ABSTRACT
Written mainly by men and critiqued for its marginalisation of women, post-war Caribbean literature has male experience at its heart. As David Scott has outlined, however, this is primarily the experience of a ‘normalized middle-class nationalist-modern’ male, whose faux-universalism has served ‘to exclude, assimilate, or contain’ (Scott 1999, 218). Central to those excluded from the nationalist claim have been men who desire other men. Such individuals neither conform to contemporaneous models of Caribbean citizenship, nor do they shore up the fantasy of national romance so often marshalled to reconcile the tensions of independence. It is no wonder then, that critical orthodoxy has it that the period’s fiction is either silent on or hostile towards same-sex loving.1 Yet there are works by a number of authors, which deal with this persistently controversial topic. Texts by Neville Dawes, Austin Clarke, Jan Carew, Paule Marshall and V.S. Naipaul marry rejection of samesex desire with more sympathetic renderings, providing an uneasy challenge to allegations of either silencing or opprobrium. Novels by Oscar Dathorne and Andrew Salkey, meanwhile, place men desiring other men at the centre of their narrative concerns. Taken as a group, these works provide substantive evidence for what Donnell has described as ‘the multitudes of quieter, intricate, understated, and undisciplined acts of living and loving that characterize everyday reality in the Caribbean’ (Donnell November 2012, 214).
