I’ve written a collection of LGBTQ-themed short stories , which may be just a little less polemic than being a big-bottomed woman wearing a red thong under a white skirt to Sunday service in Barbados. My motivation is that of bringing attention to the LGBTQETC situation in Barbados. Very old people with very old ideas, based on traditional feelings rather than facts, tend to influence public opinion on this small island, and until these old people all die, there will be no chance of equality by law regarding the spectrum of genders and sexualities that have always existed. “What you doing in my bedroom anyway?!” I say.
The following story was inspired by a walk through busy Swan Street where I saw a friend (if you’re Barbadian you can’t go into the capital, Bridgetown, without seeing someone you know). One of the vendors had something to say because my friend, unconcerned about what strangers think of him, makes no effort to edit himself to please anyone. He has what Barbadians consider ‘feminine traits’, traits they associate with being homosexual if you’re a man.
A rage grew in me. How does someone become a person capable of saying something horrid to a stranger? Thinking it through, I knew it wasn’t his fault - he had learnt to be this way, but I went with the rage. My regret is that the protagonist may not appear to be in his right mind when he acted, because that makes him easy to dismiss and potentially perpetuate the trope of gay men being miserable, violent and insane. It was one moment among many that do not define me as a single thing, however, and readers who pay attention will understand that he knew exactly what he was doing.
Thin Line Between
After skinning over the vendor man tray—with both hands—this is me laughing out so hard? But I does only laugh like this with my friends you know. Reigning back and falling forward. Slapping my thigh. My breath had forsaken me since…well…the big able rainbow umbrella! And this, the pot of gold?! Dounce pitching everywhere?! “You running? You running? You better had run!” Because the tables turn! “Them flip! It is Jesus Christ in the temple!” [Look at these faces dried into vexed lines as if dreadlocks does thrive on love, leaching it until what remains beneath thin skin is concentrated until dark, caught in the trident of the netted ites, gold and green words of over-sized shirts and camouflage pants and would-be combat boots]. “Scatter and run! Dodge about and bounce! Today this catwalk is mine!” I turn and stick my hands on my hips, right where they hook on the bone. Everybody had a cell phone point at me. This is me posing and preening. This is me smearing the blood across my cheeks and dabbing it on my nose. My forehead may be a’ oily fishcake but my filter-face for Facebook! I massage it into my neck in long even strokes from my chin onto my chest, using four fingers. Yes, how you meaning?! My chest exposed! My chest is my passport because I use to lift and throw five times a week up the road…until them call me in the office one day at a quarter to five. After a full day’s work! But look, push it up at the sides, thus and so…cleavage! My natural hair look good too. It Remi weave ready. And it long because, “Um is mine and guess who don’t need your rashole permission!” Watch me walk. No please…my walk ain’t your walk. I never had to limp like a city dog, foop many women, drink many Guinnesses nor dress gangster to show other men I is a man. “Look me here! This is you business, sister?!” Out with my business, my hips waggle it at a red-skin man in a tight, bright-colour armhole shirt, hiding behind sunglasses. Fingers curled into fists, akimbo, this was the song to be sung, “And walk! And walk! And walk!”…while strutting in my gown. The same long, queeny, robey-looking one Rihanna wear to some red carpet something. The one in which they say she features a omelette. Why people so effing—“Try it! Try it!” Some men looking for fame by crouching into their self-assigned roles as Hollywood heroes. My weapon waving about, vex. I always hate a audience hear! And a audience always love to hate me, but somehow…today, shoulders and hands up in the air! What is this liberating feeling at the end of my ‘Naomi Campbell’, where yours truly is the brown girl in the ring? And the ring is four walls, two with eyes. All agape. Probably because normally skinny jeans and a fitted t-shirt is my style, but today, being very avant-garde was my thing. Turning, I pull the stringy, pink intestines draped over my shoulders out of the way and throw some around my neck as a scarf. Somebody get splatter with shit. Somebody that see, vomit. The blood make such a pretty design in this White’s Alley though…soon to be a corridor of lasting stains. It would have looked so much better on white sand. You know, the contrast. Oh well! Next time. “And walk! And walk! And walk!” Wondering what this amount of blood would look like in real life was always my guilty pleasure. On TV it was too red to me. Like it was trying harder to appear to be the notion of blood than blood itself. Impossible to convince myself it belonged to the person in it! I had to see for myself! Yeeees! I had to see for myself! Now I know. True colours are only always themselves in nature. At my feet lays the corpse gutted with the carving knife carried around for just that purpose. The carving knife used to saw flesh off the bone to make ham cutters ladened in pepper sauce on Christmas morning. The carving knife that must be put back in the uppermost left slot of the knife block in my mother’s kitchen. She’s another one! Kneeling, my fingers claw their way under the ribs to dig out the liver—full of poison but, unlike the heart, capable of regeneration. Liver is one of these things which you must either be genuinely interested in or dismiss with prejudice immediately after tasting it once. I lick my lips and rake my bottom teeth against my palms trying to have enough of it. Straight from the source, it is a texture food—you could slurp it up like Jell-O. [Clotted blood coloured all over, outside the lines of the lips, for a small child can eat anyway it feel]. “Karibna…” [Courtesy of GCE History—it is funny the things that fall into the mind when your brain loses its balance]. And while Caribs before me may have been victims of racial profiling, “I will devour the strength of every human being animal!” My middle fingers pistoning above my head. A very heavy woman faint and drag some bodies down with her. “These ratssssssss, biting at me every day!”; “Hey, heeeey! Well, what you expect? The Pied Piper is the cornerstone of the Church!” (Everybody does talk to themselves). “The rest is just duppies!” YOU ARE REQUIRED TO OWN AN INVISIBLE SEESAW UPON WHICH TO DO THE DUPPY DANCE. (Nobody does call it “the duppy dance” though). “But there must be death so there can be rebirth…and now my eyes see the glory of the coming!” Yes! Stand in awe for through this sacrifice—reverberating through eternity—see me transformed. Arisen from the depths, my truest self. There is no more abiding the deceit of pants and underpants. The remainder of the ripped-open shirt also gets wrestled to the ground. Let me position myself for my return to innocence. I sit in the cadaver’s empty abdomen. I lie back and cover my face with its dreadlocks, pulling them in a deliberate manner to give myself the impression that they are washing over me in waves, from one side…and then the next. I rest the knife down and cross the arms of the cadaver over my chest. Then, a kafuffle of hands dragging me onto my belly. Now heaving me to my feet, my wrists neatly fastened behind my back, men are yelling something or the other. (Their lips are moving and their golf balls jumping out). Schups. Only undoing my artistic instalment. “Wunna finally come to protect and service me?!” comes out of my mouth, loud, as if it were an attempt to say this past these lawmen. To address people much farther away. Struggling to find an opening, I hawk and spit on the carcass of the vendor man I had put a stop to. “You could call me a buller man again.”
Comments