Matthew Chin
Fractal Repair asks how history writing can do the work of repair for gender and sexual minorities in the present. It focuses on Jamaica not only because of the material harms that queer people experience on the island but also because of the way that colonialism shapes the association of the country with extreme homophobia. The book turns to fractals, a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat inexactly, as a way of writing about queer history from Jamaica.
A fractal approach foregrounds how the emergence of gender and sexuality difference in the past both reproduces and departs from existing relations of power. Fractal Repair shows what this approach looks like by staging different accounts of Jamaica’s past. It focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, a key period spanning the island’s late colonial, post-independence and neoliberal eras. The book revisits pivotal moments in Jamaica’s past with a focus on performance (National Dance Theatre Company), activism (Gay Freedom Movement), the body (HIV/AIDS epidemic) and knowledge production (Jamaica’s foundational social science studies). Altogether, these narratives suggest that perhaps repair is less about an emancipatory break with the past than it is about living with the pasts that persist in the present while holding on to the queer promise that the past cannot repeat exactly in the same way.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
Matthew Chin: Two formative experiences shaped my interest in queerness and Jamaican history. First, I experienced extensive disciplining for violating expectations of gender and sexual propriety growing up in Jamaica in ways that inspired me to better understand the island’s gender and sexual politics. Second, having moved to Canada and then the United States for university, I became discomforted with how often I was confronted with questions about how “bad” it was for queers on the island. It was also around this time that Time magazine published its infamous article labelling Jamaica “the most homophobic place on earth”. I could not help what North Americans had heard about Jamaica, and I was no stranger to the events that the Time article described, but I also felt deeply defensive of my country. Fractal Repair emerged out of a desire to leverage history writing as a form of critique to respond to the gender and sexual limitations that I experienced in Jamaica and to the overrepresentation of these limitations in North American popular culture.
In thinking about how to compose the nature of my response, I was also invested in framing the project in ways that did not reinforce dominant narratives about Jamaican queer violence. Because trying to find the historical or social determinants of this violence or to show how activists in the past valiantly resisted it, in some ways can still center this violence as the starting point from which Jamaican queer research should occur. Fractal Repair sought to ask a different question about the possibility of constructing a Jamaican (and more broadly Caribbean) form of historical queer critique. And while I still think this is a productive line of inquiry, I also worry that it can also have the effect of downplaying the very real material and psychic harms of queer violence across Jamaica. Trying to figure out how best to integrate these two imperatives in a balanced way remains an important and unresolved intellectual and political challenge.
NOTCHES: Why would readers be drawn to this book?
MC: It is hard to anticipate who might want to read this book and why. I thought long and hard about what it would mean to take Jamaica seriously so that Fractal Repair was not only a queer history of Jamaica but a Jamaican queer history. In that sense, I hope it might be useful to others who are trying to think about how and why geopolitics matters to queer studies and queer history. To my knowledge, this is the first academic monograph that addresses queerness in Jamaica, and I imagine that it may be of interest to scholars in the fields of Caribbean Studies, Africana Studies, Queer Studies, History, and Anthropology.
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
MC: Fractal Repair’s exploration of the emergence of HIV/AIDS and gay activism in Jamaica is perhaps the most obvious way the book engages history of sexuality. But the book is less about sexuality per se than it is about the concept of queer, a term that entered the English language in the sixteenth century and was used to refer to something “strange” “odd” or “peculiar”. In this sense of the word, sexuality emerges as one of many dimensions of strangeness/oddness/ peculiarity (i.e., queerness) in twentieth-century Jamaican history.
Each of the book’s chapters considers how color and class hierarchies function to produce the strangeness of any kind of gender, intimate, or erotic performance. The book’s third chapter, for instance, revisits the establishment of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) in 1962 to re-assess its foundational contribution to Jamaican and Caribbean cultural development. It analyzes the company’s earliest and most popular works and suggests that queerness was key to how Jamaican sought to understand themselves in the wake of national independence. And yet the strangeness of these performances did not necessarily lie in their exploration of gender and sexuality, or at least not exclusively. For instance, NDTC’s performance of Dialogue for Three explores the complexity of the relationships within a love triangle composed of a woman, her husband and his pregnant girlfriend. Audience responses to this piece suggest that its queerness lay not in its departure from monogamous marriage but rather in the way that it performed the possibility of cross color and cross-class solidarity between women. Through the idiom of queerness, Dialogue for Three raised questions about the kinds of intimacies and forms of family that could cultivate Jamaican and Caribbean cultural sovereignty.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book?
MC: Each of the main chapters of the book required assembling its own archive and I found myself drawing on as wide range of sources as possible in this process. For instance, to write the chapter on HIV/AIDS I brought together three kinds of sources. First, I conducted interviews with the first generation of HIV/AIDS survivors and those who sought to support their well-being, including doctors, nurses, contact investigators, and community activists. Second, I carried out archival research at nine different libraries across Jamaica where I consulted newspaper coverage of HIV/AIDS in across five Jamaican newspapers; HIV/AIDS studies, policies, and reports created by state, academic, and nongovernmental organizations; and HIV/AIDS public awareness materials in radio, print, and television formats. Finally, I examined cultural texts of the period that dealt with HIV/AIDS including the Jamaican novels A Small Gathering of Bones by Patricia Powell and the Trinidadian play One of Our Sons Is Missing, by Godfrey Sealy, which toured across Jamaica to widespread acclaim in 1993.
Over the course of my research, I was most intrigued to learn about the Grenada-based Caribbean Homosexual Association (CHA) and its leader Don Anderson. At the ArQuives in Toronto, Canada, I learned that Anderson wrote an entry about CHA in the 1980 edition of the gay travel guide Spartacus, and at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture in New York, I read a letter that Anderson wrote to Spartacus’s editor seeking financial support. According to these sources, the CHA was established in 1975 and by 1979 had achieved a membership of some 1,3000 individuals in Barbados, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Antigua, Martinique, Venezuela, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Guadeloupe. The CHA claimed to have coordinated a 500-person conference in Barbados, founded a school for children of gay parents with attendance of over 670 students from across the Caribbean, built five health clinics staffed by a 66-person team including doctors from Barbados and Trinidad, and constructed a rooming house for gay Grenadians living in the countryside who traveled to work in the city. For several reasons, it is unclear whether CHA existed and, if it did, whether it achieved the accomplishments that Anderson described. Yet for me, the significance of Anderson’s writing about CHA lay its capacity to operate less as a trace of queer achievement and more as a trace of queer desire. To me, these documents reveal less about the realities of an organization, and more about an investment in a kind of aspirational queer self-presentation constructed at least partly for the purposes of financial solicitation. I did not end up writing about CHA in the book, but I could not help but be enchanted by its queer vision of a Caribbean regional imaginary.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
MC: I felt a great deal of pressure writing what may be the first academic monograph on queer Jamaican history, but I make no claim on its representativeness. There are quite a few topics that this book did not address, at least partly because of the limitations of space and time, and partly because my interlocutors requested that I not share some aspects of their stories.
Nevertheless, in the context of what the book was trying to do, I think it would have benefited from more clearly from addressing a number of additional perspectives such as the diversity of Jamaican geography. Upon reflection, the book feels very centered on the island’s capital city, Kingston. This centering no doubt stems from my own bias as a Kingstonian but also perhaps stems from the geography of Jamaica’s archival infrastructure which foregrounds this city as representative of Jamaican-ness. This is not to say that Fractal Repair does not touch on other Jamaican locales or address how queerness takes shape outside the capital. For instance, the book’s first chapter considers the work of Roger Mais and his novel Black Lightening which offers an opportunity to reflect on a literary iteration of rural queerness in mid-twentieth-century Jamaica. Looking back, I wonder what the chapter might have looked like if I had begun with Black Lightening and its rural geography as the starting point from which to then orient the other Kingston-focused dimensions of queerness that the chapter discusses.
Advances in studies of Indigeneity in the Caribbean have also prompted me to think more critically about the book’s emphasis on Jamaica and Jamaican-ness. In what ways does a queer investment in Jamaican nationhood operate in relationship to Maroon and Taino peoples’ contemporary struggles for sovereignty on the island? Taking this question seriously might unsettle some of the assumptions the book rests upon. For instance, while the chapter on Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company considers the queerness of cultural performance at the moment of the island’s independence from Britain, I wonder how the political struggles of Jamaica’s Indigenous people complicate the reading I offered that framed this queer articulation of an emerging national culture as an implicit good. The epilogue of the book sought to conceptualize queer futurity by revisiting the first written account on the natural history and ethnography of the Americas but I now think it might have also been productive to route this question through the recent demands for the Jamaican state to legally recognize the Indigenous status of the island’s Maroon and Taino peoples.
NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?
MC: I had a very clear vision about the individual chapters of the book. I knew that I wanted to think about queerness by revisiting key moments in Jamaica’s modern history: the beginning of a local social science tradition, the establishment of the National Dance Theatre Company, the election of Michael Manley’s as Jamaica’s Prime Minister, and the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. The challenge was figuring out the book’s throughline. I initially thought that the concept of creole/creolization could function as a framework that brings together these different chapters. Creolization, or the process of cultural struggle among different ethno-racial groups, is a key theme in Caribbean Studies and I thought it might be useful to foreground the different class and color hierarchies that each chapter addresses. At the same time, for reasons I cannot explain, creolization did not sit right with me, and I somehow knew that it would always be a placeholder. It took an entire year for me to arrive at the concept of fractals, which I came across after reading Erna Brodber’s novel Nothing’s Mat. Brodber’s use of fractal geometry to surface the complexities in the process of family history making became a model for my own work.
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
MC: I have found that undergraduate students are especially drawn to histories of gay activism and so the book’s chapter on Jamaica’s Gay Freedom Movement (GFM) might be of particular interest. In partnership with the Caribbean International Resource Network, I created and launched an open access digital archive for GFM’s publication, the Jamaica Gaily News and hosted an online event to celebrate the archive’s launch with the participation of various former GFM members. To really bring the work of GFM to life, in addition to having students read the book’s GFM chapter, I might also have them read an issue (or part thereof) of the Jamaica Gaily News, and to watch a section of the video documenting the archive’s launch in which former GFM participants reflected on their experiences in the organization. To situate the book within the burgeoning field of Caribbean Queer Studies, I might ask them to read Queer, which Ron Cummings and I authored for the Keywords in Caribbean Studies project of the Caribbean Digital. The Sexualities section of the Small Axe Keywords project (available in the July 2024 issue of Small Axe) might also be useful in situating the book in relationship to iterations of queerness across the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish speaking Caribbean.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
MC: Historical repair is a key concern for Caribbean societies that are advocating for reparations from (former) colonial powers to hold them accountable for the historical and ongoing legacies of empire, Indigenous genocide and African enslavement. Fractal Repair engages this conversation in two ways. First, it raises questions about how gender and sexuality matter to conceptualizing historical repair. For instance, if regulating gender and sexual relations were necessary for the functioning of enslavement regimes, how can attempts to address the injuries of these regimes also work to undo the violences that these regulations wrought? Second, it explores how different kinds of history writing can perform the work of repair. The language of reparations often engages approach to history writing that entails a juridical accounting of the historical harms that continue to verberate into the present. This book considers the kinds of repair that historical narratives can offer when they do not (only) seek to catalogue past violences. It suggests that repair can be forthcoming not only in the content of our historical accounts – tallying up past injuries or outlining how historical actors resisted them – but also in how we write them or in the (fractal) forms that they take.
NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?
MC: I am currently thinking about how and why Asia matters to Caribbean thought. The fact that this question hasn’t already been addressed is curious for two reasons. First, the concept of Asia has been taken up by the study of literally every other geography of the western hemisphere. The institutionalization of Asian American Studies, focused on the United States, was later followed by Asian Canadian and most recently Asian Latin American Studies. The Caribbean goes missing in theories of Asia across the Americas despite its literal location in the heart of the hemisphere. There is no doubt that Caribbean Studies engages the literatures, histories, cultures and communities of people from individual Asian countries, but the concept of Asia and its significance for theorizing the Caribbean remains underexplored. Second, Asia is central to the imagining of the Caribbean. In 1492, Christopher Columbus first arrived in the New World and encountered the Lucayans on Guanahani in what is now known as the Bahamas, convinced that he had reached the outposts of Cathy or what we now call China. Columbus’s claim was ultimately proven incorrect when Magellan crossed the Pacific, but fantasies of Asia continued to frame Europeans violent engagement with the Caribbean’s indigenous societies.
Asia and the Caribbean are now recognized as separate geographies, but the continuing relevance of the term “West Indies” to refer to at least some part of the Caribbean, speaks to Asia’s ongoing discursive haunting of the region. And yet, Caribbean Studies’ extensive debates about the meanings of Europe and Africa for self-understanding have yet to be matched with similar conversations about what and how Asia means to the region and its peoples. Asia’s emergent global status in the present and rising anxieties around the increase in Asian economic incursion into the Caribbean, marks the urgency of this project in constructing a geopolitical grammar of criticism.
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