As with all creations, the water between their thighs comes to the forefront.

borderless, centered, illegible an unexplained queering

Freed sighs of unknowns that language had yet to collapse.

Word and spirit in a violent collision, at each crash against the shore.

How does this ocean write?

And I remember the effort of swallowing hot sea foam

transfer oral knowledge into this new situation,

drowned in its limits, and are still learning to breathe underwater.

—Justine-Marie Williams

If you were asked to detail any significant memory, right now, how would you tell it? Would your story be linear? Or would there be time-shuffling for added context? Are there infallible heroes? Delicate victims whose purity deems them most worthy of protection? All of this is up to you, the Memory-keeper. Memories live as instances of the world around us; being processed and stored in our brains and bodies, given new life when recollected. That new life is subjected to the discernment of the Memory-keeper and their listeners, creating conclusions filtered by preexisting perspectives or received morals. In her 2014 essay, “ The Politics of Memory”, Nicole Maurantonio describes memory as “...a communicative process that occurs in terrain that is simultaneously contested and negotiated. Memory is political.”[1] Objectivity can be taught, but never perfected. What makes a memory is a combination of how it is expressed and who expresses it. 

Collective memory is a conclusion. It is an amalgamation of the individual memories of a group that are exchanged across generations. It is also the identity that resonates within the minds of people outside of that group.

Try this

1. In any search engine, type “Gay in Jamaica”.

2. Hit search.

3. Ask a friend in a different location to do the same.

4. Compare your results. 

Depending on your location, search history and a number of other factors, the results may look different. Regardless of the order, what binds the search results together will be  warnings for gay tourists of the absence of their safety, graphic retellings of Queer murder, forums inquiring whether it is “the most homophobic place on earth”. Obviously, this is not true. There is no metric for what makes one expression of homophobia more potent than the next, nor is there a need for one. Moreover, many of these people whose deaths and disappearances are reduced to cautionary tales have been harmed for reasons beyond their identities. Likely beyond their own understanding, or any of our own. 

What these searches tell us is that any existing evidence of the nourishing and fulfilling lives of LGBTQIA people here in Jamaica is punctuated by a legacy of violence in the collective memories of those who have not lived it. Queer antagonism and gender-based violence colour Queer histories opaque. The circumstances around which one disappears, dies, or is killed, becomes the colour of the memory. This violence is not only seen in events of forcible removal, but through the regurgitation of sensationalist stories that do nothing but fuel moral panic. In the gaps that should be holding solemn acknowledgements of the lives taken and a union of those left behind to fight for their memory, there is an unseemly wedge of sensationalised stories and theories around the circumstances of their deaths and disappearances. This sensationalism is another way that homophobia surfaces. An american media critique organisation, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) defines sensationalism as “...focusing attention on lurid, highly emotional stories, often featuring a bizarre cast of characters and a gripping plot but devoid of significance to most people's lives.”[2] What is sensationalised is reduced to spectacle; fleeting and frivolous. Sensationalism creates short-lived, exaggerated instances that decentralise actual victims; manufacturing their erasure before they can be remembered. 

There is no corner of the Jamaican LGBTQ+ community unaffected by erasure. This is a concept with which we are uncomfortably familiar. It is felt by those of us who grew up between bushes on a red dirt road, being told that queerness is a white infection being spread in Kingston, and sometimes Montego Bay. Feeling parts of ourselves disappear as we are fed stories that rural has no place in the acronym. And it is felt by the collective when we are told by the Jamaican government that there is no intention to decriminalise anal sex in their constitutional reform. Yet, there are entities still dedicated to the illusion of Diversity and Inclusion. Erasure is a microcosmic expression of coloniality. Colonial record keeping was the primary form of archival practice in Jamaica and the Caribbean prior to 1957. Colonies were not considered settled communities that necessitated preservation.[3] In a country that prides its proximity to imperialist power, there are no expectations that memories of queerness are ones they want to keep. It then becomes our responsibility to tell our own stories. 

The Book of Carmen

Kodi-Anne Brown

When I picked up the last of Carmen's things, the diary was balanced atop everything else. It seemed like Mrs.Madden, her mother, had spared no care in packing the box, chucking Carmen's personal effects inside so that they were sticking out at weird angles, like she was throwing out trash. Still I saw a spot of tenderness in how she braced the box against her body as she carried it out to my car, her hand set on the purple, rhinestoned book so it would not slide off. It was a quick handover, Mrs.Madden completing the work that she and her husband had always tried so hard to accomplish: pushing their daughter away and into the arms of people who knew how to love her better. As much as Carmen had lived in their house her entire life, after a decade of friendship, receiving her remains like this—in old socks, bracelets, dried-up nail polish, and ceramic knick-knacks—felt like a homecoming in its own way. 

When I got home to my apartment, I didn't even feign at unpacking her things. I just plucked the diary off the top of the mound and headed to my bed to read. The diary was one of the few things I had explicitly asked for. Sitting on the edge of the bed, running my fingertips over the jeweled cover, I was glad to have it. I had no way of knowing if Mrs.Madden had read it, at the risk of offending her Baptist sensibilities, but I knew it didn't matter because Carmen had meant for it to be read. The diary was her fledgling autobiography.

From our early university days, Carmen had maintained a vision of sharing her life-story "from back to front, and front to front” but she always lacked the patience to finish a proper manuscript. Of her false starts, which had working titles like “The Book of Real Sex” and “Dentistry Dropout”, the diary was her strongest effort at putting her life to paper, painstakingly scribbled over the years. She'd read bits and pieces of it to me before, but I'd never taken the whole thing in hand and started from the beginning. I had been, with unwavering faith, waiting on that first hardback copy. 

Now, I pored over the entries, dated haphazardly, if at all, and sometimes out of order. She had started with a stuffy “I was born on May 29th…” wherein she recounted a few slim paragraphs worth of her childhood living in St.Elizabeth before her family moved to Kingston. But soon after she found her rhythm and I met the full force of her personality, her bright humor and distinctive voice lifting from the page. I laughed when she wrote about an awkward fall in high school which flipped her uniform skirt over her head, and the first time she “suck tongue” with a boy at the fair. My face grew hot at the sensuous language she used to describe her first love (“wetupwetupwetup”), and my heart ached as she narrated the subsequent heartbreak that made her never want to love again (“she cut me up”). I cried when she wrote of me, our first meeting, when she knew so much about what she wanted, and I didn't, and we fumbled our way through a doomed courtship that then blossomed into an inseverable bond (“mi DAY ONE ooman!”). I read, filling in the gaps of what I already knew and relishing all the new sides of her mind previously unmet, till the end. 

Only it didn't end. Carmen's writing stopped halfway through a sentence, leaving her thought incomplete. I didn't know what had paused her pen and why it had never returned but it was jarring to see. I wasn't ready to leave her world behind. 

The final entry was an account of our last night out together, when I had finally pulled myself away from work and grad school, to give in to Carmen's incessant desire to “bruck” me out. In her words, I saw us arriving at the party, talking shit about the DJ, and then panicking as one of her exes breezed through the function. The story stalled after “mi see seh she neva gi mi back mi shirt and”, the lack of a period hanging like a held breath. She was not here to exhale. But I was there, I thought. I know how the story ends. 

Perhaps possessed by Carmen herself, I grabbed a pen and set to writing on the line below her last, connecting the bones of the story to tissue and fat and skin. I knew her voice, I knew her thoughts, I could hear the rhythm of her speech as my pen skipped through the pages. At one point, my hand cramped, the pain running straight up my arm, but with a flash of my wrist I was back at it again, determined to haul the story to paper. “Don't leave me out, y'ere,” she had said at her last. “When mi gone you fi talk to mi same way.” So we spoke together in the purple diary, reminiscing on how Carmen triumphantly regained her love, at least for the night, with a strategic click of her heels, and a swish of her long braids. 

When it was finished, the diary entry spanned a dozen pages, longer than her usual style, still not enough to capture each subtle shade of her being, but altogether more complete. I wrote no further than that night feeling it appropriate to end things on a high note. I could breathe easier with it done, and that made the crying come easier too, the reservoir of my grief overflowing. I let the sorrow run and run. And finally, when the tears had ceased and my vision unblurred, I opened the journal to page one, eager to meet my friend all over again. 

Do you want to be remembered as the things that happened to you or who you were? The history of a people is created through the collective memories of those who lived it, or at the very least lived in its proximity. However, a history is disseminated by those who have the resources to collect it. Imagine if we spent our days breathing in the belief that we are history in the making. Histories make space for futurity. Without a map to show where we have been, how are we expected to create futures? Everything in our material world stems from an initial idea. Futures are built from the imaginations of those who have witnessed the making of the past. Tina Campt says it best in “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” that futurity is not simply a question of "hope", but is inextricably bound to aspiration.[4] She goes further to say,

“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn't yet happened but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It's a politics of pre- figuration that involves living the future now-as imperative rather than subjunctive--a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.” [5]

Futures are not only what we are imagining, they are also what we live. The future we need includes resistance to being misremembered. Queer Futures can only exist in the context of resistance. Resistance requires reclamation. Reclamation necessitates collective memory. When we think of Queer death, it is important to remember that the people lost do not disappear when their bodies do. Their memories live with us. They linger in the weight on our chests when there is news of fresh blood. They are tears we cry when helplessness swallows us whole. The frustration when we realise that there is nothing left to do but continue forward. Moving forward also means remembering why we are so bent on survival. It requires recollection in its most truthful form; not quippy speculations of brutality. 

What happens when the death of some is inseparable from the boisterous laughter, the blinding joy of others? And what does death owe to memory? The relationship between death, memory and grief read like the connections between copper wire, light and an electric shock. If death is an event that marks time, splits epochs into befores and afters, then memory is the hue that tinges the days that elapse. Grief, then, is the fashioning of calendars, the breaking down of time into boxes small enough to only hold tiny deposits of the pain you will ration for the rest of your life. What we, as loved one, as witness, as community are left behind to do is to shepherd that pain. 

As memory’s shepherds, those left behind build collections of tools for grief; albums of photographs, minutes of voices, boxes of belongings. Vesta Cay is a different tool. It comes with a challenge to hold room for the impossibility of embodying queerness. That is coexistence of the inexplicable relief of feeling held in a queer space, and the bitter acceptance of the violence of inaction. There is enough room for celebration and gratitude for the strides made in the Jamaican LGBTQIA community, but that room will never be enough until our wholeness is recognized. That wholeness lives with us in our deaths as much as they do in our waking lives. 

Grief is time consuming and disruptive. Queer grief can be described as “a threat to the established order of society that sees some lives as unworthy of being grieved and that sees grief as an impediment to progress and productivity.” [6] It then becomes a necessary process of reclamation for LGBTQ+ people to indulge in the fullness of their grief. Grief requires remembering things as they were. It is a response to a cavernous absence that will never be filled. We will never grow around this grief if we are not able to pause and remember. This is a space to pause. If daring to exist as we are is queer resistance, then daring to grieve is all the more powerful. 

Finding the space to grieve is not something that can happen completely in silo. A person’s life is upheld by the people who witnessed them, who add layers of character to their stories. So too is the grief following their death. They inform each other, morphing into indescribable blurs of pain. The grief of losing people from our communities is compounded by the everyday grief from relationships, rejections, and other deaths.  None of these instances exist in a vacuum. Prolific Burkinabe grief worker, Sobonfu Somé shares that we learn to compartmentalise grief because expressing it in an unwelcoming place will only lead to more grief. We are taught that the people who are closest to us have no way of holding us when we fall apart.[7] What if we carved space to fearlessly fall apart? That can only be answered through experience. This is why grief is a communal issue. Like many burdens, it is meant to be shared with those prepared to hold it. It is possible to identify the starting points of some forms of grief, but for others there is no end. There is no real release when we do not have the space to process these losses. 

This space is a carving into Queer Jamaican history to pause for those we have lost to violence. Those who were not afforded the privilege of being properly grieved. 

Dwayne Jones you are remembered.

Kadene B. you are remembered.

Oshnel Byram you are remembered.

Shinnel Fashion you are remembered. 

Blue Ivy you are remembered.

Nurse you are remembered.

Kevaughn Young you are remembered.

The 3 men lost in the 1997 prison riots, you are remembered.

Recco Gayle you are remembered.

Julesia Headley you are remembered.

Lenford Harvey you are remembered.

Kenrick ‘Bebe’ Stephenson you are remembered.

Orell Johnson you are remembered.

Steve Lindo you are remembered.

Brian Williamson you are remembered.

How do you want to be remembered?

References

1. Maurantonio, Nicole (2014). The politics of memory. The Oxford handbook of political communication, 1-17.

2. "Issue Area: Sensationalism". Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Archived from the original on 5 February 2012. Retrieved 17 April 2024.

3. Aarons, John A., & Alexander-Gooding, Sharon (2018). Historical Developments in Caribbean Archives and Record Keeping.(PDF) Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader, Sacramento: Litwin Books.

4. Campt, Tina M. (2017). Quiet soundings: the Grammar of black futurity. Listening to images, 13-46.

5. Campt, Tina M. (2017). Quiet soundings: the Grammar of black futurity. Listening to images, 13-46.

6. Mason, Myles (2017). Good mourning: Structured feelings and queering the affective potential of grief (Master's thesis, Syracuse University).

7. Somé, Sobonfu(n.d). Embracing Grief: Surrendering to your sorrow has the power to heal the deepest of wounds. Sobonfu Somé. https://www.sobonfu.com/articles/writings-by-sobonfu-2/embracing-grief/