BFLF 2021 Love, Lust, Literature

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[00:00:20]to meet you so what i don't get a hello that's how i get treated i already complimented your beard okay i hello chris you're not very needy a good good friend from long long time how you doing i'm good i'm good okay try again shawna okay hello hi there okay so it's 6 01 we're gonna wait a few minutes yeah we're just gonna wait another minute um for more folks to get online and then we will start okay all right tell tell me if this is if this is good enough light i'm going to put on some more you tell me if it's too much all right is that too much no that's good this is good this is better yeah is that good for you it's fine for me i just don't know how it looks yeah yeah that's fine that looks good okay you're looking fabulous as usual thank you thank you thank you thank you flattery will get you everywhere [Laughter] all righty hello doctor david so good to see you so good to see you all right all righty so let us i think we should begin start on time not gonna do the caribbean thing right all right so good evening everyone and welcome to our discussion love lust and literature this roundtable discussion is a part of the annual blue flamingo literary festival hosted by the university of the bahamas and school of english so a bit of background last year in 2020 our main focus main festival which was scheduled for march of 2020 was cancelled due to the national lockdown resulting from the covert 19 pandemic however in the fall semester the blue flamingo literary festival committee decided to move forward using the available online modalities to continue and a series of panel discussions scheduled for the fall included uh panel on bohemian folklore as inspiration for contemporary cultural productions um black in comics and the significance of the black panther film which was a roundtable discussion focused on representation of black lives in comics and the last one last year was an evening of poetry voices across the diaspora where we invited poets from across the diaspora to share with us now in its fifth year the aim of the festival is to promote reading writing and literary arts within the bahamas by reaching out to local regional and international partners the blue finger literary festival hopes to create a space for developing highlighting and encouraging thriving bahamian literary culture the blue flamingo literary festival includes poetry readings book launches panel discussions writing workshops live stage music and spoken word performances writing and poetry contests as well as activities specifically targeted towards the youth on march 18th and 19th of this year which is next month we will launch our virtual bluefinger literary festival with a full slate of events over two days and these events include poetry workshops graphic design workshop writing comic books workshops and a lot of other events and so we hope to get that information out to everyone very soon before we move on i would like to recognize the committee members of the blue finger literary festival for all their work in organizing these events they are my co-host this evening dr marie cersing dr dustin hellberg dr saskia first uh bridget stewart ivy higgins melind seymour and princess pratt among other partners that we've also worked with as well i would also like to thank the chair of school of english dr mayuri dica and the dean of faculty of liberal and fine arts dr douglas barkey for their continued support of the blue flingo literary initiative um i also want to thank our four panelists for agreeing to take part in this evening's roundtable dr michael buckner dr donald azzaware solay dr sean morgan and dr peter bailey so thank you all um for agreeing when i begged you to take part in this conversation now before we introduce uh our panelists i want to just talk a little bit about housekeeping how this is going to work um i have muted everyone um as questions come up i would ask you to send your write your questions in the chat and myself and dr searsing once the panelists have presented we'll ask your questions for you and so to introduce our speakers i would like to introduce my co-host for the evening a marie cersing dr sarah singh is associate professor in english studies at the university of the bahamas where she teaches a range of composition and literature courses including writing and rhetoric advanced composition bohemian literature american literature caribbean women's writers west indian literature and contemporary african literatures dr singh is advisory editor for the college language association journal in the area of caribbean and african diaspora literatures she serves on the editorial board of the international journal of bahamian studies a publication of the university of the bahamas as well as on the editorial board of tupent caribbean journal of cultural studies her research interests include literatures of the african diaspora with an emphasis on women writers the intersection of literature and african philosophy caribbean literary and cultural theory and gender and cultural studies dr singh good evening everyone i'm just so very excited um looking forward to this event very much so and we have four dynamic panelists who i'm about to introduce to get this um event underway i begin with uh doctor donna azeri who is vice president of the association of caribbean women writers and scholars and former coordinator of the mellon foundation's hispanic serving institutions pathway to the professoriate fellowship at florida international university she's also an associate professor of english and affiliate faculty in african and african diaspora studies center for women and gender studies and lacc at fiu and andrew w mellon and citizens and scholars fellow formerly woodrow wilson fellow where soli is the author of eroticism spirituality and resistance in black women's writing published by uh university of florida press in 2015.

[00:07:45]two poetry collections first reign people tree press 2006 and the woman who knew finishing line press 2016 she's also co-editor of caribbean erotic published by people tree press in 2010 and co-edited with opal palmer adisa this latter publication features essays fiction and poetry from 62 writers from the english-speaking spanish-speaking and french-speaking caribbean her critical and creative writings have been widely published in national and international forums including scholarly and literary journals and edited volumes second presenter will be um dr shauna m morgan who is the author of fear of dogs and other animals published by central square press she's a poet and scholar from rural community in clarendon jamaica an associate professor of creative writing and africana literature at howard university in washington dc she has published poetry in a gathering together proud flesh new african journal of uh culture politics and consciousness pluck the journal of africalation affiliation uh art and culture interviewing the caribbean as well as other journals her critical work has appeared in the journal of post-colonial writing south atlantic review bulletin of the school of oriental and african studies and ariel which is a review of international uh english literature among other periodicals shawna recently moved to lexington kentucky where she tends to a hopeful garden i'm sure it's flourishing our third presenter dr michael buckner is an associate professor former head of the department of literature and english and the public orator of the mona campus of the university of the west indies he's a first-class honors uwi graduate in english who completed his m.a and phd degrees at the university of western ontario on a commonwealth scholarship in 1999 he received the usis fellowship to the university of louisville kentucky and in 2002 the du bois mandela rodney post-doctoral fellowship to the university of michigan he's also a recipient of the institute of jamaica's gold musgrave medal for eminence in the field of literature an award he received in 2019 he's also a ferguson institute of public affairs award recipient uh for outstanding promotion of caribbean literature that in 2018.

[00:10:29]he also received in 2018 the principles award uh research award for best research publication article and most recently in 2020 the principles research award for the book chapter horizons of desire in caribbean queer speculative fiction marlon james's john cruz devil he was chair of the association of commonwealth literature and language studies from 2010 to 2013. he currently serves on the editorial boards of caribbean quarterly issues in caribbean in critical investigation and locales and is senior editor of the journal of west indian literature he's also co-edited with allison donnell of the work the rooklet companion to anglophone caribbean literature and carries out research on austin clark caribbean canadian writing post-colonial literatures and theory diaspora studies masculinity and masculinities and popular culture most importantly he is currently teaching a course on erotic poetry this semester at uwi mona campus our final panelist dr peter bailey is assistant professor in the school of english studies at the university of the bahamas his research mainly focuses on the literature of decadence and aestheticism he works at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies and victorian studies he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled aestheticism and the erotics of pedagogy and essays on decadence and caribbean texts please join me in welcoming warmly our four panelists for this evening's roundtable event i think you present in that order so we begin with um dr where sully all righty then okay so i want to start with um talking a little bit about um two writers one of whom i have been threatening to become familiar with for a long time and one i've been familiar with for more than half my life actually a lot more than half my life so it's audre lorde and gabrielle garcia marquez and i finally read um gabriel garcia marquez loving the time of cholera because i thought how apt right right now the time of kovid let me see what this book that i have heard so much about is all about really liked it but i immediately started to compare how he deals with how he analogizes illness and romantic love or illness and passion especially unrequited love and comparing it to how lord deals with it so for example in in lord's poem sisters in arms um it's a poem about the poet i suppose a poetic persona and the south african freedom fighter so two two warrior womans two warrior women making love and for them making love is both a way to connect across difference and a way to connect different struggles love making becomes a temporary armistice if you will both are laying down of arms and a laying on of hands right so to speak um kind of like in the marvin gaye context of sexual healing is how i read that just to to some extent right and it makes me wonder if there is something um there's a deeper connection there between sex and healing that cannot happen in porn or in casual sex that is disconnected reductive or objectifying and i and i do believe that is so um and of and and and part of the reason i'm convinced this is so is because she also talks about self-pleasure in the cancer journals when she talks about self-pleasure as a way of dealing with the mastectomy a way of healing from the mastectomy a way of getting in touch with how she really feels about all that is happening with her body and the illness the cancer and so on wrapping in her body she uses her own self-pleasuring um to talk about to kind of get to the other side of the trauma but also to work through the trauma and to understand the trauma i thought that that was fascinating and then um comparing that to sisters in arms when she i'm just gonna read one one um stanza from sister cistern arms the edge of our bed was a wide grid where your 15 year old daughter was hanging gut sprung on police wheels a cablegram nailed on the wood next to a map of the western reserve i could not return with you to bury the body reconstruct your nightly cardboards against the seeping trans ball cold i could not plant the other limpet mine against a wall at the railroad station nor carry either of your souls back from the river in a calabash upon my head so i brought you a ticket to durban on my american express and we lay together in the first light of a new season right and in mark marquez's work the way that he analogizes romantic love with illness um because it's in the time of cholera so there's a way in which he talks about romantic love it's kind of like a slow burning fever particularly this unrequited love that he's carried around for 50 almost 51 years for this woman um it's like a slow burning fever that consumes your body and your soul right it's sexual passion but but sexual passion without that romantic love because he i think he has like 622 affairs over a 50-year period waiting for this woman right who eventually her husband i hope i'm not giving it away for anybody maybe everybody else has read it except for me but eventually he gets her but 51 years right he's holding back his love so he has 62 love affairs but he won't allow any of them to touch him deeply and one or two of them come close to touching him but he kind of pushes it away because he's just determined that he's gonna get her and so for those that that um for those love affairs where he's not giving his old soul and heart just his body the sexual love passion without love is either frenetic furtive and mysterious like the sudden onset of a disease or it's longorius and decadent without being nourishing to the soul kind of like a sweet dessert full of calories but no nutritious substance and i i thought that was so interesting the difference between how he talks about um passion and and um sexual pleasure and the way lord talks about passion and sexual pleasure she also talks about in the cancer journals um how the love of woman saved her and i was really struck by that as well like so he has the 622 women and he gets a lot from them but he doesn't give anything in return and this is what she says um i do not know why i do know that there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing into me from the woman around me and it felt like being bathed in a continuous flow tide of positive energies even when sometimes i wanted a bit of negative silence to compliment the pain inside of me but support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of images meanings for me now one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of woman like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea i can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes and do not fear it it is a sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voice is calling my name that gives me volition helps me remember i want to turn away from looking down these images flow quickly the tangible flood of energy rolling off this woman toward me that i converted into power to heal myself and there is nothing furtive and hidden about these relation you know this relationship she has with these women she's talking about her lover francis as well as the woman in her community who are her support system but for gabriella garcia marquez 622 women none of them know each other none of them have ever met um as a matter of fact the woman is in love with um that diesel i think feminist she doesn't know she's the rumor she hears about him is that he's gay and that's the rule that's what he allows everybody to think so that he has these 622 affairs but nobody in the community has ever linked his name with a woman for 51 years because he goes to them furtively you know either brings them on the boat and on the weekend when no one else is around or he kind of treats them like prostitutes or he goes to them at night and in one case he's he's with one woman who he ends up um claiming her body physically claiming her and do i have time to read just one one thing yeah okay good i just let me find it because i don't have it i don't i have a uh i have the book here on my phone so let me find that section because that one i [ __ ] i thought was really interesting wha what happened what tends to happen to the woman it's like they tend to die for him right and i thought that that was really interesting um so give me just a second to open it up okay so this woman is a married woman with whom he's having an affair and i love i love garcia marquez marquez's writing but i remember reading this and thinking that doesn't sound right because of what happened and so i'd love your opinion on that when you when you get a chance to ask questions because i thought it was very odd the set of circumstances that he sets up how this woman um what eventually happens to this woman who falls in love with him and still has to go home to her husband so let me see if i can find it all right 22 i think it is ugh [Music] oh i can't find it and i don't want to hold you up but anyway he sprawls on her body uh the he scrolls on the woman's um pubis this you know you know what is mine right this is my pee right and she goes home to her husband and forgets that he is good now you know there ain't no woman don't forget that that's girl he does it in pain red pain ain't no woman don't forget this girl we ain't gonna forget that's there okay that ain't happening so i was like okay okay garcia i'm not quite relieving this part i'm with you all the way but right here no and so anyway the husband just doesn't say anything he just gets up and and kills her just just um stabs her to them and that's just one example is another girl in um that he that he seduces basically um a 14 year old girl who's put into his care a family member he seduces her and she ends up when when eventually the lover that he wants when the lover's husband dies and he's able to get this woman he just abandons this girl like in a in just in the flip of a switch he finds out that the the woman is a widow and he abandons this this 14 year old girl and in the end she ends up killing herself over him so it's like there's a series of stuff like that but there are other relationships with women that don't end that way but the fact that it's like it's furtive it's it's all hidden he gets a lot from them he can go to them any time of the night but they don't really they a good portion of them want more from him and they're never able to get it because he's just not giving himself but the relationship that he has with the woman that he's that he's in in love with it's really not a relationship it's a phantom relationship because they're not even on speaking terms for 51 years so i i thought it was interesting to compare these two writers and the different ways in which they handle you know illness and love because when he's in love he becomes feverish as if he has color as well and of course the entire book is built around the idea of cholera and also the war right in colombia as well so it's it's really fascinating to the comparisons between the two of them that's as far as i was able to get with it something i would like to continue but craig making me do this kind of force me to think about those two because i was reading garcia marquez at the time when i was asked to do this so i found it an interesting comparison quite quite unexpected i wasn't planning on it thank you so very much donna uh some food for thought i'm sure we'll be getting questions in that direction when we get to that point in the program and so i invite now uh dr morgan sean morgan to give you a presentation thank you so much it's so good to be here and i just want to thank um dr singh and dr smith for inviting me um it's always good to be connected to this festival in some way um so i'm going to just share some thoughts and then hopefully um if you will permit me i would just share a few poems as well all right um really glad to be talking about to be sort of uh launching from audre lorde um her work has has been so important um to me personally and professionally um and so i'll start uh with her um the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings wrote audre lorde in uses of the erotic i'm somewhat preoccupied with how that measure that dimension that she references is shaped by physical spaces we occupy and more specifically um how the natural world is you know the natural world also imbued with its own erotic right becomes a place in which our erotic power can be awakened and ultimately open up a path to liberation particularly interesting to me are the literary engagements with the natural world in which our erotic selves meet the sensuality of the landscape or environment to help us um in a way articulate those strong feelings to which our lord refers right the strongest feelings she says um an example from her own creative work can be heard felt and seen in her poem on a night of the full moon um and i'll read it here and this is one of my favorite lord poems on a night of the full moon out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that nose comes the shape i am seeking for reason the curve of your waiting body fits my waiting hand your breasts warm as sunlight your lips quick as your birds between your thighs the sweet sharp taste of limes thus i hold you frank in my heart's eye in my skins knowing as my fingers conceive your flesh i feel your stomach moving against me before the moon wanes again we shall come together and i would be the moon spoken over your beckoning flesh breaking against reservations breaching thought my hands at your high tide over and under inside you and the passing of hunger attended forgotten darkly risen the moon speaks my eyes judging your roundness delightful i hope i've done it some some the poem immerses us in sensation of course but it's not contradictory to lord's critique of what she refers to as the superficially erratic right that idea of quote she says sensation without feeling right rather the poem is itself an illustration of lord's point that the erotic as she says quote is not a question only of what we do it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in this doing so in this poem we're both we're both pulled in by the poem's portrayal of erotic in the physical sense right a deep sensation in breasts warm as sunlight um and we're we also experience the feeling right what she that line the skins knowing uh and in that that essay right that sort of anchors us today she talks about this other kind of knowing this erotic knowing so the skins knowing that brings us to a sensation and the passing of hunger attended forgotten and those lines just that um particular in particular stick with me right because we see this moment where a hunger is satiated but it also signals it signals the possibility of a world of longing to be fulfilled in some way right another world of longing um and in my own work i'm interested in longing and desires and the way that um the erotic of which lord speaks can allow us to to claim a sense of belonging right maybe in a place um where we're foreign for example that's my preoccupation or even to claim freedoms to sort of dream against what she describes as quote the principal horror of a system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need so there is something that she's she says robs our work of its erratic value uh she says of its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment and so um i'm going to read a few poems that attempt to claim the erratic um in self and in the natural world um moving that that measure right at least attempting to to move that measure of self and feeling love and freedoms and i'm really in this work trying to work out again those ideas of belonging right what how can you um call on the power of the erotic right that thing that's it the inward thing that she refers to right to mitigate the circumstances to transform the circumstances in which you live um to transform those horrors right of the reality of our existence in this world um and so i i the act for me the act of writing um itself right not just the sort of formulation of metaphors but even the very act of writing i think is a is a perform is a uh a way of entering that right inward space where you call up the um erotic so i'm going to try to be mindful of the time and just share a few poems of mine here um this first poem comes from a series of poems called the valley poems and they deal with sort of um being a foreigner in a space and trying to connect trying to to find home and be at home and and the thing that that seems to be the catalyst for the connection is is is that that space again the measure between self and um and that deep feeling this valley away when this valley feels so far away from what i know you pull me up saying come here sweet woman you take me up to that cold black hill make me walk on that old dirt road and kick up dust on my legs you let me sip your granddaddy's batch until dark comes and fireflies blink in familiar rhythm you show me stars i gaze that as a girl lay me down on the wood porch make me feel it's dents and crevices against my back when i feel so far away from this valley you pull me up kiss the sweat at my hairline and let me see just what it is i know i'll share uh one of the things that i'm i'm attempting to do i'm sort of obsessed with birds right now and looking at them listening to them and i'm also particularly interested in those birds that live those migratory birds that move from north america to caribbean ones you can find in both places and how they make a life this is um a poem uh for the black-throated blue warbler called black-throated songs the understory trembles confessing the secret of her nest in woodbine virgin ivy she listens flits her unremarkable self offers up a moment see see shrill to a buzz she purchased higher bill up see see a melody skyward cotton belly black throat quivering eminent plume turning blue as the mist burns away see see see she vibrates her wings everything else falls away under a deciduous canopy hovering together and after songs until the young are fledged until the freedom of salt air until the sanctuary of moist ginger lily until the oak and maple come again there a white spot on a wing below the verbum berries bursting a faithful warble of fruit um and i'll close with um uh one poem rekindling it's called rekindling from my chat book um it's a poem in four parts and i hope in this in this is one of those poems that i hope sort of exemplifies this space where the erotic um um appears right not in that superficial way but in a way that the feeling is deep and connects to the natural world rekindling one he found me not quite asleep in the hollow of a thicket on a bed of light wood and i no longer green would have burst into flames at the sight of him at the sound of his voice if not for the river and the moon and the steady hand of the universe to when i stood and stepped out holding his scarred arm i felt the acute sensation of his touch move me to intoxication a furvid vertigo spinning me into the sunset and into the darkness that followed three it was here he set me ablaze with word and touch and gifts unexplained by time and when he heaped unto me all the weight of oak and the fire as ancient as the sun i ignited became new [Music] for i imagine him now having left me seared in my newness kindling old fires sacred as the wind moving slowly to remember precisely how we yearn to a flash how he rendered a life into embers beautiful and warm the remains of something familiar um and and for me much of the feeling that's imbued in this poem i think again creates a sense of belonging um and yeah this poem was for my husband thank you marie you're muted thank you very much uh dr morgan for those wonderful reflections and for sharing your work with us and um we look forward to questions from the audience following all four presenters so now i call on dr peter bailey to make his presentation and following that we will have dr michael buckner and that will conclude the the presentations all right so [Music] one of the things i've been thinking about uh since the european conquest of the caribbean islands to the present the region has been constructed as a pornographic playground a space of libertineish where sensual and sexual pleasures could be sought out amid a relaxed moral and religious discipline sun sand and sea and sex still sell and yet if the inhabitants of the islands are all too familiar with the pervasiveness of sex doesn't mean that they're comfortable with it and that they own it uh that they represent their erotic desires and identities and discourse with a great degree of comfort i'm reminded of roland bart's introduction to his deconstruction of ambroseness a lover's discourse in which he says the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude this discourse is spoken perhaps by thousands of subjects who knows but warranted by no one it's completely forsaken by the surrounding languages ignored disparaged derided by them severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority sciences techniques arts once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the back water of the unreal it has no recourse but to become the site however exigious of affirmation and so we can see bart there thinking about the fact that we don't or at least when he was writing we probably still don't have any really good language to talk about love you experience it but it's not an official thing that you can write about with any particular authority you feel it but there's this question of how well it can be described how well it can be expressed how officially it can be recognized and there are all these subjects these kind of people that have desires and feelings that are not able to articulate what those are necessarily or to be acknowledged um directly and so one of the things that bot is trying to do in that text is to give a description to the various states of love of desire to anatomize them break them down into various stages and and describe you know in detail um various forms of passion and i wonder if we don't have to do that in our own literature and i'm speaking specifically of the bahamas right now i'm thinking about if you had to make a map if you had to describe all the various varieties of bohemian love what would that look like right what can't you talk about all right like we all know that uh you go to these funerals and there's a woman that's off to the corner and she's not quite in the church and she's mourning or at the cemetery and she's not acknowledged or maybe she is acknowledged uh there's these other families what is that story like for instance what is the great poem of the sweetheart or what's the great novel of the sweetheart um what is the great account of um you know the inner city junglas and her love with demand that's out in life with key what does that look like right what is the great um account of kind of interracial love in the bahamas who were all these exiled kinds of subjects that you would need to provide uh the fullest account of what erotic citizenship looks like in this country right what would be the cast of characters what would be the narrative to describe um the lover's discourse of this country and what would the literature look like if we had it um and what is the problem like what prevents us from being able to represent those stories right what does the love of the queer bohemian looks like what are those accounts and you know it seems to me that there's a great powerful myth that love is civically productive right that it it it's something that helps society in some way if you go back to the greeks eros is this great thing that you have and it helps you to um you sublimate your love right you you don't express it directly but you channel it into building the law and you know building a stable society um or if you are a great romantic able to turn your passion into an immortal work in which your beloved lives forever for everyone to read about and experience but there's this question of what are the barriers to immortalizing these various forms of love in in these ways okay and where would our models come from so just as an example for how important kind of building these traditions are being able to look into the past and find examples of desire that you identify with and then kind of writing them or rewriting them on your own terms i was thinking of um the poet sappho right who talks so engagingly about what it is to be in love and i'm just going to read one of her poems that talks about the experience of what it is to feel desire and then read someone who is writing in response to her because it seems to me that this would be the kind of thing that we would have to do like who are the bohemian icons of the past so who had historical figures in the past that our current writers would need to write to um and connect with and sappho wrote in her fragment 31 that man seems to me to be equal to the gods who is sitting opposite you and hears you nearby speaking sweetly and laughing delightfully which indeed makes my heart flutter in my breast for when i look at you even for a short time it is no longer possible for me to speak but it is as if my tongue is broken and immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin i cannot see anything with my eyes and my ears are buzzing a cold sweat comes over me trembling seizes me all over i am paler than grass and i seem nearly to have died and you can think about how familiar that sounds if you've been in love um this is you know hundreds and hundreds of years old but recognizable a marilyn hacker writing back to sappho says didn't sappho say her guts clutch up like this before her face suddenly numinous her eyes watered knees melted did she lactate again milk brought down by a girl's kiss its documented torrents are on loose by such events as recently produced not the wish but the need to consume in us one pint of maillocks one of kao pectate my eyes and groin are permanently swollen i am alternatingly brilliant and witless and sleepless bed is just a swamp to roll in although i'd cream my jeans touching your breasts sweetheart it isn't lust it's all the rest of what i want with you that shares me shitless that's it thank you dr bailey um and finally uh dr buckner will give his presentation and then we'll open for q a dr buckner thank you for your kind invitation to participate in this webinar and for your equally kind introduction i should hasten to say i'm not here because i have some oversized reputation as an expert on shaggy's bombastic lover man who happens to teach literature but because of recent teaching events in my department at uwa we have a course called love death and poetry and we have wanted to update this course under the rubric of erotic poetry and so when i was assigned to teach this course this semester i decided to experiment i hope to share some of my thoughts on love lust and literature although in spite of the alliterative lust of the title i perhaps would recast the word lost as desire and perhaps to focus my remarks on erotic desire the politics of intimacy while i'm looking at thomas hardy a 19th century male pointed this course i'm also looking at tanya shirley's work that is very frank about sexual desire but it is also daring to challenge gender norms and then i do have an anthology of poems from around the world this made me start to think about black erotica in literature several thinkers have already noted the way in which the imperialist project not only view the lives and cultures of black people through a racist lens but also through a patriarchal erotic frame and i put those two words together for example in imperial leather and mcclintock makes the point that caught the narrative of new world imperialism was eroticized by rhetoric that sexualized imperialist practices of european colonizers for example in his travelogues columbus suggested that the earth is shaped like a woman's breast generally she continues this patriarchal narrative of imperialism depicts the new worlds who rhetoric normally ascribed to women suggesting the land's passive and submissive nature awaiting the conquest of men john don writing between 1953 and 1990 sorry 1593 and 1596 in the middle of the european expansion into the new world writes these lines to his mistress going to bed memorable lens license my roving hands and let them go before behind between above below oh my america my newfound land my kingdom safely one man man my mind of precious stone my empiry how blessed am i in this discovery to enter in these bonds is to be free then where my hand is set i see you shall be here he imagines the conquest of the woman's body as claiming land and its rich resources to what extent then is writing the erotic for black women involve an interrogation of these kinds of representation of the black female body in grace nicholas's poem allah for example the erotic black body becomes a sight of resistance as dion brown writes in her tribute poem to fill his cord caught you should have known the first thing they would jump on was the skill of your womb on court this claim in the reproductive and sexual functions of black women during colonization was central to the capitalist and patriarchal enterprise of slavery hillary because arguing and centering woman the political economy of gender in west african and cabinet society says that court slavery was a system of socio-sexual exploitation and control of women yet knickers is enslaved woman resist this by taking the life of her child and she's mercilessly punished in the poem nichols foregrounds the erotic body of the enslaved female that the plantation owner puts on display she's naked as she receives her punishment both at this strategy or foreground in that recognizes both the role of female sexuality in slavery but also to show how women resist face up they hold her naked body to the ground arms and legs spread eagle each tie with rope to stick then they caught her in sweet molasses and called us out to see the rebel woman with a pin stick the soft mold of her own child's head sending the little newborn soul bringing its way back to africa free yet beyond the exploitation of women's sexual labor for capitalists gave because of the conception of their bodies as always available for sexual conquest was a further racist idea that blacks the black subject both men and women were over sexed according to anika marshall in her essay from sexual denigration to self-respect she says during slavery the belief that africans were subhuman savages with uncontrollable sexual capacities was used to legitimate the exploitation of their labor how does the caribbean writer painting erratica escape this focus on the sexuality of the black subject without subscribing to this mythology it's part of the challenge bell hooks for example explained that black men's preoccupation with the phallus is part of the history is part of that history but hooks in the essay it's addicting indicates that quote the convergence of racist sex is thinking about a black body which is always projected onto the black body a hypersexuality and in jamaica the obsession with dick size is represented in crotch holding in tall tales of sexual conquest it is immortalized in the wood carvings in fern bully it is celebrated in the sun sea sex tourism of the north coast as represented by peter as peter said earlier it is reflected in the debate over the emancipation statue and it is reinforced in the all songs that promote this obsession poets such as tanya shirley confronts this reproduction in her focus on what i call phallic eroticism in a poem like negotiation it begins with an epigraph coined much like a caribbean proverb epigraph big dick can't go to supermarket yes i know i am beautiful my mother tells me so frequently yes i know the way i move my waist is magic i'm from the caribbean yes it does excite me that you promise to perform conilingus i hear i'm sweet like mango what what else do you bring to this table and she goes to a series of things i only read a couple of the verses do you have a baby or yet to claim because you're waiting to see if he looks like you if i start crying at the sight of a full moon a starving child a dead rose a lizard over my front door will you appease me without condescension don't you forget don't you think i forgot do you have a big dick my third kind of inquiry is to what extent erotic pleasure is part of the black subject reclaiming their humanity okay guru matario and others have suggested that even from the degradation of the slave ship and slave plantation torch and the whole affective world of erotic pleasure was one of the sights for black people to express their humanity if a cesare claimed signification during slavery was a strategy of imperialist control to which rex nettleford offered smallification as the need or the desire for blacks in jamaica to reclaim their humanity one of the ways of expression expressing one's humanity is through erotic pleasure grace nicholas represents this very well in the poem i go to meet him we're on this plantation these are the thoughts of this female subject mournings of dew and promises the sound of birds singing pink and red hibiscus kissing i must devote some time to the joy of living raising up from my wedding of frightening care my eyes make four with this man there ain't no reason to laugh but i laughing in confusion his hands soft his words quick his lips curling as in prayer i nod i like this man tonight i go to meet him like a flame i see the trembling star of murder in your palm black man bleeding and raging to death inside yourself broken and twisted as a wheel watching your blood run thin and thoughtless to the earth as you grip the throat of cain kin of my skin you are i have raised three aspects of the representation of the black body black female body is available for conquest the black body in general is over sexed but also the black erotic body as a sight for the reclamation of their humanity conor james quoting jafari allen's book on erratics of black self-making in cuba argues that the recuperation of the quotidian spaces and practices of personal agency as political and encourages us to pay attention to everyday gestures that must be read closely for their impulse towards personal freedom which when thought through and redeployed collectively instantiate moves towards liberation or a larger freedom here is a female persona in his poem declaring what she's she imagines is an enjoyable sexual and i end my presentation with this journey fruit i want to be the mango that makes you long to be home i open my legs for you yellow juice stains the white sheets you choose slowly then swallow making a meal out of me tongue these palms oiled for you holy is each finger in your mouth let me dry your dripping words feed you flesh until your horse your tongue is a hummingbird pulling pollen out of me stir my back against your broad chest you swirl until i'm sore i bend forward keep stirring remove dangerously slow seated we stumbled to bed the sea spilling out of us well thank you so very much all panelists um yeah fantastic reflections fantastic uh theorizations etc on this whole business of the erotic the power of the erotic the uses of the erotic how we theorize and and apply the erotic the discourse very broadly and what i gather from each of the presenters from something you've said something you read from your own work or the work of somebody else it's the idea of reclaiming um getting back the power of the erotic moving away from the pathologization of this i this aspect of identity reclaiming all right so it's about the reclamation i i gather that from uh virtually what everybody says peter talks about what might uh passion what might desire look like if we could tell these multiple stories multifarious spaces from which we emerge and move and have our being and our identity michael talks about you know and and references uh hillary beckles and so on centering women how do we um get that space back what might that look like you from your own uh reading shona and uh donna talking about these two writers who you know uh are emboldened if you like by a reclamation of that space of the erotic and so um you know i wonder if uh each of you might speak to the idea of you know at the level of theory all right we have susan sontag we have uh audrey lord sort of proffering a mode hermeneutics if you like or they they would they would shun that word they would shun that word all right uh in favor of thinking of a mode a way of understanding the erotic and and the importance of it um and how we read it how we understand it uh taking it out of the normative sort of of of modes and and structures how we read text normally they're offering something that is less euro rationally uh oriented and more toward um heightened sensibilities and sensitivities in terms of how we might read texts of you know various thoughts what do you think is the value or in what way might we think of theorizing um erotic literature well let me start with lord because she says that when we live outside ourselves and by that i mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves then our lives are limited by external and alien forms and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need let alone in individuals but when we begin to live from within outward in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves and allowing that power to inform all and illuminate our actions upon the world around us then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense for as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings we begin to give up of necessity being satisfied with suffering and self-negation and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society so clearly there is a connection there for lord and um for so many women writers who see lord as a literary um ancestor um like shauna morgan um that that um that that we we really live our deepest and richest lives when we are fully in touch with erotic and that the robot the erotic is not about sex without sense with sex um just for the sake of sensation as shown up as shauna already suggested but that it is really a way of getting in touch with who we really are at the deepest level and i think that is why she makes it a point of her duty to to connect healing in the cancer journals with pleasure with with our own erotic pleasure with our own self-pleasuring as i was pointing out so that we can understand that this is not just about sex for the sake of sex that the erotic is more than sex that the erotic is a spiritual connection and i i wasn't being facetious when i mentioned marvin gaye's song because i think we tend to to hear that song and we think of it on a very surface level but when you pair that with what lord when you play marvin gaye's sexual healing with lord you unders you can understand marvin gaye's song on a much deeper level as well that he was actually there's a subtext to what marvin might have been singing about that we never really we never really thought to make that connection and i think for me lord makes that connection and it becomes glaringly obvious when you look at other people's works where where sex is really justice and just about sensation or sex is about objectification sex is not about connection whereas for lord it is clearly about connection connecting with another human being connecting across um struggles connecting across our common humanity connecting even across our differences right um and so yeah i think that there's definitely a theory there about the importance of the erotic that we cannot afford to not engage it but it's how we understand the erotic that is really important but it's not on the surface level as as pornography is which is what a lot of people think about when they think about the erotic yeah yeah that that importance of differentiating between pornography and the erotic you know a lot of people conflate the tool and you know as you so very well point out donna you know there are differentiations to be made with respect to these two concepts uh does anybody else want to respond yeah i mean well i'll take it to the other theorists you mentioned that sontag on the other side i mean that line is instead what is it instead of her hermenetics we need a neurotics of art she says and i mean it comes back in in one way this is going to be quite an old-fashioned answer but if the erotics of art is about enjoying the sensuousness of our some of that approach is going to have to be kind of getting away from that need to analyze and kind of kill something to death and look for the meaning and a moral as the most important thing yeah and you know michael is teaching this poetry class i'm teaching poetry this semester and one of the things that's hardest to do is to to tell students that they actually love poetry and that they've loved poetry since they were this small and you know they're in love with the rhythms and they're in love with the rhyme and the sound effects because they think that they have to look for the meaning right and the moral and they've lost entirely that idea that you can just sit with the poem or sit with the text or sit with the art and figure out what is this thing to me what does it mean to me um in some kind of deeply meaningful way that is not superficial and that that's a perfectly valid answer and i think part of what um an erotics of art has to do is to teach people how to fall back in love with the text how do you fall back in love with the sanctuousness of the art objects right and see that not as a superficial thing but as a kind of deeply radical thing because i think people think i remember you know when i was undergraduate bell hooks came to talk and she was talking about how um love was a thing i think she just done the love book and she was talking about this and you know one of the students stood up and said you want us to love you know there's all this injustice in the world and she stood up and she you know that voice that she has she was like i'm not talking but no namby pamby hallmach love i'm talking radical and i mean i think that's a similar thing right how can you teach that the love of the poem the enjoyment of the poem is still can be a radical deep engagement right i think that would bring us um into the discourse of the erotic because the aesthetic is about the body feeling so that's the way that you suture those two together i think yeah and peter think of of even you know the idea of you know loving a book right um there are some of us um freaks who like oh i love to have a i have to smell the book and the erotics of that as well in terms of connecting with the literature in a particular kind of way even before we get into the reading process and just that tactile that again the touch and the smell and the connecting with the literature in that kind of way um in some ways sort of gets us to that point as well yeah i i wanted to just add that um in shirley's work that's one of the things that we have been looking at how she twins the pleasure of sex with the pleasure of creative endeavor writing and um and and and it's an and and even the pleasure of food right you know the mention of the mango and the last poem but how those three things come together uh as as as heightened kind of heightened pleasure in reading her work um it seems to me that any kind of theorizing and of course we've all been informed by um lord's work to a large extent and and how she shifts the paradigm um in the way in which he looks at at it and i think that part of the process of thinking through the erratic as um whether we want to call it hermeneutics or some kind of strategy of understanding um is that it privileges feeling and the effective domain and and primarily because that is often um feminized or associated with women it's one of those things that people kind of dismiss and so we have a audiolord who recovers that aspect it seems to place value on pleasure and the fact of enjoyment one of the kinds of things that i've been working on is the idea of dress and how black people um get uh get a sense of great pleasure out of how they look and it's a kind of a kind of um erratics of of of how you look and the pleasure in that um you see that in dancehall culture and when you have nothing else as a kind of source of capitalist valuation to the economics of that paradigm then there's a pleasure paradigm that people are getting validation from and so i think you have to think about the value placed on pleasure and certainly um as said by other speakers the idea of connection the sense of intimacy if there's one thing that kovit has taught us with this all of this isolation and how much as a as human beings that we value connection yes and um and i think that that paradigm is going to shift some of the kinds of categories of value that we do which we think yes one of the things that is is evident to me and and based on everybody's comments as well is that the the poetry itself is theorizing right the poetry itself is doing the theorizing and i and i think about um somebody like kai miller for example and um you know in his work i see this thing that i've been sort of trying to tease out this this um erotic divine or this kind of sensual divine thing this spiritual erotic thing that's happening in his work that um you know again sort of forces some kind of theorizing but it gets to that point of of connection and and intimacy and and intimacy sort of across you know sort of all kinds of intimacy right with self with even dirt even you know um somebody in a pew next to you in a church or you know even through language and so it's it's interesting it just has me thinking that the the art itself is sort of doing the theorizing uh thank you so much for that and in in keeping with that last comment uh one of our uh persons um has asked the question is poetry the best literary genre to convey eroticism the erotic i'm a little biased towards poetry myself but i think gabriel garcia marquez and lord and other lord does it in zombie toni morrison certainly does it in almost every book so it really depends on the writer i think it's it's really a lot of writers are are very lyrical already whether they consider themselves to be strictly writing poetry or not so i wouldn't be essentialist about it even though i do have a bias towards poetry personally and thank you and it occurred to me you know we're talking about pleasure and you know basking and pleasure and enjoying pleasure in pursuit of pleasure and i'm thinking you know uh you know orthodox christian principles and values and you know you're to shun pleasure and i'm wondering the the role that that has played in terms of our conditioning uh with respect to how we view indulgence in pleasure or representations of pleasure a passion in in in literary works you know peter you you talk about the dearth of that kind of writing and you know in bohemian you specified behind literature uh in particular but even more broadly across the region you know i mean there is the the 62 writers published in uh caribbean erotic you know but i'm still wondering whether there is this censorship of the imagination that people um perhaps still feel that there's that reticence or there's you know um a reluctance to kind of engage uh whether in writing or in other forms of representation you mentioned dancehall and perhaps there's no reticence there michael you know but you know i wonder generally and broadly whether there is still that sort of reserve hesitation or will it topple what we have internalized as you know um maybe a kind of um a belief system that sort of insulator so we attempt to use the insulators from what we might consider um unwholesome and pornographic and and undesire undesirable as a discourse to fully engage and immerse ourselves in and i just i just wanted to add to the uh when you mentioned um judo christian influences and i wondered i'm also teaching a course called reggae poetry and so we're looking at reggae lyrics in this um course and um one thing that comes across is that that idea of that restraint and respectability we're looking at a lady saw song the other day under the sycamore tree in which um ladies saw as much as she's the icon of this female sexual liberated woman reclaims in that song appeals to the idea of respectability that she she can um do a marathon sex thing and she can be on top and you're riding this this this particular bank but then she appeals to this church image um to say she's a good girl and to ask me to do relationship is therefore um too far um and i'm part of part of what some of that discussion generated is the idea that there's a kind of middle-class um co-option of religion um in support of a kind of respectability culture and oftentimes if you look at other classes um you know um i'd like to like to say to people i have never seen a more frank representation of the lower class than somebody like austin clark in um in um scissors and songs or that earlier novel um sleep in my memory no but what club does is to represent a kind of frankness about sexuality that you don't have these pretensions around and i think that part of that question is not just christian but kind of respectability culture that says we ought not to it's a kind of 19th century idea that we ought not to disclose what we do quietly but it's everybody's doing it you know and and it's it's about this a second thing not just respectability but about this um differentiation between what you publicly declare and what you're privately engaged exactly and and and i think that's part of the question as well yes thank you and so we have some questions coming up in the chat uh one from sanji bethel which i'll read how do we navigate that murky space between the healing and redemptive power of the erotic and the near ubiquitous historical trauma of sex slash desire how to rationalize hedonism in a traumatized space i guess for me you reclaim it for yourself you know you reclaim it you reclaim it and you rename it because when you allow yourself to be defined from the outside you get you're disempowered by somebody else's somebody else decides who you are and what you are to do and you know how they see you when you reclaim that for yourself then that's the for me that's that's how you navigate that space between the healing and redemptive power and the and the trauma because the trauma really comes from the outside the trauma is something visited upon you even if it's even if you eventually um internalize it and it affects you in a particular way it's still something imposed from the outside usually trauma is usually not something we impose upon ourselves um so when you reject it and when you claim the erotic when you understand the erotic as something that belongs to you and something that is empowering and something that you can use to heal yourself and to kind of move um your transcend you know your circumstances i think you are just a reclaiming of it is powerful enough to allow that kind of transcendence to allow to allow you to um to find a way to navigate it where um that space so that um so that you take back your power right rather than allowing them to constantly impose their own ideology or their own um their their traumas on you which is you know they're very good at doing that the society is very good at doing that um and to kind of link that to christianity um the christian if you if you read the bible itself all the new testament you'll see that it's it's sometimes some of the doctrine in the bible is very different from what they teach what they actually teach you in the church it's like it's the way that it's interpreted it's that dichotomy it's that that that that split that they create between the sexuality and spirituality that is an artificial binary right like when you when you um even even when you read some i don't know if you've read like sue hao chin did a collection on the spiritual narratives um and i think it was published by schaumburg schomburg center for research in black culture and even the spiritual narratives you can see the woman the black woman and these women who are enslaved trying to reclaim the erotic through christianity and they're doing it through the holy ghost they're talking about being you know entered the holy ghost enters them right and then they begin to express what that feels and if the language is very sexual and so you can see them trying to um find a way to incorporate the erotic into the doctrine even though the doctrine is telling them that this is not okay and it's like this is the only way the only way to talk about the body the only way to talk about the pleasure of the body is to kind of tie it to spirituality to tie it to you know to to christian doctrine in a very um binarized way so they can't they don't know they don't know how to do that so what they do is kind of um transfer the sexual aspects of it onto something else onto something spiritual rather than melding the two right and i i find it the in terms of the language that they're using they're kind of doing a kind of transference where it's like i i can i can expect i can only experience sex through the holy ghost right i can be filled with the holy ghost and and that's okay that's a way to express my sexuality my my erotic power through the whole and i found it fascinating when i discovered that that was what they were doing because it's like it's not it's forbidden in the church but it's not necessarily separated in in the same way in the bible is separated by the doctrine that they preach all right we have a question here by uh for from keisha ellis she says i also reread love in the time of caller during the lockdown garcia marquez skills as a writer is obvious and his descriptions of how love made him feel physically are superb but his writing about sex is just that well-crafted descriptions of sex hearing his words next to those of audrey lord sappho and the other women writers lead me to ask a blunt question can men write erotica and if so have they can i read something craig wrote no no you cannot can i answer that one we have another question come on gray i can reset what page is it on 60 okay let me answer you with a poem oh my gosh mind blowing love is in the mind but when you're giving me head i cannot think straight oh anyway so this question is hot water kisses if they're very short come on craig wins kiss wet faces dark bodies embraced in waves toes curl on the sand trying not to splash cold colored faces smiling eating sapodilla sapodillas sapodillas we don't call it sapodilla in jamaica so tell me if i'm saying gooseberry knees very exactly you tin sapodillas the moment is now lips press against down his skin moisten with the tongue now bite into it teeth penetrate juicy flesh taste nature's nectar [Laughter] i wanted an opportunity to share your portraits she just gave it to me so this is in the book of paul and i put together curvy and erratic and that's one of uh three of craig's very short i think we had done some haikus right craig we did yeah we wrote those from those haikus and i've always liked those so yeah i think so i think men can can might be right it depends on your mindset as aptly demonstrated wonderful we have another question from criteria rule to dr bailey what would the erotic look like with the many representations we can have in bohemian society and is there space enough for every representation do you see this as a necessity in terms of developing a national literature i'm not sure what it would look like i mean i think that's we would have to discover together um whether there's space yeah i mean i feel like as long as there's somebody to write a text and someone to read it you can put that representation out there i mean some may be resisted by people that don't want to see particular forms but that doesn't mean that you can't put them there i mean that happens all the time and do i think as a necessity yeah i tell ya so um i feel like um there are as many types of experience in the world and you know you never know what you may identify with what may cause you at any minute to feel like i can survive this particular day right if you read this or you encountered this in this text so i think some of those things are definitely necessary you know again thinking about just practical experience you sit around and uh you any number of students may come through your office at any time and tell you about something that's going on with them and you think to yourself if you could read this or if you could see this you would see that you're not by yourself other people have felt like this or other people have experienced these things um so i think that those representations are vital and they would just make us richer peter that um i think that's an opportunity for me to read this piece by essex hemphill which i think speaks to what you're just saying now we think now we think as we [ __ ] this nut might kill us there might be a pin-sized hole in the condom a lethal leak we stop kissing tall dark strangers sucking mustaches putting lips tongues everywhere we return to pictures telephones toys recent lovers private lives now we think as we [ __ ] this nut might kill us this this kiss could turn to stone and so i think you know to just to piggyback on what peter's saying in terms of how we use um the literature and how we use the erotic um even to deal and work through things um that someone and of course this is the speaker this poem is speaking about the aids epidemic and you know the dangers um of the erotic rays right but still the necessity to connect to touch to love um to express in that way is vital and necessary okay there's another question cj cj bogle and it's addressed i guess to uh all members of the panel there seems to be quite a binary opposition set up between the pornographic and the erotic in the panel i wonder how we might think about how black feminist scholars have tried to read pornography beyond the obvious issues of exploitation and preparing as offering black women possibilities of economic agency and as jennifer nash would argue that racial quote fictions can create a space of agency and pleasure for black female subjects end quote what does the panel think about this alternative formulation and labor issues i i would say i would want to hear it from the woman in in the industry because i remember we had a conference once long time ago at hunter i was a at hunter but it was in new york when i was at hunter it was in new york and i remember we had invited some women from the um were sex workers and um the way that some of us right as feminists were trying to re-theorize and recontextualize sex work was very different from the way that the women wanted us to talk about it because they they didn't necessarily feel that way a lot of them felt like um they had um that this was something they did because they had to do it because but not something they would have chosen to do necessarily so i guess that would be my response i'm very wary because of that experience i'm very wary and i always wonder what what do the women and men who do sex work how do they feel yes yes you can have your agency doing sex work and you can make a decision but it's it's it's uh to do that but it but it feels to me from when i have when i've had the opportunity to have those conversations that it seems to me to be a choice made out of no choice a choice made out of not having choice and also something that a lot of people come to after being extremely traumatized sexually not everybody but that's my answer and it might not be the politically correct one but that but that's my answer that i i see a difference between um in in how we think about the because because pornography tends to to make sex be about just sensation right without connection and and because it tends to make it about objectification because there is a tendency in the industry to do that i would want to hear from the workers themselves rather than someone who is not a sex worker theorizing about it i want to know what the people who are living it think about that i think as always my question is you know if there is agency in sex work and a degree of agency ultimately you know is it is it pandering who is it serving ultimately is it serving the capitalist structure you know white supremacist patriarchal capitalist structure you know i'm thinking about conversations i've had here in the us about that um you know and even if you think about film industry for example right there is a sort of growing market of women filmmakers who are attempting to make erotica right that appeal to um a different kind of audience right than than the pornography that that you know we're so typical uh that's so typical of the mainstream but ultimately again the question is you know is it in service of that that that horror structure that audrey lord refers to that's the question that i always ask and i don't have an answer to that um but i do know that um the making of art right just to sort of call back to that that question that zanzi had about how do you navi how do you navigate that space right between between trauma between power and oppression right uh that you that you'll see in pornography and and a healing space and i think the making of art right whether it's visual art or poetry and just even just the process of making it becomes a sort of defiant thing um and so i don't know if i can um think about sex work um in that way although you know there are women who you know i know who have gone from doing sex work in service of right to that structure to to focusing on uh sex work that is that's that's targeted at women's healing right so i think there are some innovative things that are happening there but again i i don't know if we can um just talk about the agency without asking that question okay we have another question from uh viewer uh natario thompson this is to dr soleil the work attitude that you reference with the 51 years of affairs is an identity mode of existence that is easily recognizable in dl or closeted men within bahamian society and maybe even the wider caribbean when you mention that i've always looked at it uh i've always looked at it from the woman or the lover who has had their heart broken or received unrequited love but i am wondering if it is an attempt to be freed from the patriarchal confines of hegemonic or toxic masculinity in in the case of florentino in in um loving the time of cholera it is not in the in in i think the way that marquez draws this character the way that marquez portrays this character he's very critical of hegemonic patriarchy but he's he's pitch is critical of it in the patriarch who's recognized as as such in the society like fermi nadisa's husband right and who's a doctor and you know from a great family from a well-recognized family in the community and so on and um florentino ariza who is the one who fell in love with her first as a as they were both young right he was early 20s she was a teenager and it ended up losing out to the doctor right but he the way he goes about dealing with women it's also very hegemonic um it's very different from the doctor who probably has one or maybe two affairs but he's married to one woman and the way that um the um that the main this main character who's in love the way he with with fermina the way he deals with women it's very much the way that you would um you you compare that more to what goes on in contemporary society with men who are just very you know [ __ ] a lot of a better word very promiscuous and without any kind of of sense of how how their behavior affects the woman right he's not really careful about the woman's feelings in any of this and although he gets a lot from them he doesn't see them as invaluable beings but he but he's using them for his own satisfaction and he doesn't really give much back in return because he's really saving himself for someone else so where where i think that could be appropriate elsewhere in this particular text i would say that um garcia marquez is is as critical of this kind of expression of patriarchy as he is of the other more traditional expression of patriarchy and it's not that um florentino is he's not a gay male he uses that as a cover for his activities so that nobody will know that he's going around philandering with all these women because ultimately he wants um fermina's husband to die so he can get into a relationship with her and he want as a matter of fact what he tells her when he does get her back is that he's kept himself a virgin for her which is a flipping off the script if ever there was one because she's been married and sexually active with her husband with children and he's saying i've been a virgin all this time 51 years because he wants you know took to kind of keep this ideal of himself that she had when she was a teenager he wanted to keep that intact so he deliberately um i guess supported or encouraged that view of himself as being a homosexual if he were that would would have been a different story if he were just trying to mask his homosexuality that would have been a different story but that was not the case in this particular narrative all right thank you i think we have time for maybe two more questions and then we will um wrap up after um the second question marie do you have a question well i'm just reading deborah gordon's question and it's addressed to all panelists how do you think love and lust will be written about with the effects of social distancing locked down during the pandemic some sociologists have shared that many have become touch starved will it become mundane exaggerated or something entirely new what are your thoughts i think we're gonna see entirely new forms of erotics um [Music] people adapt you know you know foucault was saying that you know he was waiting for somebody to invent a new sexual pleasure in the 70s um i think that people anyway and what he did about that is another story but i think you see new things right so people are having their their you know their erotic things over zoom they are you know sneaking off after curfew which has its own thrill right they are doing all kinds of things um there's a whole catalog of things that people what people are doing you know i think people's sex lives have entirely shifted so that that ghost run that people do between three and five in the morning they now do at five to seven in the morning before work like it's stuff like that um so i think you're gonna see a whole new set of of activities discourses and feelings and after the curfew has i mean after the it's over i think people will be nostalgic for some of the things that were happening under these conditions although you don't think that now but yeah i think you'll find that um craig there's a question there yeah so we have um someone just said all right so what are the practical steps for folks to begin this reclamation of the erotic from imperialist capitalist and the colonial trauma and influences and as you think about that let me um just read this i think there was another one that was says she was skipped over it's the same it's the same person yeah okay what are the pro well go ahead shauna i think i'll um sort of try to address the previous question and maybe uh try to pick up the thread of the the last question you wrote uh you read this idea of sort of thinking about these new ways of um being right i think one of the things that might come out of the pending gimmick at least i hope is that we'll sort of start revisiting the constraints right of intimacy that that exists right whether they be our understanding of gender or even just the understanding of erotic right and intimacy what does it mean to touch to hold hands with someone who maybe you don't have sex with right what does it mean to to have an intimate and deep conversation with someone face to face i think that again my hope is that what will emerge is a different understanding you know in addition to sort of those innovative things that dr bailey talked about maybe um a departure from you know the very sort of um uh uh you know puritanical ideas and constraints around sexuality around intimacy around love even right what does it mean to hold a friend's hand or to to take is to touch to share space you know i just hope that there will be a different kind of openness to thinking about a kind of continuum of erotic right and what that means what it means to be with people yeah i agree i also think that some people some people have kind of dug dug it dug in some people some people have said like to hell with it people are traveling for love and it's like everybody is not following the rules some people have decided hey i could die tomorrow or you know what i mean some people have taken this this very aggressive attitude towards love let me pursue what makes me feel good you know in this because you know who knows just take the proper precautions but let me pursue what make not everybody is constrained i guess is what i'm trying to say i suppose i would add that um some people will enjoy auto eroticism in the context of being separated and that might increase but i also think that perhaps one aspect of erraticism which is about longing and and to have desire and waiting for it to be fulfilled might be increased at this particular point in time and in fact the language which which sometimes we don't talk about that part of eroticism is um pre-touch and so on it's about the sweet some things yeah that people will say and the kind of language of enticement and engagement and um and i agree with peter that this can be done across electronic devices where people are engaging prior to that moment of you know the poetry poetry perhaps is getting a bigger purchase these days um in the moment of of separation i agree with that too what was the last question i don't i don't remember the last question how was it framed what was the question uh how do you think that love and lust will be written about uh with the effects of social distancing and the lockdowns yeah that was the that was a that was a pen ultimate one what was the last one the practical steps for folks to begin their reclamation erotic from imperialist capitalism and colonial trauma yeah i guess it's going to be different for everybody for me it's always right in reading and writing i mean i was determined to read love in the time of color and this this panel forced me to read it that was my project from the beginning of the the lockdown i was like okay i'm gonna read this book right i'm gonna read this book during this season it's taken me long enough but i finally did it so for me it's it's i guess it's it's always through fiction and poetry it's it's it's it's my way so i think it's going to be different for everybody there isn't a one rule for everyone that's the beauty of it let me throw out this um this will probably be the final question and then um after um you answer this question we'll give the panelists uh another two minutes to you know for final thoughts but this question um is a question we skipped over um for donna this is for you in love in a time of cholera there is sorry this is from sonora edwards la in love in the time of cholera there is so much unexpected humor in the text and lord centers pleasure joy and satisfaction in uses of the erotic this makes me think about the connection between the erotic and laughter the satisfaction and connection we can find in sharing a laugh with one another we often even say that humor is sexy and find those who can create laughter attractive in dating and finding mates it seems like the erotic laughter can be a source of healing can you speak to the humor in marquez's work and how it functions in the text as a force of erotic attraction and healing how has laughter served as healing in your own life and work marcus's work is so funny senior that i find myself like i think i was reading it at three o'clock in the morning laughing out loud in the house at three o'clock and i'm not the only one in the house and just just it's it's the way it functions in the text is to kind of it dehumanizes the characters and it actually allows you to like a character that i mean i liked him all the way until the very end when the little girl killed herself and then i was just like you know what and i'm through with him right now right you know i was like he seduced this little girl and then didn't realize that she actually fell in love with him right and involved he's a he's a he's a pedophile what do you call that he's he's a pedophile yeah right so yeah that i was disgusted with that because of the little girl you know the age but also it you know but but up until that point the humor there's so much humor in um marquez's work that it like it disarms you and it pulls you in and it makes you really like this character who you know it's like when you look at him with a clear-eyed view is not that lovable character but as you're reading it he's a very lovable character you're going along with him you want to find out what's going to happen you're rooting for him you know i think part of that has to do with the humor in the text um in my own work i think i would like to just um read just a little bit of of one of my poems in caribbean erotic as a response laughter a deep belly laugh is better than medicine but not no better than a hard night's loving part in my lips i flash your hint of pink tongue watch your bad boy turn loose skinning pupalix i'm cutting up desire giddy up into your sweet brown skin laughter bubbling over a deep belly laugh is better than medicine but not no better than a hard night's loving you grab my ankles i tumble ungraciously balanced on the tip of your mouth right in the delicious peels of your baritone my belly filling up with glee soon i will burst give birth to bang belly verses full of themselves a deep belly laugh is better than medicine but not no better than a hard night's loving we laugh till we hiccup like drunks bouncing off walls and staggering about clutching at each other to break our fall tears run down like rivers tears run like river down our cheeks i drink your salt until i bring over swallow your laughter to hoard for my rainy days but iridium change nice all right time for a cigarette [Laughter] wait until after this one you might want to have a cigarette all right well i drink as well i close with a poem by shirley again from across the room you trot into rooms big horse high haunch shore foot a sudden craving for whatever you're offering coconut drops tamarind balls in my mouth half grain hot eucalyptus oil down my back lips dark fermented risen sure to hold a whole breast nipple to clavicle in the swamp of your mouth you can pluck the stem from a cherry no hands drip juice i can be the cup those hands that turn me into the bible rip me out like some stuffed into black back pockets hallelujah god didn't do wrong wide chest a girl can write stories on i'll have your baby in the back seat of a taxi skin like coffee served with a teaspoon of condensed milk cinnamon and nutmeg on top hope you like a coffee i hope you like it black like the foals of me wrap me up like a rediscovered love letter edges flayed dunk words still intact press hard press up throw me like a fist like a buzz like a scream or lay me down soft like a song like new white linen like dew on the mountain let me guide you to a tree a hammock a whistling skirt a private spot have you a cigarette now [Laughter] let me [Laughter] all right let's um hear from shauna and um peter um any um parting words for us no sir i [Laughter] no i don't think so no i'm good all right um marie any um parting shots sure just to say thank you so very much for to all the panelists for this fantastic session um it was rich it was um it engendered a great deal of thought and discourse back and forth i was happy to see you know some of the students very busy with their questions and and other uh participants uh busy with questions i i hope we got to all of them and um i thought it was a a very great panel um splendid opportunity to to discuss and converse about these these um on this topic that you know a lot of people i think but still even among some of my students i see here have a great deal of reticence so you know bringing it out in the open you know not censoring the imagination if you like you know and making it a discourse worthy of exploration and so on you know it it has enriched i think you know uh the way in which we think of erotics etc all right thank you very much thanks thank you so much marie and craig and all the panelists michael and peter and shawna this was fun before we before we go i'd just like to um i want to i want to leave us with um actually the introduction from black erotica erotic noir and the introduction is written by intazaki shange says we are lost in the confusion of myths and fears of race and sex to be good people to be respectable and worthy citizens we've had to combat absurd phantasmagoric stereotypes about our sexuality our lust and loves to the extent that we disavow our own sensuality to each other so how do we speak of our desires for each other to each other in a language where our relationships to our bodies and desires lacked dignity as well as nuance sex and sensuality are elements of any progressive discussion here in these stories and poems we are not myths or stereotypes art forms or sex objects we are simply folks at intimate play our fierce rhythms of desire the erotic unencumbered by the other close and hot so i think that that's a great place for us to leave again in terms of thinking about our connections with the erotic and our reconnection with our bodies and ourselves outside of the gaze of the other um and again i want to thank all the panelists um everyone who um logged in who registered to be a part of the conversation everyone who um put questions forward based on this conversation it seems that there are more conversations that need to be had and um hopefully we'll be able to organize that maybe even a conference who knows um so we can look forward to that but again thanks thank you to everyone and i want to encourage everyone to keep an eye out as i said the blue flamingo literary literary festival is coming up in a couple of weeks march 18th and 19th and so keep an eye out for those flyers if you have any questions or concerns you can always contact me alrighty thank you all for tuning in and have fun again thank you very much thank you everyone thank you good to see you donna good to see all of one of you so many times and shawna it's a pleasure to meet you good to meet you good to meet everyone yes shauna and peter pleasure to meet you bro you you haven't been to you haven't been to ub yet donna we need to change that yes please yeah man ready for sure freddie all the time to all my students who joined yes and so i was pointing out we're officially done but i was pointing out and thanks to my students who joined too thank you all i don't know if i mentioned it that um all the panelists are jamaican and so peter is jamaican too yeah i have i have been from craig why did you do that i it wasn't it wasn't but you know it just happened to be that way so i don't know it's more erratic than everything i'm gonna let you explain that because i i'm not touching that one anyway but thank you all very much thank you very much and ronnie you didn't mention that um it's coming up on the 10th anniversary of caribbean erotic right yes it is coming up on the 10th anniversary so i will be sending to folks and now and ask you to send to your folks opal and i are going to be doing an anniversary celebration sometime this term before the semester is over i don't think it's march maybe april is poetry month so maybe in april um and i will definitely so look out for it for the fly and the information i'll send to craig and marie and and ask them ask them to send your sean and ask them to michael and ask them to send to peter and so on and so forth and everybody here hopefully we'll get around i'm not on social media so it's harder for me to get stuff around but with a little help from my friends the word will get out we get it done all right folks have a good evening take care everyone see everybody gotcha stay safe