Chapter5 Global North Homoimperialism and the Conundrum of Queer Asylum

Canada: A Queer Safe Haven?

These narratives stand in stark contrast to the testament in the opening epigraph that situates the Global North as a queer safe haven, where in this context the Jamaican refugee praises Canada for providing the safety and comfort that was not presumably available at home. In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Ann McClintock’s theorizes the interrelation between race, gender, and sexuality in the context of European colonization and imperialism. Further, she examines how racial hierarchies, gender stereotypes and norms of sexual behaviour were reinforced, exploited, and imposed to control women, the colonized, and the industrial working class. While McClintock does not comment explicitly on the impact of these colonizing structures on homophobia among the colonized, her theorization proves useful for thinking carefully about how narratives like these are refracted through lingering racial hierarchies, and gender and sexual structures that persist in the Caribbean (and everywhere impacted by European colonization). These kinds of narratives of wanton violence position the region as an anachronistic elsewhere that remains “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity,” while leaving unaccounted, the impacts of European Empire on the moral, cultural and political psyche in these spaces.2

I have been documenting these stories of despair as part of ongoing research that theorizes the ways that queer people engage a politics of hope as they negotiate and resist homophobia, transphobia and discrimination in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas. Indeed, they also inspire my discussion in this chapter, as I interrogate some of the deeply complicated experiences that queer refugees from the Caribbean confront as they search for a “better life” elsewhere. I offer this analysis to rethink notions of peace and liberation as a means to focus on what happens when queer refugees enter Canada and The Netherlands as “Others” in relation to settler colonial and multicultural legacies that work to structure relationalities. How are they impacted by the prevailing racial, political, cultural, and social dynamics in these assumed “safe” havens? This question is often maligned or disregarded in mainstream, Global North international human rights activism, which relies heavily on white, neoliberal ideas about queer rights for persons elsewhere. Joseph Massad’s theorization of the gay international’s sexual identity politics is useful here for situating this politics as a way to understand how the world ideas for queer liberation emerges. In Desiring Arabs, Massad examines how Western ideas and human rights activism influence sexual identity politics and define “not only Arab nationalist responses, but also and especially Islamist ones, and what implications these would have for the sexual desires and practices of contemporary Arabs.”3 This trend he attributes to the gay international’s mobilization to “defend the rights of ‘gays and lesbians’ all over the world and to advocate on their behalf.”4 He finds that the gay international propagates a largely white, male, Euro-American discourse that “describes” and “explains” their distant interpretations of Arab and Muslim sexuality against their ideas of a contemporary gay world.5 This inevitably produces palatable versions of Islam and queerness and reinforce the imperialistic nature of human rights politics. Massad argues further that the gay international invokes an incitement to discourse that produces homosexuals in specific contexts and represses same-sex desires that “do not assimilate into Western sexual epistemologies.”6 This incitement, he continues, “divides the world into those who support and those who oppose gay rights.”7 This argument, when applied to the current landscape of human rights activism in the Anglophone Caribbean is highly provocative, as it acknowledges the very particular ways that queer life is referenced on the one hand, and exposes the inherent silencing of the creative and transgressive ways that queer people actively negotiate violence and discrimination.

The Global North as a safe space for queer people therefore emerges in initiatives spearheaded by many organizations run by mostly white gay men and queer refugees from various parts of the world. I speak as a queer person from the Anglophone Caribbean, living in North America, and working closely with community activists and working-class trans people from the Caribbean and in Caribbean diasporas across the world. Some queer liberation initiatives in the Anglophone Caribbean have allowed countries like Canada and The Netherlands to enter the region as a formidable “gay international” force through the deployment of human rights interventions, be it activism or asylum policy, that continuously frame the region as salvageable or “underdeveloped on the one hand, while reinforcing Canada [and The Netherlands] as manager[s] of global imperialism” on the other.8 This helping imperative through queer-rights talk imagines the Caribbean region as barbaric by introducing ideas about what it might mean to save queers based on white, neoliberal notions of queer liberation. Global North human rights defenders have invested heavily in the region and their own queer imperialism, which, as Jamaican scholar-activist Carla Moore theorizes, enacts a queer liberal hegemony by those who purport to be the holders of queer legitimacy and who justify their intervention with colonialist development rhetoric.9 To do so, it utilizes members of the queer Caribbean diaspora to transport this politics to the region, a process in which Caribbean queers residing in places like Canada often become transformed into what I theorize in my work as “native experts” about these conditions.

“Native experts” are persons from the Anglophone Caribbean (and elsewhere) who have relocated to countries like Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and The Netherlands. They have been positioned within white neoliberal queer discourses as holders of exclusive knowledge of the realities in their countries of origin. In Canada, they are made to speak the language of the human rights defenders who assist them, where narratives of death, disease, and escape from a violently homophobic region becomes the de facto rhetoric. Other stories are delegitimized in relation to these, and if the dominant narrative is contested, conflicting opinions are shut down and struck out of the conversation. This concept of “native” is indeed fraught with contention, and, as Trinh T. Minh-ha explains in her interrogation of anthropological studies of the Other, the very classification of someone as “native” emphasizes “their being born inferior and ‘non-Europeans.’”10 In this arrangement, native experts become “the handicapped who cannot represent themselves and have to either be represented or learn how to represent themselves. Whatever the issue, they are entrapped in a circular dance where they find themselves a pace behind the white saviours.”11

Examples of native-expert narratives abound. For example, Envisioning LGBT Human Rights (hereafter Envisioning), a Canadian queer human rights initiative, propels a narrative of rescuing queers based on an idealized notion of what Canada has to offer. As part of its global mandate, it conducts participatory action research to ascertain the international landscape of LGBT human rights and to determine Canada’s response to situations beyond its borders. This project explicitly focuses on “Commonwealth countries that maintain criminal code sanctions against same-sex intimacy, working with partners in selected countries where such laws are currently being challenged (India, Uganda, Kenya, Botswana, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Belize and Guyana).”12 In 2013, the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination in Guyana and Envisioning partnered with Guyanese artist Ulelli Verbeke to produce a photo-text essay called Capturing LGBT Migration from the Caribbean to Canada, which was launched by Envisioning at the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives (now The ArQuives) for Toronto’s 2014 World Pride. In this piece, Verbeke photographed queer people who still reside in or left the Caribbean in search of safety or, more precisely, to avoid death. The subjects in the Caribbean remain anonymous through their framing—back toward the camera, heads bent, or ambiguous body parts being shown—while those in Canada are photographed with broad and confident smiles. Each picture is accompanied by a short quotation that reinforces Canada as a safe haven. For example, Dud (face toward the camera), a refugee from Guyana now living in Canada, explains, “I totally empathize with people’s plights while they’re living there. That’s why I can never, ever go back. I have absolutely no desire to.”13 Annon, also from Guyana (back toward camera), lays blame for the incessant homophobia on the government: “When we look at the struggles of the huge gay movement in the Global North in terms of the gay revolution it requires a lot of work. And if we are looking to give equal rights to the LGBT community, then a lot more has to be done. And we can only do that with the support of the government.”14

These kinds of dynamics are made tangible in David Murray’s pioneering scholarship on homonationalism in the Canadian context where he establishes a clear link between the native-expert narratives (that I trace in my work) and International Refugee Board (IRB) culture that legitimizes particular stories of queer despair. In Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus, Murray argues that Canadian asylum narratives

reinscribe the homonationalist queer migration to liberation nation narrative undergirding the refugee apparatus, in that Canada is constructed as a new, liberated, home nation for sexual and gender minorities, while former home nations (mostly from the Global South) are constructed as backward and primitive because of their rampant homo- and transphobia.15

Murray explores the complicated navigations that queer asylum seekers need to make when they arrive in countries like Canada on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) claims. Focusing on some of the processes that queer refugees must go through to authenticate their queerness to immigration officials, he explains,

Few SOGI claimants arrive in Canada thinking of themselves as “refugees,” and some do not think of themselves as members of a particular sexual minority or gender identity group or may not recognize or identify with sexual minority terms as they are defined and organized in Canada. However, in the period leading up to their IRB hearing, the SOGI refugee claimants must learn relatively quickly how to “be” or at least “occupy” one of these LGBT identity categories authentically, as their hearings are dedicated to assessing the credibility of their claims to be members of a particular social group, who have faced persecution in their country of origin. They are reminded repeatedly by their lawyers, peer support group leaders and one another that there are a number of components, characteristics and assumptions utilized by IRB members to determine the credibility of an SOGI refugee claim, and if they learn and understand these assumptions and characteristics associated with “LGBT” identities, and integrate them into an appropriate narrative of identity formation and persecution based on that identity, then they stand a better chance of a successful hearing.16

Murray goes on to examine the experiences of several refugees from various parts of the world, including gay men from Uganda and the Caribbean. He walks the reader through the various ways they perform or are made to perform their queerness once they are under investigation by the IRB and gives vital insight into some of the messy negotiations that queer people must engage in, like confronting homelessness, lack of access to sustainable employment and health care, and segregation among asylum seekers when they bring with them deep-rooted histories and ways of engaging with each other.

Readily visible in this discourse are a validation and celebration of queer rights within a particular queer neoliberal framework; one that “presumably makes Canadians feel proud of their nation’s status as a gay-friendly refuge.”17 My research continues to reveal that native experts, formerly Othered queer subjects in their countries of origin, are one of the main ways that such limiting performance queerness is maintained. And as Sima Shakhsari argues usefully, such figures “have been traditionally excluded from the heteronormative imaginations of the nation, and thus willingly take the opportunity to insert themselves into national imaginations in diasporic reterritorializations” as saved queers in the Global North.18 But what are the ethical responsibilities of those who are positioned to speak about these imagined violent safe places? Rinaldo Walcott questions this in Queer Returns: Human Rights, the Anglo-Caribbean and Diaspora Politics as he grapples with the ethical responsibilities of those who “speak to somewhere and from another place . . . as displaced subjects both inside and outside of the region.”19 Walcott allows us to see this in the work done by these diaspora activists and native experts whose work “measure[s] citizenship in the exact and minute terms of heterosexual citizenship [and] provides space for elites within states to self-express . . . produce and police sexuality on singular terms forcing sexual minorities into a one size fits all model.”20 This, he contends, “does not work for the poor.”21

Bearing in mind what Walcott asks, it is not my intention to diminish the experiences of queer refugees who find their way to places like Canada and The Netherlands. Rather, I am interested in how their stories of frustration disrupt an idea of “good life” in the Global North. I wonder what might it mean to recognize that human rights as a singular-focused framework is an insufficient strategy for seeking queer liberation? Further, I posit that real, complicated and nuanced experiences need to inform and destabilize the homoimperial culture of liberatory queer human rights policy and activism. And as Caribbean feminist scholars Angelique Nixon and Rosamond King argue, this work must be attentive to the embodied experiences in ways that seriously contemplate the ways that transnational flows of power remain deeply informed by queer people’s historical, social, cultural and political circumstances.22 The following queer refugee experiences provide a glimpse of why this is a necessary ethical responsibility of human rights defenders of the “queer Other.”

Asylum on Whose Terms?

My ongoing ethnographic research has revealed that, despite compelling narratives of queer refugee freedom in Canada and The Netherlands, many queer people continue to face significant economic, social, cultural, and interpersonal hardships. These are mostly tied to the larger political and racialized landscapes that define people of colour and particularly Black people’s relationship to these queer asylum spaces. I began documenting queer Caribbean refugee stories in 2019 to understand the complexities of the refugees’ experiences once they arrive in Canada and The Netherlands.23 While refugees have expressed gratitude for being able to leave their home countries, newfound peace and happiness seem to be deferred because of many other mitigating factors. In what follows, I turn to interview data from queer people from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago to reveal this pressing reality.24 While this sample limits the representation of refugee realities, it is nevertheless reflective of some of the experiences of many queer refugees and points to the critical need for further documentation and a better understand better the hardships that non-white queer refugees experience when they arrive in the Global North. I explore emerging refugee stories under two main themes: finding work and financial support and love and sex relationships.

Finding Work and Financial Support

Well, to be honest, work not really hard to find but I should say good jobs are hard to find. But work on the whole, like not really hard to find. But if you looking for something that will suit probably like what you did back home or something that suits your education, or qualifications or things like that, you might have a bit of a problem because coming to Canada all your education stuff needs to be assessed and . . . they still will require you to add certain things to it. . . . Or they may even . . . want you to pay. It’s expensive, that’s another thing too. . . . They have to contact the institution back in your country, the institution has to send certain forms and different things like that. So that can be a bit ticklish or be hard because, um, sometimes some of these people leave flee to these country without any of these information or document. . . . So some people just end up doing factory work, doing cleaning jobs and things like that just to make ends meet.

Anthony, the respondent above, has been living in Canada for approximately five years after leaving Trinidad and Tobago because of the discrimination and violence he experienced.25 Once he received refugee status after a year in Canada, he needed a stable income to support himself, having arrived with no financial support or resources. Despite being a qualified nurse in his home country, he learned that all his education and experience were deemed invalid and that he had to start over in order to stay in the medical field.

Things were extremely hard for him for his first few years, and he was often at a point where he had to find any kind of work “just to make ends meet, just to put food on the table to get by.” One way that he and his other refugee friends managed this financial crisis was by registering with the provincial unemployment relief program called Ontario Works (OW) to get a monthly stipend. Anthony explains:

Well, refugees could, um, with their refugee ID can . . . get registered with Ontario Works . . . which that be . . . like ah kinda stipend they will get for each month. But with OW they encourage you to like get up and go find work. They also try to get you connected to like public programs; because OW have programs like maybe classes, for instance, for someone who may come from a country who don’t speak French or don’t speak English. If you might want to do cooking, sewing and things like that, they have classes and things for that. So that’s how OW gets you connected . . . and they help as much as it can. The money is not much.

Much like Anthony, Earl from Jamaica experienced extreme poverty after arriving in Toronto, with little hope for assistance from the numerous Black queer groups that cater to refugees. Since his arrival on March 14, 2016, he constantly struggled to find employment, finish university, and find stable housing. In our interviews and interactions, he always became extremely emotional because of the profound sense of regret and loss that he feels. On one occasion, he exclaimed,

Until this day I am living like damn second-class rat. Nothing accomplished! I’ve experienced what poverty and true isolation is over some homophobic threats in Jamaica. My life was economically more progressive in Jamaica. I was not socially isolated, and I had real proper guys to interact with despite them going through the same psychological issues due to the Caribbean society. Now I waste a way in an over-rated, overpriced ice waste land like a dingy rat.

What makes Earl’s situation unique among other research participants is that he has been diagnosed with severe clinical depression and mild schizophrenia and remains heavily medicated. This has affected his ability to maintain stable employment or to attend school as regularly as he needs to maintain his funding through the provincially funded Ontario Student Assistance Program. In fact, he temporarily lost this funding and was being forced to withdraw from his undergraduate classes despite only needing to complete four courses to obtain his bachelor’s degree. This continues to take a serious toll on him as he contemplates going back to Jamaica, which he now appreciates as the better place to be:

Canada is not designed for people like me. [It is] designed for hypersexually persecuted men and pretenders who are obsessed with North American gay life pictured on TV. If you don’t fit that, you get fucked! Even an impotent straight guy is able to find a decent woman and his life improves in all aspects. I ran from the frying pan into the fire. Still, I burn in the façade.

[I] ran from homophobic family to live like a john crow [a vulture] in Canada. Ran from proper housing, shelter that I volunteer for years to help sustain and upgrade my future blueprints to expand; to now come to a foreign land to deal with daily fuckery.

From dam riches to rags

From being affectionate with guys to be[ing] socially isolated and despised by guys

To eating daily 2 or 3 times to eating 0 or 1 time.

From learning to drive and planning to [but now] can’t even afford a bicycle

From saying, I paid the utility bills for 3 months in advance to eluding creditors and struggling to pay my landlord rent.

Earl’s reality is frightening. Over the years, I’ve tried to work as closely as possible with him to ensure that he’s connected with health care resources and mental health crisis personnel. However, this too has been a struggle because of the highly racialized, sexualized, and politicized nature of health care in Canada and Toronto that diminishes equitable and culturally appropriate access for many Black populations in the country.

Earl and Anthony’s experiences only begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of crises that queer refugees in my research experience in Canada. Similarly, Dirk, who had recently relocated from Trinidad and Tobago and was working closely with newcomer communities with one of the main LGBTIQ+ organizations in Toronto, reiterated this reality:

Some organizations have support, so they run programs for mental health. But the thing is that . . . in the Caribbean there’s a stigma around mental health, right? Cause you see . . . if you have a mental health [issue], yuh crazy. Mental health does not always look like . . . what we see. We all have, you know . . . I probably have a range of mental health conditions going on with me right now. But you know, but I’m functioning. So it’s how do we communicate that to these communities, so they understand what it is [so] they are not afraid to access mental health support because there is a stigma around accessing mental health support. A stigma around accessing substance use support as well.

These deeply complex dynamics are further complicated when queer refugees enter Canada as racialized and sexualized subjects, and, as I explore next, refugees in Amsterdam face a similar struggle due to systemic barriers that disproportionately affect them when they try to settle in. Annabelle, a trans woman from Trinidad and Tobago, moved to The Netherlands in 2016 after almost being murdered by an online acquaintance. Based on a promise of new life and an opportunity to transition safely, she was full of hope that Holland would offer all that she needed for a happy and safe life. However, she learned quickly that this was not going to be the experience that she anticipated. In reflecting on her financial situation, she lamented,

Here I feel so frustrated. . . . When I moved to Limburg to the new refugee camp, I was there for like a week before I was even registered to be there. Regardless of that, I am not a needle in a haystack, I am not a pin, I am not a strand of hair; I am a whole entire human being with flesh and blood. How do you forget me in a system for a whole bloody week? It’s those things that I feel like just has me feeling frustrated.

They put you in this house and is like, okay, you could shut up now because you have a house and is like they forget about you. So [sighs], I think my unhappiness comes from me not having a sense of direction here. Like I know that they say within three years you have to pass your Inburgeringsexamen [examination on Dutch language, culture, and society]. That’s not enough for me to have an aspiration for the direction of my life; that’s not enough for me. So, I don’t know if I’m being critical, or if my feelings are valid to be honest, eh, but I am absolutely miserable here.

You know, the government is always coming down on us; oh, refugees are not doing nothing and blah, blah, blah. But y’all are not giving us the opportunities to do it too, like is like they want us all to be like a bunch of hotel cleaners, fast food workers, street cleaners and delivery girls and boys. . . . [I] read articles and I see what they think about us! I know people who came from Iran that were fucking doctors, but because they don’t know fucking Dutch they have to go work in a fucking hotel as a teller as a bellboy. . . . It’s fucking ridiculous!

These kinds of frustrations are further compounded when queer people go to Canada and The Netherlands and try to find love, or even use love, relationships, or sex encounters as a way for coping and achieving some financial stability.

Love and Sex Relationships

Let’s be honest. In those days, I’m actually trying to get out of Trinidad. So this was my opportunity to leave. I got my visa within two weeks. He pulled some strings got me my visa. He left the Wednesday; the Friday morning, I was on that plane heading out. I got to Canada. When I got to Canada, I quickly realized that the guy wasn’t what he said he was. He was a drunk, an extreme drunk. He was divorced with four kids, and he was very abusive, to which, I grew up in an abusive home and it’s something I would never tolerate. It so happened that the guy . . . tried to throw me out of the house because he wanted to have a threesome with me and another guy. And . . . I knew nothing about these things yet [laughs]. Like, I’ve done it before, but I knew nothing like it in a relationship. I thought this guy was going to be my partner. He was going to be my saviour. He was going to be my hero. And it turned out that I literally was just his boy; he owns me. So whatever he wanted to do, I had to do. Um, I had a friend in Toronto that I used to call to help me to get out of the situation [but] to no avail; my friend never helped.

As he relates, Kyle left Trinidad in 2012 based on a promise of love, happiness, and a better life with his newfound lover but this quickly turned into a nightmare. Recognizing that this arrangement was deeply fetishistic on his partner’s part and isolating when his friend abandoned him, he left and sought refuge with other newfound friends in Alberta. But all this happened after a violent encounter with his lover that landed him in prison with the threat of deportation:

One night on May 4, 2007, the guy proceeded to throw my stuff out. And then reach[ed] at me . . . [and] started to choke me and reach into my pocket for his keys . . . well, for my keys . . . the keys that he gave me when I came. And we got into an altercation, a physical altercation; it got to the point where he became hospitalized. I ended up in the Edmonton Remand Centre. I had to call a lawyer who insisted that I plead guilty. I kept telling my lawyer that I do not want to plead guilty because if I plead guilty, I have nothing to go back to in my country and I came here for a better life. I was promised a better life, and I don’t feel like if this is a better life that I’m getting.

I was in Remand for six weeks and one day before my case came up, I met a paralegal. We just started talking and she advised me as to what I should do to stay out of this situation to be able to stay in Canada; because she believed what I said about the situation . . . about the altercation. She advised me to stand up and speak to the judge in front of everyone. And I did just that. I poured my heart out, I poured my soul out because I really believed and knew that I came to Canada for a better life and it’s what I should be getting. I won my case. The case got thrown out, and she advised me to go seek asylum in Canada. I went in, I sought asylum and got accepted into the refugee program within three days.

Earl has also had his share of disappointment with relationships since arriving in Toronto. His mental health struggles and asexuality makes his interactions with men extremely difficult. Or as he explained to me more succinctly,

We are fresh meat for them, and they just want your dick and ass and give you cash, then kick you out after. Anyone who rejects this stereotype gets ostracized with not much support. Most refugee gays are like crab in a barrel, all about drama and fuck. That’s ok but what else is there to offer than risking people’s health and drama? I am homoromantic asexual/gay asexual. I guess the system doesn’t know how to fit me in or puts me as a progressive straight man or slightly queer guy.

Earl points to several interesting and complicated dynamics as a Black queer man entering a highly racialized city and having to confront this new reality of being fetishized both within and outside his community of queer refugees. Unfortunately, at the time of our interview, he became “socially isolated and despised by guys.” Further, he recognized that his life was more progressive in Jamaica, where he “was not socially isolated and had real proper guys to interact with despite them going through the same psychological issues due to homophobic Caribbean society values.”

An interesting occurrence was also happening in Holland at the time of my research, where, because they were receiving meagre financial assistance from the state, refugees often had to resort to sex work to survive. Keagan, a gay man from Trinidad highlighted this:

So, a lot of the trans girls, even some of the gay boys, they turn to sex work. . . . I personally know people that do that and credit card, credit card scams and fraud, and stuff like that, because especially the trans girls people have this notion, Oh, you get everything but when they come here and realize how hard it is they turn to men and these kinds of activities to survive.

Annabella too, shared her thoughts:

So, I don’t [do] it but sex work is a big thing. Especially if you’re a queer person of colour. I mean, there’s a high demand for it. It’s ironic as fuck but there’s a high level of fetishism here. And then it’s so racist to say, like, oh my god, like, you guys are fetishizing us but you’re so fucking racist toward people of colour.

Even in the organizations out here that are supposed to be helping us, they aren’t as innocent as you think. So there’s one called [name omitted] and then there’s another affiliation called [name omitted]. I know people who had court cases and the most [they] have done for them is written a letter. That’s not enough you know, but yuh want to have sex with them after yuh parties and have orgies at yuh house with everybody. That’s crazy.

Carl from Jamaica felt that Holland’s highly sexualized culture came with its seemingly natural affinity with sex:

The first world is the first world. Everyone up here is into drugs and sex and parties, and all of these things are things that are not in the Caribbean, so when we come here, it’s almost like culture shock and some people dive into it in a bad way and some people sort of experience it and then go on with their lives. It comes with a whole bag of negativity. But it’s the first world kind of living. The Caribbean is slow and laid back and living here is like a culture shock.

A lot of refugees are into prostitution because here you know, my god, it’s ridiculous. Being Black here is sort of like being a forbidden candy that white people just want to try. So it’s really difficult to not get into prostitution here if you need money. So if you sit down here with no money and ten, twelve old men a night messaging you to sleep with you, obviously you going to get into prostitution at some point. So most of the refugees here get into prostitution and that’s how they make their money. I don’t judge them for it; no one in The Netherlands will judge you because here it’s like a regular job. Here it’s . . . legal, this is a regular job, so I don’t judge people. I just believe that if you doing prostitution let it be for a bit and put things toward something that’s better for you. Prostitution comes with constantly taking drugs and you get lost. You don’t use the money for anything good, you use it just to buy more drugs.

While Canada appears to be more reserved in relation to Amsterdam in these recollections, evident here is the way that Black queer refugees are fetishized and sexualized and become deeply embedded within economies of sexual pleasure. These relationships continue long-standing racialized relations of power that situate Black bodies as hypersexual and hot-bodied.26 Further, these relations fulfill a white fantasy, as tourism scholar Ian Strachan theorizes: Caribbean people are “supposedly beast-like, the object of sexual fantasy, the site of devious promiscuity.”27 Through these gazes an “exoticization of the Black slave body and ‘untouched paradise’” continue legacies of colonization.28 However, as these refugees show, this is unacceptable if we really wish to achieve the elusive goal of peace and freedom for queer people.

Toward Queer Freedom

While these stories are disheartening, they also provide useful insight into the kind of work that is still needed in our quest for queer freedom. But how could we envision peace in ways that are attentive to these kinds of deeply complex experiences among queer Caribbean refugees in Canada and The Netherlands? I propose that human rights defenders and their funders need, first, to acknowledge that current rights frameworks premised on the demise of a dying queer subject elsewhere is insufficient for representing queer realities. Second, native experts need to ensure that the dark underbelly of queer asylum be recognized to nuance the first world’s generous self-positioning as a queer safe haven. Third, funders and activists from outside the Caribbean region (and elsewhere) must work closer with organizers on the ground, in the countries that they continue to situate as barbaric and savage. I have reflected on this necessity elsewhere, and my research continues to reveal that we must strive to honour these ethical responsibilities to ensure a more effective engagement with issues of queer peace and freedom.29

But how do we attend to this conundrum when, as queer-of-colour scholar Sarah Ahmed argues, the promise of a “a good life” that “gives us images of a certain kind of life, a life that has certain things and does certain things” is illusory.30 Evident in these experiences is a scenario where queer refugees enter these countries through already predetermined measures of progress and legitimacy in their quest for peace and freedom. By establishing these indicators, human rights as a framework regulates what denotes not just a happy life and queer peace but also what constitutes a good life. This predetermined good life, Ahmed reminds us, involves the regulation of desire.31 However, as she asks further, “Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch?”32 Ahmed continues to explore the viewpoint of the wretch:

If we listen to those who are cast as wretched, perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.33

The queer refugees in my research (and that of others) are acutely conscious of their alienation in their quest for peace and freedom, and it is important to pay closer attention to and devise ways to ensure that they become less entangled in the kinds of highly racialized and deeply problematic relationships that are fostered in transnational spaces like Toronto and Amsterdam. Further, in this quest for peace for those who are Othered and deemed different or less-than, human rights activists in the Global North must invest energy and resources to understand and reflect on the deeply complex contours of queer life. They must also interrogate their ethical and moral responsibilities in attending to problematic sexualization and fetishization of those they assist. In fact, they can draw on and learn many lessons from the community groups and activists fighting for change in the Caribbean. While conflicts between native experts and regional activists continue to foster tenuous relationships, native experts must understand that their validation and celebration of queer neoliberal human rights discourse “presumably makes Canadians feel proud of their nation’s status as a gay-friendly refuge,”34 while overemphasizing “the hegemonic narrative about gay persecutions” elsewhere.35

Caribbean feminist scholar-activists offer a useful remedy to this debacle and a way to refocus on what queer freedom can look like in a Caribbean context punctuated by violence and discrimination. I return to Nixon and King, who for instance offer embodied theory as a methodology and praxis for honouring queer people’s situated knowledge and experiences. This they posit, facilitates an approach attuned to people’s realities where they are located across intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, among others. As such, organizing and advocacy must “encompasses the importance of community organizing and attention to the local . . . and consult local [and regional] archives and to collaborate with local [and regional] scholars, community-based researchers, and other experts in meaningful ways.”36 With this in mind, the embodied approach to queer freedom in the Caribbean is one, as Nixon and King explain,

that does not ignore the reality of bodies—either of the people being studied or of those doing the analysis. We too often, for instance, talk about sex without any mention of pleasure, as is clear in the heavily used term “MSM (men who have sex with men),” which privileges global north epistemologies, HIV/AIDS work, and the international non-governmental funding complex over local language and ways of knowing. Embodied theories pay particular attention to the material reality of the body—how the body’s need for sustenance and safety can drive the decisions of everyone in every sector of a society.37

We should also take seriously feminist legal scholar Tracy Robinson’s provocation that Caribbean people’s imagined lives are an integral aspect of how we envision belonging in the region. Or as she argues succinctly, being attuned to imagined lives ensures that “we hear in one another’s contributions a tangible embodied analysis that responds with words and ideas we already own.”38 It is particularly important for activists, scholars, and funders to provide a space for queer people located within the region and its diasporas to actively share their experiences. In adopting an embodied theory approach proposed by these Caribbean feminists, we can retell stories using the experiences, language, and ideas that “address the tensions and contradictions of [their] daily lives . . . to destabilize received representations of experience [and] facilitate the political consciousness and the political communities that are necessary in order for us to revisit varied and far-reaching forms of domination.”39 In doing so, we recognize that silenced stories do not necessarily equate to silent existence. We must therefore work toward ensuring that other non-Global North realities are respected and honoured, and that we foster solidarities across difference.

Notes

1. 1 Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, “Bonham Centre Symposium on LGBTQ Refugees and Migration,” April 19, 2018, University of Toronto, https://marksbonham.ca/2018/04/14/bonham-centre-symposium-on-lgbtq-refugees-and-migration-april-19th-2018/.

2. 2 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41. The comment quoted in the epigraph appeared in a series of photo/text images titled Capturing Migration from the Caribbean to Canada created by Guyanese photographer Ulelli Verbeke.

3. 3 Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 47.

4. 4 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 161.

5. 5 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 162.

6. 6 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 63.

7. 7 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 175.

8. 8 Massad, Desiring Arabs, 161; Todd Gordon, Imperialist Canada (Winnipeg: ARP, 2010), 14.

9. 9 Carla Moore, “Wah Eye Nuh See Heart Nuh Leap: Queer Marronage in the Jamaican Dancehall” (master’s thesis, Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, 2014), 52.

10. 10 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 52.

11. 11 Minh-ha, Woman Native Other, 59.

12. 12 Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights, Envisioning LGBT Refugee Rights in Canada: Is Canada a Safe Haven? September 2015, 6, https://ocasi.org/sites/default/files/lgbt-refugee-rights-canada-safe-haven_0.pdf.

13. 13 Verbeke, Ulleli. 2013. “Capturing LGBT Migration from the Caribbean to Canada,” accessed February 6, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20190123040410/https://www.verbekeproductions.com/projects/.

14. 14 Annon, “Capturing LGBT Migration from the Caribbean to Canada.”

15. 15 David A. B. Murray, Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016), 136.

16. 16 Murray, Real Queer? 45.

17. 17 Kyle Jackson, “The Construction of Black Jamaican Masculinity in a Neocolonial Imaginary: Canadian ‘Homohegemony’ and the ‘Homophobic Other,’” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 8 (2014): 209–34, at 217.

18. 18 Sima Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora Cyberspace, the War on Terror, and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8, no. 3 (2012): 14–40, at 27.

19. 19 Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2016), 3–4.

20. 20 Rinaldo Walcott, “Queer Returns: Human Rights, the Anglo-Caribbean and Diaspora Politics,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 3 (2009): 1–19, at 12.

21. 21 Walcott, Queer Returns, viii.

22. 22 Nixon and King, “Embodied Theories,” 6.

23. 23 This chapter draws on this research and documents the queer Caribbean refugee experiences that are left out of mainstream international queer human rights activism.

24. 24 The prominence of queer refugees from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in my research is representative of the larger numbers of persons seeking asylum from these Caribbean countries as opposed to others in this historical moment. In most of the (independent) Anglophone Caribbean, same-sex sexual intimacy still remains sanctioned by law under various Sexual Offenses Acts. The exceptions are the Bahamas (1991), Belize (2016), and Trinidad and Tobago (2018), St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, and Barbados (2022) who have all amended or challenged sodomy laws for various reasons and with different degrees of social acceptance. Ongoing colonial laws carry varying penalties for engaging in same-sex activities, ranging from between two and ten years’ imprisonment in Guyana, to ten years in Jamaica, while in Trinidad and Tobago offenders could have served up to a lifetime sentence. Because of these laws, the Anglophone Caribbean is often described as one of the worst places to be queer in this historical moment.

25. 25 I use pseudonyms for all research participants.

26. 26 Kamala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor (New York: Routledge, 2004), 195.

27. 27 Ian Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 12.

28. 28 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (New York: Routledge, 2003), 156.

29. 29 I engage in a more extensive analysis of the need for nuanced approaches to queer liberation in the Caribbean in Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023); in “Let’s Liberate the Bullers! Toronto Human Rights Activism and Implications for Caribbean Strategies,” Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies 42, no. 3 (2017): 97–121; and in “LGBT Rights, Sexual Citizenship, and Blacklighting in the Anglophone Caribbean: What Do Queers Want, What Does Colonialism Need?” in The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics, edited by Michael Bosia, Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 249–66, which I co-authored with Cornel Grey.

30. 30 Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 90.

31. 31 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 4.

32. 32 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 17.

33. 33 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 17.

34. 34 Jackson, “The Construction of Black Jamaican Masculinity in a Neocolonial Imaginary,” 217.

35. 35 Shakhsari, “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics,” 23.

36. 36 Angelique V. Nixon and Rosamond S. King, “Embodied Theories: Local Knowledge(s), Community Organizing, and Feminist Methodologies in Caribbean Sexuality Studies,” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 7 (2013): 1–15, at 2.

37. 37 Nixon and King, “Embodied Theories,” 6.

38. 38 Tracy Robinson, “Our Imagined Lives,” in Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, edited by Faith Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 201–13, at 209.

39. 39 Shari Stone-Mediatore, Reading Across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 126.