Notes from inbetween
By Mervyn Morris

Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, by Thomas Glave (University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0816-646-791, 280 pp)

Glave is brave. Before even meeting the man or reading his work, one is fed that line by all who had heard of or met him, as if bravery were one of those words that a writer yearns to have trailing his name. It was a rhyme repeated at his book launch as well. But whether true or false, “brave” is a tired and safely vague adjective for a writer, as if by declaring him courageous, we never have to investigate whether he is any good. It is an easy way to dismiss the man with respect while never reading his work. Perhaps Thomas Glave senses this. A brilliant writer who does invoke the James Baldwin he’s often compared to, Glave has written perhaps his own Notes of a Native Son and Fire Next Time rolled into one: a deeply felt collection of essays where the personal is the political, the political the sexual, and the sexual the struggle to be as alike and as different from “normal” people as he chooses.

Glave is, of course, gay. A fact he has never shied away from, certainly not in print. Gayness has formed the centre of much of his work. But herein lies a danger that has nothing to do with the sexuality. When the personal becomes the political, the writer can sometimes get lost in the polemicist. To his credit, Glave rarely trips up. Words to Our Now, his first collection of essays, is subtitled “Imagination and Dissent”, both of which he has in abundance. With pieces dating as far back as 1994, Words to Our Now is fearless to be sure, but also affecting, confused, melancholy, wistful, rancorous, and even silly.

What connects these essays is “inbetweeness”, a theme that occurs several times in several ways throughout, sometimes in a different shade or with a different perspective. But inbetweeness, while easy to recognise, is hard to define. “Where’s the inbetween language?” he asks. In the first essay here, “Baychester, a Memory”, and in the masterful “Between Jamaica(n) and North America(n)”, inbetweeness means a perpetual limbo between identities cultural and sexual, the obsession with connection and remembrance, the usefulness or futility of nostalgia, and the acceptance of rejection. Inbetweeness can mean a flexibility as useful as the many passports Glave carries around, as much as it means a visual entry into the Rastafarian world (locks, facial hair) while being held back by sexual ambiguity (hips sashaying too widely, voice not gruff enough). Glave is particularly brilliant at taking his very personal space and mapping it to the disparate worlds around him, showing how they co-exist even as they fail to coexist. In “These Blocks, Not Square”, he nails the universality of loneliness that comes from people who never connect despite sharing the same longing.

The [store’s] Korean owner, not particularly friendly to anyone, fairly unsmiling with all. The owners who in their most brusque moments are doubtless dreaming of another place: some place else near water, beneath the long hands of trees.

Inbetweeness means half Jamaican and half American (Glave was born in New York to Jamaican parents and grew up partly in Jamaica), but it also means experiencing the ignorance and hostility of both. In these passages, Glave knows when to get out of the way and let the story tell itself. The result can be devastating, like looking at the same mirror in a different light and seeing previously unseen but obvious flaws.

Yes, well those black Americans are always complaining about something . . . Those Jamaicans think they’re better than everybody else . . . but those black Americans, you see, not one of them has any ambition . . . And you know how those Jamaicans are, they don’t even think they’re black . . . Pure laziness . . . Yeah, his sister married a white man, doesn’t that sound typically Jamaican?

These are moments where the writer could have got lost in the polemic, but Glave lets the story tell the story. As a man frequently reminded of how different he is, Glave is adept at recognising the differences and similarities between us, including the use of denial to reinforce our differences. His writing has a preacherliness about it (not to be confused with preachiness) that unfolds in call-and-response phrases, repetitions, questions not meant to be answered, and sentences begun in the middle, as if he’s whispering, “Can I get an amen?” as he writes. Glave has a way of writing, in perhaps the way he thinks and talks, by working his way to an undecided conclusion, and he’s as surprised as the reader often is when he gets there. That can result in narratives that seem labyrinthine or perhaps difficult to follow. Glave doesn’t only put the conclusion of his thought process in his narrative, but the evolution of that process as well. This works when he has allowed time and distance to give him perspective (his eulogies to gay poet Essex Hemphill and murdered student Steen Fenrik, for example), but does backfire in his most angry piece, “Open Letter to the People of Jamaica”.

Jamaica’s infamous homophobia, so often discussed worldwide, would border on the cartoonish were it not so frequently violent (a gay-bashing attack happened as recently as mid-April this year — on UWI’s Mona campus, no less). And while Glave points out the acute nature of Jamaican homophobia, he seems mystified, given the country’s hard history of slavery, that the people are capable of such violence. “With such a brutal history — need we say it — we should be the noblest people in the world,” he says, but that flies in the face of certain logic. One could argue that it is precisely because violence is all they have ever known that it is the instinctual way Jamaicans express themselves, the abused-becomes-abuser principle. And surely there are other things as well: repression, poverty, tribalism, hypocrisy, ignorance, puritanism, the distressing and violent link between sexism and homophobia, things brilliantly elaborated on elsewhere that he chooses to ignore here.

Glave is at his very best when he is most direct. “Jamaica would be poorer without our talent, hard work, skills, and intelligence and Jamaica knows it,” he says, and he’s right. If Jamaica were to start erasing the contributions of her gay sons and daughters, starting with Claude McKay and ending with Stacey Ann Chin, the country would be far the poorer indeed. He is also at his strongest when he is most provocative, daring to lionise a literary work that refuses to put a moral spin on incest (Carolivia Herron’s overlooked classic Thereafter Johnny) and re-imagining the Monica Lewinsky affair with Monica as a black man who finds imaginative use for President Clinton’s anus. This essay in particular is at once shocking, offensive, and revelatory, in that it exposes how much America needs its leaders to be white, straight, and morally virtuous, and how (heterosexual) philandering satisfies rather than undercuts such a need.

He’s not quite as successful when he gets fanciful. In “Whose Caribbean?”, a semi-allegorical work, a country is pictured as an ambisexual, multi-gendered being, but the magical realism undercuts the bracing reality of hatred and desire that he writes about in the same essay. And while he has mastered mapping his own internal fears and desires onto the world around him, he not quite as effective with the reverse. His imagining of the mother of a suicide bomber is well-meaning but stilted, and as he skits over Abu Ghraib, you’re not sure that he’s sure of his literary territory. He is far better off navigating the inbetweeness that dares not speak its name in the tropics, the self-racism brought about by shades of colour, the conflict between black and brown and red, and the open secret of our preference for brown skin to copulate and populate in a disturbing and publicly sanctioned consensual eugenics.

Perhaps, then, as Glave concludes more than once, inbetweeness is both journey and destination. Perhaps there is something dependably consistent about a state of flux, a certain security in the “inbetween place . . . in the place where one thing is about to change into another.” As a man, black and brown, Jamaican and American, Rasta-looking and man-loving, inbetweeness is Glave’s only constant, even as he fights for the right to belong on his own terms. Who knows where that fight will lead? But a work like Words to Our Now convinces us that we will all be the better for it.