Ars Erotica

A few days ago, a friend of mine, whom I sent "The Last Affair" to, made the comment that the overt sexuality within the story made him uncomfortable. This led me to question the level of my perversity, how deeply debauched I was...and the answer that I came up with is that I am as pure as the driven snow, innocent as a lamb. Or not.

The thing is, I (despite my current, I shit you not, celibacy) love sex and I love writing. Now not everyone likes writing but I am sure that the bulk of those reading this blog would agree with DMX that "It's all good and it's alright...et cetera". It was therefore inevitable that these two trite hobbies of mine would find the occasional synthesis.

However, I tend to believe that sex in my work so far has been more than a simple coincidence of authorial interests. Sex is often as integral to my literary work as it is to life itself.

Personally, my sexual identity is defined by this Caribbean conservative machismo modified by an an artistic liberalism - which basically means that I love having my patacake and eating it too. This is something that I tend to reproduce in my male characters.

Regarding the sex overall in "The Last Affair", this for me is the most risque passage:

"We feasted lustily off each other for over two months, she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh, and sometimes, sated, and drifting off to sleep, my dark bulk cradling her elven paleness, I committed the sacrilege of imagining that those eyes staring at me in adoration, willing a resurrection, a second or third coming..."

In "April", from my last collection, however, the sex is far more explicit, more frenzied than in "The Last Affair".

"He enters saying nothing just presses his mouth onto hers until her lips relent then the leg as if by itself finds its position against the wall again and he slips into her and he says nothing and she says nothing and one hand is gripping her hair behind her head and the other is keeping her leg up gripping tight the underside of it just above her knee and she has her arms around him her fingers locked together and his forehead is pressed against hers and he is thrusting thrusting hard silently like an animal his breath expelling in sharp eggy gusts against her face and then his thrusting is losing its rhythm his hips wildly gyrating as she tries to synchronise her own thrusts with his to join him in or beat him to a climax and his one hand is gripping so hard behind her head pressing her head so hard into his that her forehead begins to throb slightly and his fingers are clawing into her thigh and he begins to thrust so hard that she has to stand on tiptoe to stop him from hurting her and she abandons all thought of coming herself and she disentangles her fingers from behind his head and uses one hand to stroke behind his head and the other she rests against his hip gripping it gently in its frenzy and he drops his hand from behind her head curving his arm around hers to grip her buttocks pressing her into him and when he pulls her hard to him she lets out a little scream and goes a bit higher on her toes but his thrusting begins to subside slowly as he grinds slowly his head thrown back his Adam's apple in line with her eyes and then he shudders and moves away from her pulling slowly out of her and as he withdraws she lowers her leg and something hot is running down the inside of her thighs..."
from "April", Ariadne & Other Stories

Now you may ask whether such explicit eroticism has any place in literature? "April" was actually published in an issue of Small Axe a journal coming out the University of Indiana, so the artistic merit seems to be there. But more than that affirmation, I wanted to create a love story that was atypical of what passes for love stories in the Caribbean.

Ever since Stella got her fucking groove back, indeed before (like in Winkler's The Lunatic), there is the perpetuation of this myth that sex in Caribbean literature, even society, only becomes relevant when some North American or European comes and gets a nice brown girl or big cocked rent-a-dread for some "surf, sun and sex...but not necessarily in that order". Like people in the Caribbean can't fuck one another in a way worthy of some proper artistic representation.

Oonya Kempadoo started out with Buxton Spice which got a lot of ooohs and aaahs because it was set in Guyana, during the Burnham era, written by a young woman, and was about teenage sexuality. Then she moved on to Tide Running centred upon a menage a trois involving an expat couple living in Tobago and fucking the locals. Let her set a story in the contemporary Caribbean that does not cater to the needs of her readers in England, Canada and the US looking for some exotic fix, some fantasy of danger and sex in the tropics and see what happens then.

Sex in artistic representations of the Caribbean has always pandered to an outsiders' view of us, a trading in exoticism, and for me this has been one of the worst methods of our dehumanisation. Like we can't fuck just for fucking sake, or for passion, or for love, among ourselves. Then there is the intellectualisation of it controlled by academia in Britain or America or Canada, but never UWI or the University of Guyana.

And we help perpetuate this myth. Caribbean women will lap up those stupid fucking romance novels set in medieval France or Civil War America where the heroine invariable gets her first taste of the sausage between pages 74 and 102; Caribbean men will jerk their cocks dry watching Paris Hilton sitting down pun Rick Salomon cocky like chair...but its a fucking hue and cry if, heaven forbid, someone writes a story about Caribbean people fucking each other.

Fictions is not going to be primarily about sex - indeed only about four stories have anything of a sexually explicit nature. That said, I'd be losing my touch if I didn't get some reader or the other off, all in the name of good literature.