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VVVV 39 article Queer Crossings: Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality in Igboland a

VVVV 39 article Queer Crossings: Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality in Igboland and Carriacou andrew apter University of California, Los Angeles Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University. Andrew Apter, “Queer Crossings: Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality in Igboland and Carriacou,” Journal of West African History, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 (2017): 39–66. ISSN 2327-1868. All rights reserved.  In this article, I problematize the historical development of quasi- institutionalized lesbianism on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, addressing veiled references to its “Igbo” origins in popular music and culture. How do we interpret such muted intimations and the forms of historicity they suggest? I argue that a case for Igbo origins can be made if we separate gender from sexual- ity. Reading Ii Amadiume and Nwando Achebe on “female husbands” in Igboland in relation to M. G. Smith’s documentation of lesbianism in Carriacou, I identify related logics of lineage organization, prostitution, and property devolution link- ing both cases to “queer” conjugal forms. But whereas such unions were eroti- cized in Carriacou, in West Africa they remained strictly jural. hat an Igbo form of woman- to- woman marriage was sexualized in Carriacou shows how lexible West African gender ideologies shaped queer sexualities under radically diferent historical conditions than in the Americas.  Dans cet article, je problématise le développement d’un lesbianisme quasi institutionnel sur l’île des Caraïbes Carriacou en examinant des allusions à peine voilées à ses origines « Igbo » dans la musique et la culture populaire. Comment peut- on interpréter ces indices discrets et les types d’historicité qu’ils suggèrent? Je soutiens que la thèse des origines Igbo se tient si l’ont sépare le genre de la sexualité. En analysant Ii Amadiume et Nwando Achebe sur les « maris 40  andrew apter femme » en Igboland en conjonction avec les documents de M. G. Smith sur le lesbianisme à Carriacou, j’identiie similarités dans l’organisation des lignées, la prostitution, et la dévolution des biens qui relient les deux cas à des relations conjugales « queer ». Cependant, alors que ces unions étaient érotisées à Carrica- cou, en Afrique de l’ouest elles étaient strictement de droit. Le fait qu’une forme Igbo de mariage femme- à- femme était sexualisée à Carriacou montre comment la lexibilité des idéologies de genre d’Afrique de l’ouest a inluencé les sexua- lités homosexuelles dans un contexte historique radicalement diférent de celui des Amériques. Few issues remain as controversial and contentious as the West African “origins” of queer sexualities in Afro- Atlantic perspective. Part of the problem stems from the culturally taboo status of homoeroticism as a topic of discussion in West Africa, one still met with opprobrium and denial, or dismissed as a colonial legacy. Other diiculties are methodological, grappling with distinctions between male, female, transsexual, and transgender; gender and sexuality as cultural categories and per- formative regimes; and the very criteria for distinguishing between gender and sexuality as distinct spheres of discourse and practice. Compounding these issues are the terminological debates associated with LGBT initialism and activist lexi- cons, as new positionalities and orientations— such as “intersex,” “polyamorous,” and “third gender”— continue to emerge, further complicating the transatlantic waters.1 And always looming large are the politics of projection, whether the phantom Africa of the colonial imagination, Euro- American models of gender and sexuality, or their combined forces recolonizing the motherland. For example, many African scholars, including Ii Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi, have taken Western feminists to task for imposing ethnocentric models of patriarchal domination on precolonial African women without doing their cultural and his- torical homework.2 Indeed, the challenges of writing about queer Afro- Atlantic trajectories are intrinsically political, given the colonial histories of the frame- works and lexicons through which we work and seek to destabilize, and the cen- trality of race, gender, and sexuality in the remaking of hegemonies. How then do we proceed? How do we explore what Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley calls “queer black Atlantic oceanographies” without forsaking African origins— the cultural and historical roots of particular Atlantic vectors?3 In proposing one such expository pathway, I focus on the Igbo “origins” of les- bian partnerships and institutionalized “mating patterns” on the Grenadine island of Carriacou in the Eastern Caribbean.4 Building on my prior reanalysis of mate- rial irst collected and published by M. G. Smith, I develop a suggestion ofered during an interview on the island that seemed highly unlikely to me at the time: namely, that the lesbian roles of the madivine and zami had Igbo origins in West Queer Crossings  41 Africa because they were favored by women of the “Ibo nation” in Carriacou.5 My initial dismissal of this imputed trajectory was based on several factors: a criti- cal awareness of ethnic stereotyping in the Americas, as generated historically by Atlantic slavery and reworked by subsequent political projects and patterns of racial stratiication; a healthy skepticism toward simplistic attributions of African origins in the African diaspora; and enough exposure to the secondary literature to sense that quasi- institutionalized lesbianism was not culturally recognized in Igboland. Carriacou claims about the Igbo origins of lesbianism might be under- stood in terms of female economic autonomy and the penchant for business that islanders attributed to women of the Ibo nation, but not in relation to Igbo prec- edents in Nigeria. Several years later, however, my position began to change, inspired by a new class I taught at UCLA on gender and sexuality in Africa. It was during this class that I assigned— and inally read— two path- breaking studies of Igbo gender roles and ideologies: Ii Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society, and Nwando Achebe’s Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900– 1960.6 Work- ing through the lexible gender ideologies and sociohistorical contexts of religion and ritual, kinship, marriage, inheritance, trade, and political authority that both studies explored, I experienced a shock of recognition as clear correspondences among female unions, lineage organization, prostitution, and property devolution came into focus. he local attributions in Carriacou of lesbian preferences to “Ibo” women now made a certain sense, provided they were interpreted through the appropriate historical and cultural lenses. he argument that I develop in this arti- cle is that the Igbo roots of lesbianism in Carriacou can be grasped by separating gender from sexuality, such that the gender- crossing roles of female husbands in Igboland only became sexualized and eroticized in the Americas. In other words, the Igbo “origins” are strictly sociocultural, framing a trajectory of sexualization under radically diferent historical conditions in Carriacou.7 he broader impli- cations of this Igbo trajectory are not limited to Igbo origins as such, but engage a wider range of queer Atlantic crossings associated with spirit possession and Afro- Caribbean religions.8 “Ibo and Dem” in Carriacou First published in 1962, it is hardly surprising that M. G. Smith’s treatment of les- bian relationships in Carriacou falls staunchly within a heteronormative frame- work that identiies semi- institutionalized relationships between the madivine and zami as “deviant” forms within a patriarchal social order. But it is also points 42  andrew apter toward a social theory of sexuality, an innovative conceptual move that was in many ways ahead of its time. Indeed, as Christine Barrow has argued, Smith opened up an important space for separating female sexuality and desire from oicial gender roles and ideologies more focused on tradition and respectability.9 In brief, his argument runs as follows. As a former French and then British plantocracy whose owners let ater eman- cipation in 1838, Carriacou became increasingly dependent upon remittances from male out- migration during the century and a half that followed, with labor lows to Grenada, Trinidad, Venezuela, the United States, and London that created a demographically skewed sex ratio wavering between two and three adult women to each man. For marriageable men remaining on the island, a de facto system of polygyny developed in which oicial monogamy remained the preferred conjugal form, but was supplemented by extraresidential “mating” relations with outside women, colloquially called “keptresses,” giving rise to matrifocal households of kept women and their “outside” children, usually in diferent villages. Whereas oicial monogamous unions were marked by formal betrothals, elaborate wed- dings, and virilocal residence in “wooden” houses associated with agnatic lin- eages, known as “bloods,” keptresses lived with their children in less prestigious “dirt” houses made from daub and wattle. Finally, a third pattern of “keeping” emerged, in which couples cohabited in the woman’s house, seen as a prelude to betrothal and marriage but sometimes stalled in a tenuous holding pattern that signiicantly limited male autonomy. “Whereas the husband is dominant in mar- riage,” Smith writes, “the woman is the dominant partner in keeping” because “kept” men were barred from extraresidential mating and lost child custody when such unions dissolved.10 Statistically infrequent and structurally unstable, keeping posed a problem for patriarchy. His masculinity compromised, “the male member of such a union is accordingly mocked and teased and is not regarded as a full household head.”11 As we shall see, the uploads/Geographie/ queer-crossings-kinship-gender-and-sexua.pdf