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The Operations of the Closet and the Discourse of Unspeakable Contents in Black Fauns and My Brother

This paper examines the operations of the closet in two historically distant texts from the English-speaking Caribbean: Alfred Mendes’s Black Fauns (1935) and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother (1997).1 These books are more than sixty years apart and are very different in terms of their plots and styles. Yet they intersect in their thematic explorations of sexual identities that do not conform to the heterosexual norm. Mendes’s novel is a representative of the Trinidadian “anti-establishment” fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, dubbed barrack-yard literature.2 The novel is quite radical for its time, having a lesbian or bisexual relationship as central to the complications of the plot. Kincaid’s memoir chronicles the death of her brother Devon from AIDS-associated complications in homophobic Antigua. My Brother belongs in the new generation of Caribbean literature that has brought to the table the turbulent geography of sexuality, and openly challenges myths of normative heterosexuality.3 Not surprisingly, both