Jennifer Rahim
Lecturer
Department of Liberal Arts
UWI, St Augustine
Trinidad

‘No Place to Go’: Homosexual Space and the Discourse of Un-speakable Contents

This paper will read Kincaid’s My Brother and Mendes’ Black Fauns with the aim of establishing the limits of Ian Smith’s suggestion that the Creole continuum and its “polydialectical” range may be considered an accommodative model for the variety of “sexolects” of its speakers. It seeks to explore selected communicative and bodily strategies relative to the discourse of the closet, a space of absenting constructed by heterosexual-normativity that implicates its occupants in the perpetuation and dissemination of “ignorance” as the hegemonic “knowledge” that de-legitimises homosexual space.