Antonia MacDonald-Smythe
Department of Liberal Studies
School of Arts and Science
St George’s University
Grenada

Macocotte – Female Friendship by Another Name: An Exploration of Same-Sex Friendships in Buxton Spice and Annie John

In St. Lucia, the kweyol word macocotte is used to describe the intense friendship shared by adolescent girls. This same-sex friendship often provides the milieu in which adolescent girls articulate, explore and come to understand their sexuality, their gender and their social roles. Using the concept of macocotte friendships to explore the unusually instense, same-sex friendships in Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, I am asserting that these two writers use same-sex, sexual activity as manifestations of sexual awakening rather than as indicators of homosexual desire. Further, I am arguing that in these two novels, the portrayal of adolescent sexual experience suggests that through the sex-play of pubescent girls, female sexuality is not being restrained, but is in fact being managed in ways that will not put these adolescent girls at the pregnancy risk that mothers fear for their daughters. Accordingly, as a safe alternative to heterosexual friendships, Macocotte relationships provide the space for female sexual desire to be fostered and managed within Caribbean society. Finally, in establishing the ways in which kind of relationship provides a learning space for the erotic, I am proposing that in the absence of anthropological and sociological evidence, literary texts could serve as relevant data for indigenous theoretical formulations on female sexuality. It is in the privileging of these theories, rather than of the imported, psychosexual perspectives popularized by Freud’s libidinal theory, that Caribbean theorists can fully represent the ways in which Caribbean cultural practices influence gender and sexuality.