Shivanee Ramlochan
In the canefields, even gods are allowed to be queer.
The ecology of non-heteronormativity abounds in Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild), a composition tessellating imagination, history, and radical intervention, by Llanor Alleyne with Andil Gosine. First, in this landscape, you must allow yourself to behold the figures: two of them, steeped in a darkness so immersive and so intense, it glows. They are coupled; they are women. They are lovers, inhabiting the cane. They invoke in it a strangeness circumferenced by flora of Alleyne’s ingenuity: none of the flowers you see bordering and fanning within the piece are ‘real’, as in verifiable through botanic record. Alleyne has summoned them through certain conjuring, laying them in a world as open to the animal as it is to the scientific.
What about animal life, then? In the heart and heat of the Covid-19 lockdown, Alleyne and Gosine had a great deal to say about it, directly to each other. Weekly, the pair kept a bright thread of communication lit between Tulsa and New York, and in these three months, the work deepened in its singularities. The pair spoke without pressure to record or transcribe, and Alleyne returned again and again to the canvas, layering it in black upon black, incorporating the white dhotis and additional fabrics Gosine posted to her. The piece, completed in 2021, was then and still remains the largest work made by Alleyne. An animal nature roves in it, slinking in and among the sinuous lines of the cane, braided themselves by gold bands that resemble nothing so much as the gold beras worn by Gosine’s paternal grandmother. In her, and with her, Gosine found an unparalleled and vivacious joy.
Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, Gosine’s full-length academic text, is an intimate companion to any viewing of Alleyne’s piece. A complete reading might not be necessary, but if you stand before Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild), the generosities Gosine has provided in his multifocal writing on queer theory, animal wilderness, and art activism become a welcome framing: not a screen through which Alleyne’s composition can be, or ought to be, filtered, but a sort of feral kindness, a benediction in claws and carnalities. It isn’t coincidence that Nature’s Wild is, blissfully, one of the most non-academic academic books you will encounter—if there is an innate struggle with the ways the text occupies language, it is in Gosine’s mischievous and wry handling of mandated rhetorical writing, wherein a fully supple creative non-fiction is baring its teeth to be unleashed. Still, having satisfied—rigorously so—the requirements governing scholarship’s insistence throughout the work, Nature’s Wild conducts upon itself its own pleasing defiance, its own “gesture toward unruliness.”
Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild). Llanor Alleyne with Andil Gosine. 2022. 6’x 4′
Behold that mirrored unruliness in what Alleyne has wrought, using as her medium a patinated blackness so total it consumes one, upon which is layered the petals and blooms of the artist’s mythic flowerscape: in this ornamental coppice, the lesbian lovers are entangled. If you squint and stare, trying to discern their exact lineation, this is as it should be—no one sees scientifically in the dark, except, perhaps, some truly animal species we have yet to fully behold. The moon above the lovers’ bowed heads is made of paper. The canvas, I must insist you remind yourself, began its life as white. Everything here is a blanketing lushness: the paint, the meticulously cut and pasted flowers, the fabric, the whole teeming ecosystem of desire, disruption, and not a little defloration.
Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild) straddles two way stations of Alleyne’s practice. Most identifiably, the piece is in pleasing congruence with her 2017 “Queering Cane” series, which reflects, in her own words, “what it means to be hiding in plain sight as a queer woman in the Caribbean.” Synchronous in several ways with these collages, Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild) embodies and abides with them while simultaneously looking ahead to the work Alleyne makes in Moonlight, where the depths of darkness feel even further, more provocatively scried. This is no binary comparison; rather, it engages the artist on her own dread continuum, steeped in ornate symbolisms making themselves plain as moonlight.
No combative tensions roiled between Gosine and Alleyne in the months of their work. Gosine saw his role as one of thoughtful intervention, rather than outright creative steering, and the results live in that harmonious accord. Gosine’s sensibilities and ardent sensitivities are inscribed throughout. The dhoti cloth from which those translucent, tender petals were made was worn against his human skin. The other fabric scraps embedded in the work come from his private hoard. Wearing privacies on the inside out, skinning ourselves emphatically to represent the truest parts of our practice: this is a well-worn (or well-denuded) labor for artists of the queer Caribbean and its diaspora. What you witness here is an intermingling of secrecies that rivals the mere subcutaneous. It goes beneath skin, to the marrow of the thing itself.
I behold Elizete and Verlia in the rich and secret depths of the world created herein. The central figures of Dionne Brand’s first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, corralled by sugarcane but not broken by its cruelties, find a love in each other that often feels too personal, too cavernously erotic in its heat to even touch second-hand. Yet my fingerprints are all over the well-thumbed copy of the paperback I own, and in it I live as many lives of lesbian desire, layered thick and indelible, as do the lovers in Queering Cane. Gazing upon the art, I hear the voice of one of Brand’s heroine-lovers, she who knows an essential part of herself is rescued from utter hardship—the brutality of the cane—through being a woman in love with another:
That she would fall in love with the arc of a woman’s arm, long and one with a cutlass, slicing a cane stalk and not stopping but arcing and slicing again, splitting the armour of cane, the sweet juice rushing to the wound of the stem.
Gone, too, is the cane’s armor in Alleyne and Gosine’s gathering of sensation upon canvas. What you see in its stead is cane’s adornment: those gold bands, evoking beras, circling the green stalks in intimations of the decorative and the sexual, rivet and engirdle all attention. Under the watchful eyes of cane are the lovers protected, here in this site of past hauntings and harrowings that has ever been the Caribbean, the Trinidadian canefield. No one can lie here, queer or otherwise, without confronting the past. Indeed, it may well be that love is the only force powerful enough to strip the coloniality from the stalks of a former empire that once worked so many racialized bodies into a muted, unknowing oblivion.
How can that which entraps us also free us? You can look to these women, who inhabit a canefield that is both in Trinidad and not in Trinidad, for the response. See the way one lover’s hair ropes and revolves around the stalks, creating freedom in a wiry, woven halo. The hair, itself ornamented in gold, sleek and healthy as a recently-gorged macajuel, is its own aforementioned lushness, its own wayward abundance. See how it sharpens at the tips, like a living weapon. What is more animal than the wild work we make of ourselves, when rules of civility and all-too-human etiquette have chopped down our joys? You cannot blame the lesbian lovers of this artwork for weaponing themselves, if that is the tariff for their persistence.
Is every canefield story a bush story, too? Let the flowers answer this, like the purple orchids that lived in the gardens of Gosine’s grandparents’ home, at the corner of Malgretoute and the M1 Tasker Roads in Princes Town, South-Central Trinidad. Think of the flowers of your own childhood as you regard the work: the pale pink hibiscus in your favorite aunty’s prized garden; the ornamental rose bushes you plucked at mercilessly as a truant child; Aji’s bougainvillea fanning over the commotion of chickens in your front yard. All flowers are intimate, and all queer histories have their inflorescence. So many of the routes to queerness divert through, or are else born in, the bushes of the places we call home: nighttime assignations, adolescent fumblings, explorations of hands, lips, and tongue amidst razor grass and pikka bush, creeping vine and mimosa pudica bearing witness to bodies with nowhere else to learn each other safely. Neither canefield nor bush promises safety, but both give cover.
Andil Gosine and Llanor Alleyne met in person on Gosine’s birthday in 2022, released from the strictures of sheltering in place, almost a year after Queering Cane (Nature’s Wild) was finished. The ecology of camaraderie, understanding, and mutual seeing that marked their virtual exchanges transposed itself readily, found them both pleased to continue knowing each other. It’s not mandatory for artists to fall in creative love when they work like this, but I confess, the result is profoundly pleasing—this is an ecosystem of wild, queer recognition, after all. We remain persecuted by forces seen and unknown, haunted—and yes, hated still—by those who would either see us dead, or see us rendered as a substratum of animal within non-heteronormative control. Yet within the cane, the stalks rendered in living gold and green, we find flowers. Rather, flowers find us. See how they bend to the sovereign night-limned bodies Alleyne has hewn. See how this unabashed speculation of an ecology that must be made into art to exist—how this adorns every imaginable survival.
These obsidian-etched women could be anyone, but they belong to each other and to the ungovernable terrain they create. They could be Elizete and Verlia. They could be the ghosts of foremothers roiling in your blood with queer herstories to unleash upon you, still. They could be you, yourself, queer warrior, waiting for the woman of your life and death to take you by the golden bera, the floral hem, the nakedness of your animal self, and lead you into the cane.
