Annie Paul
The nature culture divide has been the ruling rubric in determining which animals have the right to be considered human and ipso facto are rights bearers in general—namely those who renounce their animality and are cultured into humanity. Of course, the gatekeepers to humanity are none other than those privileged to attain such status simply by being, by the simple fact of their existence as dominant males occupying the very apex of the totem pole of the universe created by Homo patriarchus.
Dominant males reserved human sociality for themselves, grudgingly admitting first women, then non-whites, then those who fell outside their heteronormative framing, to the category of human. Over the course of the twentieth century these human gates were prised open in most Northern industrialized societies but in postcolonial nations of the South, often in reaction to the loosening of borders up North, gatekeepers became more aggressively heteronormative, insisting on gender conformity as a minimum requirement for admission to the club.
Andil Gosine’s innovative thesis Nature’s Wild: Love, Law and Sex, instigated by an unforgettable childhood encounter with one such gatekeeper who challenged him to demonstrate his human-ness (“Prove to me,” he instructed,“that you are not a homosexual.”)[1], aims to provoke by roundly rejecting the category of the human that excludes people like him and embracing the identity of animal, representing nature and wildness, the savage untamed frontier that humans try so hard to distance themselves from.
This is fundamentally different from the reaction of others, non-white men for example, whose admission to the ranks of human, coincided with the eclipse of the primacy of ‘man’ in the human equation. Humanity or mankind in the under resourced postcolonial world responded by insisting on the reification of hardcore masculinity in opposition to the feminine or effeminate with corrective violence administered to get wayward humans to toe the line. In the face of hybridity, a rigidly articulated purity was demanded.
When an artist and curator writes a book, his disquisition doesn’t always end there. In the case of Andil Gosine, it has led to exhibitions (like this one) including the artists and artworks he engaged with in the process of developing his thesis. One of his closest interlocutors and partners in ‘crime’ was Lorraine O’Grady, the maverick conceptual artist and thinker of West Indian/Jamaican origin who passed away in late 2024. Despite the considerable age difference between them (O’Grady died at the age of 90 on December 13, 2024) the two enjoyed a tender and productive relationship prompted by O’Grady’s urging that what the world needs more of is ‘miscegenated thinking’.
Another important interlocutor was the late Trinbagonian LGBTIQQ+ activist and writer Colin Robinson, who contested the trope of the abused Caribbean homosexual, persona non grata in the Antilles. According to Robinson this figure, too often simplistically invoked by international activists, had been used to brand Caribbean people as violent and homophobic across the board without any hint of “the difficult ambivalences of the distorted, varied afterlives of colonization.”[2]
The gathering of texts in this catalogue represent readings of and responses to both Gosine’s own work and the works and artists he deploys in this rumination on the feral, the unruly and the wild; they are by poets, artists, scholars and writers, a few of them Gosine’s students, illuminating different facets and layers of this thoughtful, multiply abled artist’s oeuvre. They constitute part and parcel of the ‘wrecking work’ undertaken by Gosine, the dismantling of hegemonic assumptions about what should constitute humanity and sexuality in the twenty-first century; the cutting and clearing of the detritus left by the version of the human we have grown up with, to enable new shoots to grow.
How will we greet the “ecosystem of wild, queer recognition” Nature’s Wild animates? Do we continue to build walls against “…bodies with nowhere else to learn each other safely”? To club them into submission? Or do we have another think about how to co-exist without outlawing difference? These are some of the urgent questions raised by this exhibition.
[1] This encounter is captured in a short, animated video representing the schoolboy experience which clearly haunted the young Gosine into adulthood.
[2] Nature’s Wild, Introduction, p. 7
