Translating Narratives of Masculinity across Borders: A Jamaican Case Study

For African diasporic communities dispersed across the Americas and Europe, geopolitical alienation and historical marginalization have together precipitated the angstridden desire for reconnection to a site of origin that can seemingly anchor identity and offer sustaining alternatives to devalorized constructions of blackness. For Caribbean immigrant communities, Stuart Hall's "twice diasporized" (6), the crisis of identity may be even more severe. After struggling through histories of brutal political and cultural (re)negotiation with Africa, India and Europe to finally name the Caribbean as "home," Caribbean identities are again disrupted by journeys into North American and European metropoles, themselves identified as sites of racial and cultural antagonism. As a result, for African Caribbean immigrants, the Caribbean often comes to replace Africa as the source of a resisting counter-narrative that can challenge the construction of blackness as lack and absence confronted in these metropolitan centers. The promise of return and the assumption of the rooted nation/region encoded in the concept of the diaspora become prioritized. The problems inherent in the concepts of "home" and "nation," however, complicate both the desire to return and the possibility of (re)belonging. Despite some of the obvious problems in Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000), he does offer some useful ways of thinking about the diaspora that are relevant to this discussion. Gilroy argues that while converging around a shared identity based on cultural and national particularities may sometimes offer a "potent political and moral language" (14), that narrative of liberation can also run the risk of reconstituting itself as another type of hegemonic discourse: an unchallenged collective identity that demands complete obedience to its internal laws and rituals. As a result, . . . identity ceases to be an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction. It becomes instead a thing to be possessed and displayed. It is a silent sign that closes down the possibility of communication across the gulf between one heavily defended island of particularity and its equally well-fortified neighbors, between one national encampment and others. (103) In this desire for cultural purity, "difference corrupts and compromises identity" (105). It is precisely, however, in the acknowledgement of difference-"the half-different and the partially familiar"-that Gilroy envisages the greatest potential for political intervention and change (106). The cultural corruption and the disruption of the nation that result from migration and border trespassing can allow us to articulate new understandings of self. Understood in this way, it is the concept of the diaspora-deterritorialized and ambivalentand not the concept of the nation-fixed and uncompromising-that offers possibility for meaningful transformation. The diaspora, then, can be seen as opening up rather than closing down communication in the way that it facilitates dialogue across and within nation states. As Gilroy is careful to caution, however, when the diaspora talks back to a nation state, it often initiates conflict (126). "The half-different and the partially familiar" too often remind the nation of its own troubled identity. Self-consciously positioning myself in this paper as a Jamaican immigrant resident in Toronto, Canada, I indeed want to commence a critical discourse from the diaspora with the nation state, fully aware that the act of "talking back," of back chatting, may indeed initiate conflict, yet also holds the potential for healing. A current perceived crisis of gun violence in Toronto's black communities has led to an increasing criminalization and marginalization of black men and Jamaicans, in particular. Jamaican men have come to represent for many white, as well as middle-class black Canadians, a deep fear of black masculinity-the kind of masculinity that has to be kept in check and guarded lest it upset the delicate balance of this liberal democratic state. …