Literature, insularities and sexile in the Caribbean

Abstract

This article relates the notion of sexile (Manolo Guzmán) and the concepts of archipelago and rhizome (Glissant) and of minor literatures (Deleuze and Guattari), focusing on the case of Puerto Rico. We will analyze the literary and linguistic systems in which two poems are inserted (or not) – the poems are in the book Invitación al Polvo (1991), a posthumous work of the Puerto Rican Manuel Ramos Otero (1946-1990). The objective of this article is to understand the role of the Caribbean island geography and its history marked by colonization, by criolization and by the queer diaspora in Ramos Otero’s literature, also focused on gender and sexuality. The author had to exile in the United States, in 1968, due to his sexual orientation, which characterizes the concept of sexile. Our methodology is based on the analysis of the two poems, by which we can see that this encounter between cultures and identities does not take place in a neutral way: Ramos Otero, like so many immigrants, besides dealing with the diaspora’s own feelings (nostalgia, loss, rupture, deterritorialization and lack of belonging), suffers from oppression, ethnic-racial segregation and prejudice. It is concluded that, in association with the race, ethnicity and language prejudice, sexiled people also suffer from gender and sexual prejudice. In addition, the conclusion of this article also suggests that the double displacement (both geographic and queer) should be re-signified through the concept of the archipelago thinking, as proposed by Glissant (2005), in opposition to the universality of the monolithic subject.