Whole Town Mash Down
When the whole town start to shake
I behaving bad like an earthquake
I’ve been thinking of the Mighty Swallow’s Town Mash Down while writing this. Maybe it’s cute for you to listen with me, while you piece together these little fragments.
🌊
My father’s restaurant has been closed since the onset of the pandemic. And this is where, Mannequins in Motion, the only and longest surviving drag cabaret show in Barbados has performed for the last three decades. The show has also been kept from continuing. Whether the restaurant can / will reopen is a precarious and uncertain question. Whether the show can / will continue is just as precarious and uncertain.
I wanted to imagine a kanga for the women of the show, my father and some of the women who have supported and upheld the restaurant, which has been a miraculous site for trans* performance and expression in Holetown for 30 years.
I wanted to imagine this space, if it can’t reopen as a restaurant for touristic consumption then maybe, as a creative site for cultivating wholeness for and with local queer communities. I wanted to imagine, and remember, Wholetown.
Wholetown is still only a thought, a feeling, though maybe I shouldn’t undercut it as being “only” these things.
With the work I’m wrapped up in, I’ve been trying to account for how different intersecting and layered experiences of crisis condition and affect our bodies and experiences, while current vocabularies around identity formation don’t seem able to keep up. I’ve been trying to feel out how crisis touches our lives and practices as makers of sexual and gendered differences. I’ve been trying to account for the relationship between crisis and being queered.
To get to the wholeness — to find my way to Wholetown — I first have to look at the shambles, the pieces, all the little fragments, all these shattered memories, experiences and connections. It is tender and prickly work, to see where things do fall apart, to fall with them while trying to stay together. To follow the lines of crisis is to tiptoe the difference between a breakdown and a breakthrough.
I’ve been sifting through drawered and mildewed photos of Deva, Bianca and Holly performing in the restaurant (before the fire 12 years ago).[1] It feels too close and breathless to hold their performances in my hands, knowing that they can’t happen right now. At the same time, to hold them helps me to remember. Remembering some of my intentions:
I want to give particular attention to works that can no longer happen, moments that couldn’t appear or come to surface, experiences that came to surface appearing unexpectedly from crisis-queered openings and events that, despite everything, just needed to happen — that is, performances and appearances playing at the precarious edges of disappearance and deferral.
And if it can be remembered, it can be imagined
with a difference.
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Again, to find my way to Wholetown, I have to piece my way through the fragments. However, how I navigate this, matters too. The different kinds of work being done here operate with different relationships to visibility, invisibility and discretion. Some work is only possible discreetly and some work only works out in the open. To find my way to Wholetown, then, is to dip, float and weave between the surface, to see how queer lives relate to, break, transgress, cross, refuse and abide by the contours of the surface.
Remembering a fragment, I wrote:
Discretion has come up as something that’s complicating the work I’m doing. Discretion is invaluable to the work being done by SHE Barbados, Equals and other local queer activist groups. It is the work of making queer life possible below a sometimes hostile and breathless surface. It is the work of providing a future, surviving into a future liveable above the surface.
The community support that SHE Barbados offers, the support that SHE is providing me with personally, I likened to a support that “lets you breathe underwater”.
Elsewhere and otherwise, I’ve been feeling out the importance of coming up for air, coming to surface, queerly and intimately.
Another fragment:
They get into my car and before I move off, they hug me with a sigh of relief. It feels like they had been holding their breath since the last time we spoke. And in their touch, it feels like I had been holding my breath too. How had we learned how to hold our breath for that long?
Here, I’m remembering Ark Ramsay and the kind of support and space we hold with and for each other in this place.
Writing to them about this place and their novel in progress, I say:
It is not just an island. When those teeth sink into you, starfish severing their own limbs from unbearable dysphoric conditions makes perfect sense — they are trying, at all costs, to get away from the danger. But this danger is not some kind of hounding predator; it is the very water you’re living in, it is the very world you’ve been born to.
Some of my written responses to the work happening here are also tangled up with the crisis-queered lives of sea creatures. I have been feeling a closeness to all those lives below the surface trying to survive. I feel a closeness to queered bodies who live with a complicated relationship to the surface.
And what do I mean when I talk about navigating surfaces? From conversations with Ark:
We’re talking about different ways queer life becomes possible, about how queer life isn’t possible for certain bodies under certain conditions. We’re talking about threads of queer life in the Caribbean always being visualised / envisioned / remembered at the edges. Queer life pushed to the horizon. Queer life at the bottom of the ocean. Queer life in the thick of cane fields. Queer life in the depths of the mangrove. Queer life buried in the gully. Queer life at the edge of the shoreline. Queer life beyond the horizon. Sub-surfaces, edges, fringes, depths, margins, elsewheres.
I am still staying with these fragments. I wish I could say I had more pieced-together intentions but crisis is keeping me at the edge of my seat, at the edge of making a move. There has been an outbreak here since I started unbreaking these pieces. I must keep listening, I must keep holding together. I must wait a little longer until a move can be made, differently. A sense of wholeness can’t be found or made here yet. I must wait a little longer until I can find my way to Wholetown.
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[1] I don’t know what it means yet, to know that a lot of these fragments are only accessible through TripAdvisor links and the like. I can’t yet name how it feels to have to navigate my own family history and its presence through the lens of holiday makers and tourists.
