Sex Work in Caribbean Fiction

Abstract

Towards the end of Dany Laferrière’s Vers la sud (2006)—published in English as Heading South in a translation by Wayne Grady in 2009—Missie Abel, a young woman from a wealthy French family living in Port-au-Prince, meets the son of the domestic servants for sex in the toilets of an exclusive restaurant. The pair are overheard by the headmistress of an elite school. In a novel which—as we shall see—performs a plurivocal literariness, shifting between different styles for the starkly different socio-economic brackets in Duvalier’s Haiti, the respectable European ‘novel of manners’ is torn asunder at this point as the bourgeois world of appearances and the repressed realm of cross-racial, interclass desire surface in on one another. Like in Memórias where the priest is discovered in bed with the ‘Gypsy’, the realms of order and disorder collide. Yet Heading South shows how sexual relations remain rigorously structured by the race and class politics of neoliberal Haiti. In this chapter I argue that in Heading South a form of social and economic informality facilitates sexual engagement between Western women and young Haitian men at the same time that it prevents resource redistribution through formal wages or benefits, or indeed the resource sharing that would attend formal relations such as marriage. In Heading South, Western women travel to Haiti for sex with young men of colour whom they fetishise, but they also express the endemic racism of capitalist society, which functions to foreclose any possibility of formal, equitable, consensual relations between them. The result is a kind of social informality where structural racism and its attendant economic disadvantages are concealed by interracial sexual relations. Whereas Quijano has shown how race is an economic category constructed under colonialism but which has outlived it (534), I suggest that under the contradictions of neoliberalism it becomes necessary to obscure the economic category of race at the same time as it is exploited as part of the regime of accumulation.