Conclusion

Abstract

This book is framed by texts, and by analyses of those texts, focusing on failures and rejections of desire between women, and of Caribbean independence. This framing highlights the nagging concerns that I still have about the transformative power, the anticolonial potential, and the radical possibility of desire between women. Always already part of the mangled structure of desire and sexuality in the Caribbean, desire between women does not change radically. The similarities between Rosario Ferré’s 1998 Eccentric Neighborhoods/Vecindarios excéntricos and José Martí’s 1885 Amistad funesta/Lucía Jerez evidence not Ferré’s regression but Martí’s prescience, as well as the enduring power and insufficiency of the heterosexual model in the Caribbean. Nevertheless, focusing on desire between women initiates a more modest, yet effective, change in perspective, foregrounding the complex and intersecting structures of desire, sexuality, and family that both traverse and incorporate heterosexual structures—structures I identify with the mangrove. Indeed, if we can mark a clear change between the late nineteenth and the late twentieth century, it is not that desire between women increasingly reconfigures hetero-colonialism or hetero-nationalism but that neocolonialism and national “development” increasingly encroach upon the mangrove.