Desires and Displacement: An Analysis of the Lesbian Expressions in R. Erica Doyle’s “Tante Merle”

First published in 1999, R. Erica Doyle’s “Tante Merle” takes on a staple from Guyanese and Trinidadian folklore and gives her a surprising twist. In one famous rendition of the Tante Merle story by the legendary humorist and performer Paul Keens-Douglas, she was a miserable old woman who brought herself continuous embarrassment and bemusement for her socially oblivious or inappropriate behaviors at a cricket match. A conglomerate of stereotypes on non-normative femininity and old age, Tante Merle has such an engrained status in local cultures that her name has been generalized to refer to (often in a negative light) senior women who are irrepressibly “stuck in their ways.” Yet in recent years, the character has been reinvented as a figure of female empowerment, whose stubbornness, assertiveness and other anti-marianismo characteristics are celebrated instead of laughed at. Doyle’s story furthers this role-reversal to explore boldly the guarded tenderness beneath Merle’s appearance by imagining a story of unfulfilled love between two women, adding substance and seriousness to a caricature that might offer us a glimpse into the secret workings of representing LGBT lives in mainstream culture.

Written in Trini, “Tante Merle” is told from the first-person perspective by Merle’s niece, who comes to take care of a sick Merle and learns of her personal story after being asked by her of a special “lady friend.” Merle’s reminiscing brought the readers back to 1956, the year that she left Arima, Trinidad for the United States. She worked as a bookkeeper in town and bought mango juice every day from a female fruit vendor who, according to rumors, “only [took] up with women.” Though they never talked to each other, Merle and the fruit vendor developed a romantic connection through the daily ritual. On Merle’s last day in Trinidad, the fruit vendor finally spoke, knowing she would never see Merle again:

“You know,” she say, “it hard to be fruit vendor these days. They does have all kind of new shop downtown; and each shop does have it own particular fruit; and each fruit does have it own particular seed; and each seed does have it own particular need; and each need does find it own particular root. Each soil, rootless, does have it own particular sorrow. It hard to be fruit vendor on the savannah.”

In no more than 600 words, Doyle distills the passion of two lesbian Indo-Trinidadian women bound by social norms into a lyrical story-within-a-story of longing, a literary device used in ancient Indian literature such as Mahabharata and Ramayana. Though never explicitly revealed, Merle’s sexual identity was established when she heard of the lesbian rumors of the fruit vendor. “Is then I interested!” she recalls. Furthermore, the uniqueness of her relationship with the fruit vendor is apparent:

Fruit vendor look at me everyday, look at me like she seeing me, like no one ever see me before. Is the first time I feel like duppy watching at me, strong duppy.

Merle describes her feelings in an unequivocally romantic way: that the fruit vendor saw her as no one had ever seen her before, and that she felt transparent and exposed in the fruit vendor’s gaze (“duppy” is Jamaican patois for “ghost”). Yet this relationship could not be fulfilled: both women were married (the fruit vendor’s husband was away making “revolution” in a Rastafarian camp), and the social climate prevented any possibility of developing the relationship. The fruit vendor’s final words, therefore, could be seen as a commentary on both herself and Merle’s departure from homeland. Beneath the apparent hardship of being a fruit vendor, she alludes to her feeling of “rootlessness” and “sorrow” and notes its particularity, a veiled reference to her identity of being “different” from everyone else and her unmet “needs (“each need does find its particular root”). The unmet needs and sorrow also apply to Merle, who was leaving the savannah behind and about to experience another layer of rootlessness: that from the diaspora.

Herein lies R. Erica Doyle’s remarkable reinterpretation of Tante Merle: Doyle digs beyond the stereotypes that Merle traditionally represents and builds an emotional, compelling backbone to Merle’s apparent idiosyncrasy and social deviancy. In the story, her refusal to buy a car in Brooklyn expresses her rejection of social conventions, much as her refusal to marry. “I ain’t have a car like I ain’t have a man. If is ain’t me own wheels I turning I not interested!” she explains, asserting her agency of choice in both her lifestyle and her sexual independence. Connecting the “unfeminine and undesirable” traits of Tante Merle with the “unfeminine and undesirable” image of lesbianism, Doyle turns around an old cultural image to offer a contemporary rendition that, along with the burgeoning lesbian characters in writings set in the Caribbean, starts to address the historical oppression of the lesbian expression.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Audre Lorde
Autobiography; Biomythography
1982

Plot Summary: Audre Lorde grows up in Harlem asa child of Black West Indian parents. Legally blind as a child, she learns to read before going to school, thus stoking up wrath in the Nuns/teachers at her Catholic school. The family’s landlord hangs himself for having to rent his flat to Black people; later they take a trip to Washington D.C., where they are refused ice-cream because of segregation laws. After getting her first period at age 15, she makes friends with a small number of non-Black girls called “The Branded” at Hunter College High School. She is elected literary editor of the school’s arts magazine after starting to write poetry. After graduation, she leaves home and shares a flat with friends of Jean’s (one of “The Branded”). At the same time, she goes out with Peter, a white boy who jilts her on New Year’s Eve. She is pregnant and decides on an abortion. After some unhappy times at Hunter College, she moves to Stamford, Connecticut, to find work in a factory, where the working conditions are atrocious. Following her father’s death, she returns to NYC and starts a relationship with Bea, which ends when she decides to move to Mexico to escape from McCarthyism. There, she attends university and works as a secretary in a hospital. In Cuernavaca, she meets many independent women, mostly lesbians; she has a relationship with one of them, Eudora, while working in a library. After returning to NYC again, Audre explores the lesbian bar scene and moves in with lover Muriel, then another lesbian, Lynn. Finally, Audre begins a relationship with a mother named Afrekete, who eventually decides to leave to tend to her child. The book ends on a homage to Audre’s mother. (Adapted from Wikipedia)

Interesting Monsters (2001)

Interesting Monsters
Aldo Alvarez
Fiction
2001

Synopsis/Review: Playful, wry and tinged with melancholy, this promising debut collection of 16 short stories nimbly sidesteps the tropes of gay fiction. Though Alvarez’s prose is uneven, slipping back and forth from cunningly styled to stilted, his themes and characterizations are intelligent and sophisticated. Most of the stories are linked, chronicling the ups and downs of Mark and Dean, a couple with a long history. Set up by friends, they suffer through a disastrous blind date, then meet again two years later at their friends’ wedding, in “Public Displays of Affection.” Their courtship is detailed in the prose-poem “Ephemera” (“I like this very much./When exactly do you know you’re in love?/Me too.”) When Dean discovers he is HIV positive, he leaves Mark without explaining why, and is confronted by a straight colleague of Mark’s in the touching “Other People’s Complications.” Mark, a former pop star and a successful record producer, heads to his mother’s house in “Heat Rises,” holing up in the attic for months with a stash of recording equipment, emerging with a piece of music that he claims replicates the sound of his soul. Mark and Dean are eventually reunited, and one of the funniest stories in the book (“Property Values”) takes place in Puerto Rico, where they move so Dean can spend his last years where he grew up. Told from the point of view of a real estate broker who is horrified to find that her clients are gay, it ends with her hilarious comeuppance. Unrelated stories tend to be more experimental. In “Rog and Venus Become an Item,” the adult protagonist is still attached to his placenta, which he carries around in a briefcase; “A Small Indulgence” is set in a curiously bland heaven. These are thoughtful, ambitious tales, cleverly imagined if not always flawlessly executed. (Publishers Weekly)