Coconut/Cane & Cutlass: Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive

Abstract

Michelle Mohabeer’s groundbreaking Indo-Caribbean queer film, Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994) remains one of the earliest works of queer Indo-Caribbean visual art. Mohabeer scripts the lesbian body cinematically through an iconography of indenture: coconut, cane, cutlass. This article returns to Coconut/Cane & Cutlass nearly three decades after its release to examine the radical ways in which Mohabeer’s visual aesthetics posits the canescape as a site of Indo-Caribbean lesbian subjectivity, reconfigures the cutlass from its status of violence to one of desire, and examines the poetics of fragmentation as a queer feminist genealogical approach. In our reading of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass as a visual text of rewriting diasporic subjectivity, Mohabeer produces a radical visual genealogy that narrates diasporic Indo-Caribbean identity through a primary site of queerness, upending historical approaches to gender and sexuality within traditional configurations of the indentured diasporas. La innovadora pelicula indocaribena queer de Michelle Mohabeer, Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), sigue siendo una de las primeras obras de arte visual indocaribeno queer. Mohabeer escribe el cuerpo lesbico cinematicamente a traves de una iconografia de la mano de obra importada no abonada: coco, cana, alfanje. Este articulo regresa a Coconut/Cane & Cutlass casi tres decadas despues de su estreno para examinar las formas radicales en que la estetica visual de Mohabeer plantea el lugar del canaveral como un sitio de subjetividad lesbiana indocaribena, reconfigura el alfanje desde su connotacion de violencia a otra de deseo y examina la poetica de la fragmentacion como un enfoque genealogico feminista queer. En nuestra lectura de Coconut/Cane & Cutlass como un texto visual de la reescritura de la subjetividad diasporica, Mohabeer produce una genealogia visual radical que narra la identidad indocaribena diasporica a traves de un sitio primario de lo queer, trastornando los enfoques historicos al genero y a la sexualidad dentro de las configuraciones tradicionales de las diasporas de la mano de obra importada no abonada.