A Conversation with Gloria Wekker

The University of the West Indies Centre for Gender and Development Studies Issue 3 – 2009
Politics & Passion: A Conversation with Gloria Wekker by Andil Gosine

(Wekker 2006), anthropologist Gloria Wekker broke new ground in presenting an analysis of Mati Work, a surviving historical practice among Afro-Surinamese working-class women who create families from relationships that are not limited to blood ties, or a choice between heterosexuality or homosexuality. Her account offered a rare, thoughtful consideration of a complex Caribbean sexual culture, and continues to challenge conventional knowledges and practices of researchers, rights advocates and policy makers engaged in the struggle or sexual justice. In April 2009, Professor Wekker and I met at her home in Amsterdam—where she is both Chair in Gender and Ethnicity Studies at the Faculty of Arts at Utrecht University and Director of the Centre of Expertise on Gender, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism—and shared our thoughts about some contemporary debates and questions her work informs and inspires.

Sex and sexuality are still not easily spoken about in Caribbean Gender Studies, despite contributions like yours and M. Jacqui Alexander’s that have invigorated the field. Why do you think that there is still not a broad and engaged conversation about sex among Caribbean feminists—especially one about same-sex sexualities, heteronormativity and sexual rights?

GW:

I think it’s broader than just Caribbean feminists, because I think it’s also true for African-Americanfeminists. Hortense Spillers’ observation in the early 1980s that black women are like “the beached whales of the sexual universe”, that they’re not speaking, but awaiting their verb, still holdstrue. Since that time I really don’t think that we’ve had much scholarship filling in that huge gap. Recently, I was looking at the book Longing to Tell: Black women talk about Sexuality and Intimacy2004) by Tricia Rose. But this is a bunch of interviews with women of different ages talking about their sexual experiences but it doesn’t really theorize anything. The same is true for Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories, edited by Rosamund Elwin (1997). However much I pain in them—but it doesn’t go very deep. I think Darlene Clark’s insights are correct when she talks about how come it became so important for black women to don a cloak of asexuality because of the history of black women being raped, black women being defined as unrape-able, always already ready to have sex. So black women decided they had to be asexual, to perform asexuality. I think

that has played a huge role for a long time.

When I think about the Caribbean specifically, I think there is also some of the same processes going on there. Religion also plays a part in making it not decent, not a decent topic to talk about it. There is still very much a sense that “nice girls don’t like sex, and nice girls don’t talk about sex.” We find moreof a sexual voice in literature, in fiction, but not so much in academic, scholarly work. The Politics of Passion provided a sexual voice for Afro-Surinamese women in academic literature, for the first time in this way.

GW:

And the book has sometimes been received in a hostile manner because of its representation ofsexuality. While Politics has been warmly and enthusiastically embraced by many different constituencies, I would say—in some of the talks I’ve given— for instance, for the Caribbean Studies

Association, some men have a very hard time dealing with the study because it depicts women in a way that doesn’t make them victims. Politicsgives agency to women, and describes how they ordered the world sexually. On some other occasions when I have given talks where the audiences largely were women, there has also been a hostile reaction. At one talk in Barbados, very religious women, middle-class women, for whom it was also very difficult to talk about sexuality, found it difficult to hear it addressed. In a limited sense, there’s truth in Peter Wilson’s thesis that “men go by reputation, and women go by respect.” And then there are, of course, the Afrocentric constituencies, who deny that same-sex sexualities are an African thing, so that all in all there are lots of different reasons for some hostile reactions to my book.

How were you able, then, to resist this contention, this pressure, in undertaking your own work?

GW:
First, I am coming from the Netherlands, coming from a sexual culture that has been very open in Amsterdam. I was socialized in this kind of cultural space in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, sex was very openly talked about and people were experimenting with new forms of being a sexual being. There was so much experimentation that jealousy was out of the question! When I then pursued my PhD in the United States, some people weren’t enthusiastic about my topic, and several people really implored me not to write so openly and centrally about sexuality—even some members of my committee. Rather than sex, they wanted me to focus my work on other ingredients that were also there, that I had collected data on: the economic side, howdid women survive, etc. But I felt like and insisted that sexuality iswhat I wanted to study. I came all this way to the United States because I couldn’t do it in the Netherlands, because there were no Black studies [t]here, and hardly any lesbian studies. But it’s this particular combination that enabled me to do this study, to produce a theory to think about black sexuality in the diaspora. I’m doubtful that I would have gotten the money and the mentorship that I got in the US. But the kinds of questions that I asked, and the fact that I was able to do that, put all the ins and outs of the issue on the table, so to speak—that is my Dutch background.

Your comfort with speaking about sex and sexuality is made known to readers quite early in The Politics of Passion, when you begin to describe your relationship with the text’s main subject, Juliette. Whenever I have used this book in graduate courses, students always linger on this aspect of your study, with some of them quite clearly anxious about it. Why do you think your frank and transparent explanation of your relationship generates this kind of response?


GW:

Well, a combination of reasons. One is of course there is still a positivistic atmosphere in which weoperate. We are still not supposed to have any personal biases, we are not supposed to show the “I” that is doing the research. The “I” should be bracketed, should be kept out of sight. In Politics, the “I” is not only showing herself but also really claiming that if you are transparent about the ways in which you position yourself, including the sexual positions you occupy, that you produce better knowledge. I think I’m showing that—that I couldn’t have known all the stuff that I’ve come to know about the Mati Work if I wouldn’t have had this relationship with Juliette.
It’s the positivistic climate that still surrounds us, and surrounds those students and produces us, but there is also a specific division of labour in which women anthropologists can talk about gender, but male anthropologists can talk about sex. So I’m breaking through those binaries in that I’mtalking about sex. Men have always been allowed to talk about sex that they’ve had in the field—starting with Malinowski, for instance. Other men have had the possibility to be sexual beings in the field. But when you look at some of the books that came out, let’s say, in the 80s about self and gender
and sex in the field—the books that anthropologists read toget to know more about how their colleagues act in the field, what it is like do field work, whether you are allowed to be a sexual being, this is the message thatyou get—you better not be sexual as a woman

because you will be put down as a “field groupie.” You will be seen as someone who is not serious, even while there is much more space for men to explore that, and be taken seriously. Lesbian Studies and Gay Studies also maintainthis binary. That’s why the grouping of the two has been called an unhappy marriage, by Ellen Lewin in Out in Theory (2002). As she points out, Gay Studies has engaged with sexuality, but Lesbian Studies has engaged more with gender. And so whateverit is that lesbians do sexually, we don’t get a very clear view of it. I’m pretty much doing away with all these binaries, which keep repeating a particular way of looking at the world and I think that’s what upsets [some] students.
This gendered division extends beyond the classroom, beyond scholarship.
GW:
When I think of some of my white gay male friends, they have been very enthusiastic about the way that I describe myrelationship with Juliette. They told me they wanted more sex! (I replied that this was the best I could do!) And again I have come across women, both white women and women of colour, who found it difficult to deal with. And also religious women who have had difficulty dealing with the fact that I openly discussed my relationship with Juliette.
There is a bunch of difficulty involved in acknowledging how women can be sexual persons, and acknowledging same-sex relations makes it even more difficult, especially in a Caribbean context. You know all those painful images that are out there circulating about black women are still haunting
us. Do you think we have really begun to grapple with the way in which those images haunt us, the continuing effect—the damage—of colonialism in shaping our sex and our ideas of sex and sexuality?
GW:
Absolutely not, I think that would be a very necessary next step to take. The work that I started to do after Politics examines the Dutch cultural archive, but I absolutely feel that comparable work that goes deeper into the Caribbean cultural archive really needs to be done. The ways in which race, gender, sexuality, nation, class, have gotten deposited in our archives. I’m talking about “cultural archive” in the sense that Edward Said uses it in Culture and Imperialism(1993), as a structure of feeling, a structure of knowing, of affect. Layer upon layer of images have gotten deposited in that cultural archive, and we never have looked closely at them, at how those images and knowledges have formed us. I think it’s absolutely necessary to look into how they are not serving us, not serving us at all, as Audre Lorde would say. The austere waysin which sexuality is often dealt with, is often coloured locally. In different places, theyhave different forms. For example, I’m always struck by the punitive ways in which people with HIV/AIDS are treated in black communities like in the US, but also in the Caribbean. People with HIV/AIDS are told “you brought it on yourself”; that “ you must be gay” or “you must have swung both
ways”; that “you have been drug using”. Th
ey are told: “however
you got it, it’s your
own fault” for making an immoral choice.
That’s a very prominent discourse which

5
exposes the lack of generosity
that we have toward ourselves
, and toward particular ways
of expressing oneself sexually.
We would also seem to continue to respect
the parcelling work of colonialism. I am
struck by the commitment of even very cri
tical and interrogative scholars to ethnic
and racial compartments, at the expens
e of recognizing the
dynamic present and
history of the Caribbean. A lot of the em
erging studies of Cari
bbean sexuality, for
instance, leave completely unconsidered th
e experience of Indo-Caribbean people
and indentureship.
GW:
What you suggest is so true. We have been
so taught in Caribb
ean studies to look
at the different population groups
in this kind of way, and not
to look: “well but what did
they develop amongst themselves and how did th
ey interact?” It’s
so reductive to only
look like this. We have been missing out on a lot as a result.
In
Politics
, you were primarily concerned with
the experience of Afro-Surinamese
women and in relation to an on-going se
t of questions that consider the African
diasporic experience, but yet you stum
bled into Hindu women who were also
engaged in Mati Work. Have you given
more thought to how these women, and
perhaps indentureship, informed se
xual cultures li
ke Mati Work?
GW:
I was trained in the old-fashioned way in
Caribbean studies that I was going to look
at Creoles, not at other groups. So I stumbl
ed across these other groups in looking at the
Creoles. What I’ve been thinking about is
that, as I understand it,
there was a time when
Hindustani women, when they first arri
ved in Suriname, many of them came
independently. They came, for instan
ce, to escape undesirable and oppressive
relationships, or they came with their lovers
. They may even have come in a group of
girlfriends, who knows? I’m imagining that
, but I’m thinking that the grounds would
have been very fertile for women to say “we’re
not just going to put up with any kind of
relationship that we may have had in India.
We have not travelled all these 5,000 miles
to come to Suriname and to again be involve
d in oppressive relationships.” So there is
some material that points that out, that poi
nts to the desire on the part of Hindustani
women to be independent, or to be in lovi
ng relationships with men, not to be under the
foot of men, like they perhaps
had been. This is evident for instance in oral histories that
women tell, oral histories that their grandmot
hers or great-grandmothers have told them.
I think that is such a fertile
ground to go looking into further.
This again is about their
cultural archive that is very specific that also
has to do with the history that they had in
Suriname, how they had to do labour in the fi
elds and so on and so forth. And when I’m
looking now to those people that
I know who are in relations
hips with women of other
groups, I see some mixed relationships be
tween Creole and Hindustani women, and I
think that that would be a very fertile ground to
explore. Also Creole and Javanese female
same-sex relationships. There are also othe
r sexual areas that deserve more attention,
when you are going to adopt that horizontal
approach—the phenomenon of the outside
woman and homosocial cultures, for example.
In Suriname, masculinity hasn’t been
studied at all, nor have
bisexuality and male sa
me-sex relationships.


7
What we sometimes see, I also think, are
gay and lesbian champions of sexual rights
who are brave and revolutionary, but
who are also working within—and not
challenging—a teleological narrative, the
“global imperialist s
cript” as you put it
(255).
GW:
Absolutely. I’m really wanting to get pe
ople to think more about repeating such
seemingly automatic binaries, like what they
conceive of as tradition and modernity,
which is so evident in so many things. Why is
it that we are so willing to give up on this
culture that has survived for
many centuries and that has show
n its resilience through so
many difficulties and through many
migrations, why are we so
prepared to give up on it?
And to embrace another way of being in th
e world, that for all I know, you know, also
has its costs attached to it? I find that ther
e are certain costs attached to embracing this
identity.
But there are resources too. I don’t want to be
this nostalgic old woman. But there’s a
certain way in which I want to point out th
at the Mati Work has seen a lot of women
through, it has seen a lot of men and women
through, and has made it possible for them
to survive and to form communities. We
shouldn’t be too quick about tossing it
overboard, really in term
s of community. I think there’s a lot there.
Are the LGBT organizations from the global
North, who are becoming increasingly
interested in sexual struggles in the South,
advancing a global imperialist script of
sexuality? Among a great number of th
em—from Canada to Sweden to Holland—
there seems to be a sense of “fait accompli”,
that they have now finished the task of
achieving sexual liberation, so now they
must free gays and lesbians in the South
too.
GW:
I find it deeply, deeply problematical, and I
should say that has not been one of my
angles, in which I looked at Mati Work. But
I can certainly say a thing or two generally
about this issue, or organizing, or even when
we talk of collabora
tion. I’m often struck
by the unproblematic way in which Dutch peopl
e, Dutch NGOs, the Dutch State, engages
with countries from the South as if it’s totally
clear that they have le
ft a colonial or neo-
colonial mode behind them. It is not clear to
me at all that that has happened, especially
when you look at Dutch history. For exampl
e, when the Netherlands lost Indonesia—the
“jewel” in the Dutch crown—the next day all
those colonial officers became development
collaborators. That was done by the State.
Suddenly they were somebody else, they
weren’t the colonial power anymore but—f
rom one day to the next—they supposedly
were on an even cue with the people in the Third World, in the South. As well, there is
that attitude so deeply ingraine
d in us that we are not racist
—that race is not
an issue in
the Netherlands, it is everywhe
re else but it is not here.
And because there is no self-
reflection and hardly any impetus to look at who the South is, you find all these nasty and
ugly things in the way that Dutch NGOs deal w
ith the South, so there’s no problem at all
to see them as agents who are not as far yet.
There is what has been called a “rhetoric of
the family”, vis-à-vis Third World organi
zations, whether you look at development or
HIV/AIDS programming. It is oftentimes done
in a mode of, “well we have figured this

8
out, how this works, and we’re going to help you get to the place where we are at,
because you don’t have the resources to figure it
out for yourself.” And this is a strong
attitude, which is also backed up by resources.
I’m very interested in a number of othe
r phenomena, which sort of structure the
relationship between the North and the South.
In terms of the inegalitarianism of the
resources that are available, I’ve come to und
erstand that a lot of the sex lines in the
Netherlands—the “09 lines”,
as they are called—offer an
incredible array of sexual
services that are being offered to people. Al
l kinds of different ki
nds of sex: sex with
young girls, with young boys, sex with fat ladi
es, with black men
and women. There’s
incredible specialization on these 09 lines, and
a lot of these telephone sex lines are being
operated from the Dutch ex-colonies, they ar
e being operated in Suriname and the Dutch
Antilles. This is one of the new phenomena that
I would really be interested in exploring
further, because these people speak Dutch—Dutch
is often their first language. But they
get courses in speaking Dutch without a Surinamese or Antillean accent. By local
standards, these phone sex workers make a lo
t of money, and for these operators it’s of
course much cheaper to have these people wo
rk from the Antilles and from Suriname.
Here you see a new field where sex has
settled itself, has inserted itself.
A second place where North and South interact is
that a lot of connections are being set
up between white gay men mostly in the Neth
erlands and in Belgium, and gay boys in
Suriname and the Dutch Antilles. And, though I’m
not saying that it’s totally absent in a
female to female sphere, but this is a very marked phenomenon in male same-sex
relationships, so all kinds of inegalitarianisms
that already exist are replicated in how
Dutch NGOs and activist groups deal with grou
ps in the South. It’s disconcerting that
these structures really remain in place even
though they take on ne
w forms. New forms
but still the old inequal
ities raise their head.
Sexual desires are surely imbued with po
wer—are no doubt informed by anxieties
about race, sex, gender and class through
and through—but how do we exercise a
kind of non-punitive approach about the cons
ensual kinds of sexu
al choices people
make with a simultaneous critique of o
ppression and commitme
nt to sexual and
social justice?
GW:
I think we should not be innocent about ou
r relationships. We haven’t been given
the tools—maybe there hasn’t been much impe
tus to develop those to
ols—but I think that
the time is really ripe to develop those tool
s and to disseminate them so that people can
stop being innocent about their personal relations
hips. I feel quite strongly about this.
There are many different formats for having
a personal relationship, and we happen in the
West supposedly to be into egalitariani
sm along a number of dimensions: we are
supposed to have the same background, same le
vel of education, same income and class
and so on. All of those things appear to be
very important, but I’m also convinced that
there is an undercurrent whic
h has a lot to do with our cultu
ral archive that I spoke about
earlier. It speaks of unconscious or barely
conscious desires which are also very present
and which shape us and our desires, which sh
ape who we feel attracted to. It is not
enough anymore to be totally flabbergasted by
those desires, that they overtake you and

9
you can’t do anything about it. We can’t s
imply accept that “it’s just there” and not
consider, for example, desires by white me
n for only young Surinamese boys. Let’s not
be so innocent about that and let’s try to di
scover what is behind
those desires. Let’s
recognize that they are not individual desires but
patterns that
are cultured. It’s what our
culture, 400 years of it, has prepared us to fe
el. Instead of being so politically correct
about our desires and to say
that our desires are all cl
ean and not messy, we must
acknowledge that they are pretty messy and that
we need to delve d
eeper and historicize
those desires. That is what I would like to do
in the next project. I think that that is
reconcilable still with wanting to have a societ
y, in which there is social egalitarianism
and recognizing that desire doesn’t work in
such a simple way. It sounds a bit cliché
maybe but I do not want it to be the case th
at blackness remains so
firmly tied up with
sexuality in the minds of ma
ny people of the dominant gr
oup without them having to
think about it and to become aware of that.
My last question is about your own desires: what did you learn about
love
from your
experience of Mati Work, and your relationship with Juliette?
I am so humbled by that encounter. Juliette
and I came from such different worlds but
apparently we found each other and a middle gr
ound in which we really met, in which we
really saw each other. It’s the least likely
of things to happen and yet it happened, and so
when you ask me “do you believe in love,
and how do you see love?” [laughing], I might
at this point already say, “Thi
s is love!” You encounter it in
the least likely of places
when you allow yourself to be open to it a
nd it comes with many different faces and
many different disguises, but when you do allo
w yourself that exchange of feelings and
that meeting of spirits, that is what it is. I believe strongly in that, that way of seeing
people as Juliette explained to me. She
often said she saw me being carried by
Amerindian spirits, spirits th
at love gregariousness, love people around them. She said
that I was being carried by those spirits, and that she felt attracted to that because she also
had those spirits. I think it’
s such a lovely way to look
upon people which is so much
richer, allows so much more, than if we th
ink “ok, so I’m meeting this person, what kind
of education has this person had, what is
her income?”, you know, stuff like that. I’m
very happy that I have encountered a different
way of looking at loving and being loved.
I learned that I fall in love when this pe
rson has a lot of knowledge. That knowledge is
not necessarily academic knowledge. That clearly was the case with Juliette, she was
sitting on a tonne of knowledge, carried ar
ound so much knowledge about different
things in her head; I found it
absolutely mesmerizing. I have written about how that
relationship at times seemed like a therapeutic
relationship because I was learning things
about myself that I had not heard before. I also
learned about that there can be a large age
difference between partners, and I thought that
was also so fascin
ating. Juliette showed
me a whole new way of thinking about the sexua
lity of older people, who we often insist
should be asexual:
They’ve had their time, eh?
That is such a puniti
ve attitude, to equate
sex with youth and being attractive in a pa
rticular way, having a good tight body. I think
the Mati Work does away with all of that. A lo
t of the ideas that we
have around love in
the West are in a sense so commercialized an
d so pre-packaged about
what is attractive
and what is the time in your life that you can
lay claim to having this
attractiveness, it’s

10
very reductive really. It opened up a lot for me
to be part of the Mati Work, to become
part of the Mati Work.
When you ask, “what does love mean to
you”, I think of Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
,
which offers precisely the understanding of l
ove I experienced in my relationship with
Juliette and in those
relationships which have felt good,
liberating, not in
carcerating me.
When the prophet is being asked to
talk about marriage, he says:
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but
eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the
temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other's shadow.
That’s what I believe about love, and that’s
also what I think that the Mati Work has
made me see clearer. It’s much less of
holding each other, so th
at you kind of strangle
each other, but like you are standing tall lik
e this. I love this
phrase about oak and
cypress do not grow in each others’ sha
dow. So you stand on your own and you are
deeply different from the loved one, but you give each other stuff, you give each other
something or maybe you walk a while in
the same direction,
but you are your own
person.

11
References
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Tongues on fire: Caribbean lesbian lives and stories
.
Toronto: Women’s Press.
Gibran, Kahlil. 1951.
The Prophet
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Lewin, Ellen. 2002.
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Lorde, Audre. 1984.
Sister outsider
. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
Malinowski, Bronis
ł
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