Heading South: Love/Sex, Necropolitics, and Decolonial Romance

Shirley Tate

Small Axe, Volume 15, Number 2, July 2011 (No. 35), pp. 43-58 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/smx/summary/v015/15.2.tate.html

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Heading South: Love/Sex, Necropolitics, and Decolonial Romance

Shirley Tate The big difference, sweetheart, is that here you see them stripped to the waist. I know you dont know but thats why you came here. So stop pretending you just came here to get a nice tan. I mean, think of those cute boys. They are a dime a dozen. Take your pick. Let me let you in on a secret. I am crazy about lovesex and love, I am not very sure anymore. I always told myself that when I am older Id pay young men to love me. I just didnt know it would come so fast. I have no problem with it. Brenda, listen to me. You shouldnt worry either. If you are too shy to pay them, just give them gifts. Ellen, Heading South

Ellens words in the scene Sex and Love define the parameters of romance tourisms love/ sex in the film Heading South (2005; dir. Laurent Cantet).1 Based on short stories by Haitian writer Dany Laferrire, the film is set in Haiti at the end of the 1970s and revolves around three North American sex touristsEllen (Charlotte Rampling), Brenda (Karen Young), and Sue (Louise Portal)and their love/sex with young Haitian men on the beach at Htel Petite Anse. Ellen and Brenda share Legba (Mnothy Csar), while Sue is in love with Neptune (Wilfried Paul). The hotel, the beach, and the young men offer the women a temporary respite from their
1 The screenplay, written by Laurent Cantet and Robin Campillo, was drawn from three stories from Dany Laferrires La chair du matre (Outremont, Quebec: Editions Lanctt, 1997). Heading South (original title: Vers le sud) was nominated for the Golden Lion, and won the Marcello Mastrioanni and the Cinema for Peace awards at the 2005 Venice Film Festival. The film was released in the United Kingdom on 7 July 2006. All dialogue transcriptions are mine.

small axe 35 July 2011 DOI 10.1215/07990537-1334230 Small Axe, Inc.

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own lives back home in Boston (Ellen); Savannah, Georgia (Brenda); and Montreal (Sue). The women intertwine ideas of love, romance, and erotic pleasure in their camera-facing vignettes, in which they say what it is about their relationships with Legba and Neptune that draws them to Haiti. As is clear in Ellens words above, they are in Haiti for sex with young men and they are prepared to pay. They thus locate themselves as women beyond the bounds of white, middle-class, heterosexual respectability, because buying sex breaks into the ideal of Western romantic love. Engaging with the necropower of sex tourism and that of the state, I argue that nationalist redemption does not lie in transracial intimacy and that a decolonial reading of romance is necessary in order to take account of the politics of choosing to die as a critical response to racism, colonialism, class oppression, and sexual abuse.

Necropower, Love/Sex, Desire

In Remember Me?, the opening scene of the movie, two hours after she arrives Brenda goes to the beach looking for Legba. She finds him lying on the sand with his eyes closed:
BRENDA: LEGBA:

Remember me? Sure. Been here long? BRENDA: I just got here. LEGBA: All alone? BRENDA: Yes. LEGBA: So you came for some fun? BRENDA: Yes.

Three years earlier, when she was forty-five, she had had her first orgasm with Legba. The words alone and fun negotiate her sexual desire for young black male flesh and form the basis of what I call the love/sex contract, drawing from Ellens words. There is thus an agentic ownership of a sexual desire that she has journeyed to Haiti to satisfy and such transracial sexual desire disidentifies from white heterosexuality. None of the beach boys are represented as machos but only as romantic, sensitive, and eager to please. Examples of this are Legba brushing Ellens hair and posing nude for her to photograph. The boys youth, race, cheapness, and controllable masculinity are what make them desirable. Brenda deals with her desire for youth in her camera-facing vignette in which she talks about her seduction of Legba. When Brenda approaches Legba, fifteen, asleep on the beach he could just as well be a dead body washed up on the shore, indicating what he in fact later becomes. This makes the sexual-economic exchange already necropolitical. Ellen talks about Legba to Albert (Lys Ambroise), after Legba is killed by Colonel Beauvaiss henchman, Frank (Guiteau Nestant), and shows her sexual desire for him that she couches in terms of death, emptiness, and pain: God, he was beautiful. I could watch him for hours. He was so beautiful. He could make me come without touching me. Sometimes I thought I would die. My body was emptied. Thats why I would have done anything to keep

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him, to have him with me. Id think of him with his pals making fun of me and the other women. But I didnt mind. I was never afraid of pain. She doesnt talk about love or romance, only sex, desire for black male youth and beauty, and the momentary death of eroticism and orgasm. After Legbas death Ellen leaves for Boston, but Brendas search for youth, desire, and love drive her to continue the Caribbean journey, as she has no husband or home anymore. We know in the final scene that she will continue consuming young black mens bodies on her journey but that transracial romance will fail in the Caribbean.2 Desiring youth means that love is less about a romance between equals and more about a market in available bodies. The location must be in a marginal space, as Brenda makes clear in her list of other Caribbean nations she will visit and savor. The only proviso is that young black men must be available for sale. We get momentary glimpses of the poverty, danger, and politics of the young mens lives in Baby Doc Duvaliers Haiti. For example, in the films opening sequence Albert, the hotel restaurant manager, waits for Brenda at the airport in Port-au-Prince. A Haitian woman (MarieLaurence Hrard) who once had a husband who was a sanitary inspector but was arrested and subsequently disappeared, offers Albert her fifteen-year-old daughter (Vanessa Michel). Albert refuses and enacts a model of responsible masculinity that shows his political awareness that emerges later in the film. The woman offers her daughter because being young and beautiful, one does not stand a chance in Haiti, and she is worried that she will be killed and her daughter abducted. Death also breaks into the beach idyll as Legba refuses Ellens offer of a passport out of Haiti, even though he knows that this means certain death at Franks hands. Subsequently, Albert discovers Legbas body and that of his young female confidante (Anotte Saint Ford), naked on the beach where Frank has dumped them. This highlights a state of exception in Baby Doc Duvaliers Haiti, where forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice and terror.3 The women do not critique state terror, even when Legba is killed, although the film comments throughout on necropower, that is, the politics of poverty, repression, corruption, and death in Haiti.4 The womens refusal to acknowledge their role in this makes the lives of the young men they engage with unnarratable within the dominant erotic scheme of sex tourisms love/sex for sale as romance.

3 4

Whether love turns out to be requited or not, whether the colonized lover is male or female, outcomes seem to be roughly the same: the lovers are separated, the European is reabsorbed by Europe and the non-European dies an early death. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 97. A similar point is also made by Dina Sherzer in her analysis of colonial and postcolonial French films: Transracial physical pleasure and attraction do exist, but the meetings have to occur clandestinely and in a marginal place where reality is suspended, and they do not lead to a durable relationship. Race Matters and Matters of Race: Interracial Relationships in Colonial and Postcolonial Films, in Dina Sherzer, ed., Cinema, Colonialism, and Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 239. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15, no. 1 (2003): 39. See ibid., 1140.

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Romance, Antiromance, Decolonial Romance

The only Haitian man in the film who speaks at length is Albert, who protests at having to serve American tourists because his grandfather, who fought against the American occupation in 1915, would not have approved. Alberts thoughts are our only vision of the national pride and resistance to American imperialism that existed in Haiti. However, viewed from the lens of necropolitics, Legbas death also speaks the decolonial resistance of refusing to serve tourists any longer.5 This is not to say that the black bodys vulnerability writes against the colonial project and produces the possibility for social and cultural emancipation.6 Rather, the intertwining of state necropower with sex tourism means that as an object of desire, objectification, and abuse, Legbas humanity is recognized only through grief of his death. The womens momentary grief for Legba makes us aware that we are interconnected, related to each other, that we do not exist as singular sealed monads. Our bodies, our skins, are porous and open to somebody elses feelings.7 Through grief rather than romantic love, affect engages the potential for change in the powerful contexts of the systematic dehumanization of sex tourism. These older white North American women reject white mens bodies and their expectations and seek out love/sex in the Caribbean with young black men. Rather than seeing their love/sex with young black men as the seduction and romance that they perform in the film, we should instead read it as violence and domination because of the necropower in which sex tourism is entwined. There is, thus, more to reading love/sex than looking at how romances explore gender tensions and offer utopian possibilities for women, because the white Western romance is a deeply colonial, heteronormative text.8 Thus, conventional romance formulas, such as those outlined by Janice Radway and Tania Modleski, cannot be used for understanding the historical and contemporary realities of the Caribbean.9 This is so because neither the sexual violence of slavery nor the ideology of imperialism can be written out of understanding romance.10 In this essay, Heading South is read as a decolonial romance.11 This reading arises from the alter/native agency of necropolitics produced by Legbas choice to resist through his own

According to Mbembe, necropolitics is the subjugation of life to the power of death (ibid., 39). Decolonial thought springs from the work of the following, among others: early-twentieth-century W.E.B. DuBois; mid-twentieth-century Aim Csaire and Frantz Fanon; late-twentieth-century to early-twenty-first-century Gloria Anzalda, Lewis Gordon, Emma Perez, Chela Sandoval, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7. 6 Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 16. 7 Encarnacin Gutirrez-Rodrguez, Migration, Domestic Work, Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor (New York: Routledge, 2010), 147. 8 Corrine Squire, Can an HIV-Positive Woman Find True Love? Romance in the Stories of Women Living with HIV, Feminism and Psychology 13, no. 1 (2003): 77. 9 See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1991; and Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Routledge, 1985). 10 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 5. 11 See also Gutirrez-Rodrguez, Migration, Domestic Work, Affect; Maldonado-Torres, Against War; and Shirley Anne Tate, Not All the Women Want to Be White: Decolonizing Beauty Studies, in Encarnacin Gutirrez Rodrguez, Manuela 5

35 July 2011 Shirley Tate | 47

death.12 His sacrifice introduces coloniality and the relation between master and slave as axes of reflection in the evaluation of the meaning behind certain expressions of human reality, where the master is both the Haitian elite and US/white imperialism embodied by the sex tourists. Legbas life and death bring out the pathologies of existence in contexts marked by the geopolitical extension of the relationship between master and slave. Further, a decolonial reading of romance opens up the space for thinking about the subversive power of death, when it is recognized as a fundamental act of altericity through which a subject struggles for the liberation of the damns.13 Legbas choice of death rather than Ellens white rescue is itself a critical response to racism, colonialism, class oppression, and sexual abuse that has been repeatedly articulated in the Caribbean since the beginning of European colonialism and transracial intimacies. When transracial intimacies between black men and white women have been central to the plot in the twentieth-century anticolonial work of writers such as George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and Dany Laferrire, nationalist redemptive scripts have been based on male sexual prowess and sexual conquest of the white female body to prove not only the virility but the viability of black mens socio-political power. Decolonial romance critiques this position because of the operation of necropower, while being mindful of Donette Franciss intervention in reading sexual citizenship in Caribbean fiction written by women as antiromance. Antiromance rewrites the heterosexual love plot, rethinks alternative ways of belonging to the nation, and creates counterarchival sources to replot history, and there is no normative coupling within a script of sexual abuse.14 These categories relate to the lives of the young black women in the filmthe fifteen-year-old who was offered to Albert, and Legbas confidante, who was killedand also to decolonial romance. However, the difference lies in the importance of death as a site of both subjection and critical agency. It is through death that transracial love and coupling are critiqued and rewritten, a recognized claim to the nation is made, and an archive on sociopolitical power at the level of savoir des gens is constructed through grief/ungrievability.15 Legbas necropolitical agency emerges in his choice of death rather than Ellens rescue, through which emerges his position as a subject who resists both state terror and white female race and class sovereignty. His refusal to engage with the capitulation of the male love object and the happily ever after of white Western romance speaks back, from a position of alterity, to romance as affective, equal, a location of recognition as human and a source of liberation. Such refusal produces decolonial affect that shows that the spirit of the Haitian revolution is

Boatca, and Srgio Costa, eds., Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 195210. 12 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995). 13 Maldonado-Torres, Against War, 15, 245, 252. 14 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 9, 6. 15 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).

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still alive in this beach boy as much as in his older compatriot, Albert.16 This is a spirit that says that he would rather die a free man in Haiti than to be an unfree black man in the United States, domesticated by white love. The white Western romance needs to be historicized, therefore, to highlight its colonial continuities as the context for the decolonial disidentifications by black subjects involved in transracial love/sex intimacies within the necropower of sex tourism.17

Historicizing the Regulation of Transracial Romance

The continuing denial of black-white desire, love, and romance extends from colonial antimiscegenation regimes encompassing laws, jurisprudence and social norms aimed at regulating the intimate sphere by the creation and manipulation of racial boundaries.18 Love and romance were not just about affect, but about power, surveillance, maintaining racial dominance, and the management of life: biopolitics, in effect.19 Two discourses during slavery and colonialism that kept white supremacy in place were that of the intense desire of black women for white men, as Frantz Fanon himself shows, and that of the black man as a potential rapist of white women.20 These discourses existed alongside the desire of white men for black womens bodies and the policing, denial, and refusal of white womens desire for black men. Colonial authorities were obsessed with moral, sexual, and racial affronts to European identity. Europeanness was class and race specific, but also gender coded. For example, in the Dutch East Indies, a European man could, without necessarily losing status, live with or marry an Asian, who would be given native legal status; a European woman could not.21 Bourgeois bodies also defined their healthy sexuality in racial and gender terms in the Caribbean. White women also entered Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers and some had relationships with black men in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.22 By the mideighteenth century sexual relations between black men and white women were strictly proscribed by custom if not by law.23 If these relationships came to light, the woman would be a social outcast and the man executed. White women, regardless of class origins, were elevated to a superior, respectable status that had to be maintained, even though there were sexual relations between black men and white women. These early transracial intimacies were erased from colonial memory, leading to the conclusion that white desire for black bodies was male,
16 See Gutirrez-Rodrguez, Migration, Domestic Work, Affect. 17 Daniela Flesler, New Racism, Intercultural Romance, and the Immigration Question in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Hispanic Cinemas 1, no. 2 (2004): 10318. 18 Debra Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies: The Regulation of Interracial Relationships in North America, Social and Legal Studies 18, no. 3 (2009): 35371. 19 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 1997), 23964. 20 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (1967; repr., London: Pluto, 1986). 21 Anne Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 22 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 2. 23 Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 16501838 (Kingston: Heinemann, 1990), 112.

35 July 2011 Shirley Tate | 49

which was in the interest of empire in constructing colonial citizens.24 Antigua was the only British colony in the Caribbean to legislate against miscegenation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These laws sought to control the growth of the mixed race population born from liaisons between white men and their slaves. In the French Caribbean colonies the Code Noir protected enslaved women, and in 1695, for example, the king imposed a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar if a man was convicted of being the father of a mulatto. In the Spanish Caribbean under the Siete Partidas, enslaved women could be freed in compensation for being abused, violated, or forced into prostitution by their owners.25 In European colonies, historical evidence shows institutional concern with the regulation of interracial marriages and the existence of mixed-race progeny.26 The colonial order coupled sexuality, class, and race in defining what it meant to be a respectable citizen. Within this racialized economy of love/sex, European men and women were respectable if they steered their desires toward legitimate paternity, intensive maternal care, family, and conjugal love. European women in the colonies were officially encased in a model of passionless domesticity, mythologized as the desired object of colonized men, dissociated from the sexual desires of European men, and disallowed from being desiring subjects.27 Transracial romance has always been politically explosive in the United States.28 Indeed, antimiscegenation laws established gender and racial identity norms from as early as 1664 in the colony of Maryland.29 Laws regulating interracial sexuality predate the Declaration of Independence by more than a century, and colonial records indicate that interracial sex was a punishable offence as early as 1630.30 Interracial sex was often a felony whose penalties varied state by state.31 In the preCivil War United States, Massachusetts, among other states, repealed its laws, and in the aftermath of the war the laws continued to be repealed across the country, with the exception of Georgia and several other states.32 This formidable antimiscegenation regime lasted until the mid-1950s, and some states included these provisions in their constitutions.33 After the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan was unofficially created to regulate interracial romance and sexuality, leading to the public lynchings of black men in the early twentieth century.34 When World WarII began, more than half of the states had laws prohibiting interracial marriage between blacks and nonblacks. But the war brought black bodies into contact with white bodies. As a result of transracial workplaces and European
24 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 2. 25 Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 28. 26 Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies, 355. 27 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, 182, 183. 28 See Alex Lubin, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 19451954 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), xii. 29 See Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies. 30 At one time or other 41 of the 50 states have enacted such legislation, encompassing restrictions not just against blacks, but also Asians, Native Hawaiians, and in some cases simply all non-Whites. Ibid., 354. 31 Ibid., 357. 32 I specifically mention Massachusetts and Georgia here because Ellen was from Boston and Brenda from Savannah. 33 Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies, 360. 34 See Lubin, Romance and Rights.

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and Asian battlefields, transracial love/sex developed and threatened to undermine the United States racial order, and the postwar years brought both the black struggle for desegregation and a battle over the right to be intimate across the color line, with that intimacy involving white bodies being the most troubling.35 It was not until the Supreme Court found Virginias antimiscegenation law unconstitutional in its 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision that heterosexual transracial couples could marry freely in every state. Antimiscegenation laws were not enacted in Canada though an informal and extra legal regime ensured that the social taboo of racial intermixing was kept to a minimum.36 Transracial intimacy was also of interest in postcolonial Haiti. However, in contrast to colonial authorities, the nations first emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who wrote the 1805 constitution, included a provision that made white women and their children part of the nation. He thus made visible the fact of consensual transracial sexual and familial relationships and installed the black patriarch as the symbolic father of the multiracial nation.37 This provision remained part of the Haitian constitution until 1918. This is the colonial and postcolonial context of the consumption of the Caribbean by white North American women buying transracial love/sex in romance tourism in 1970s Haiti.

Consuming the Caribbean: Buying Love/Sex

In Heading South affective tourism creates a sense of place that is both nowhere and somewhere at Petite Anse in 1970s Haiti.38 The date and place are both significant, since it was only after 1967 in the United States that all antimiscegenation laws became illegal and their informal and extra-legal regime would still have been active.39 This was approximately a decade before the film was set, and women had already been travelling to Haiti to buy love/ sex, free from the constraints of laws and mores. In the scene Sex and Love, Ellen locates the easy slippage between love and buying sex with young men when she locates herself as crazy about them as well as having a pragmatic approach to affect and sexual gratification: I am crazy about lovesex and love, I am not very sure anymore. I always told myself that when I am older Id pay young men to love me. I just didnt know it would come so fast. I have no problem with it. In the nowhere-somewhere that was also the first black republic in the New World, a postcolony of the United States where the dollar was king, a place of extreme poverty and the despotism of the Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorship where paradise comes at a price, we see the necropolitics of sex tourism.
35 Ibid., xiv. 36 The Indian Act in Canada was designed to regulate interracial [Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal] marital relations and the categorization of mixed-race offspring. If women married non-Aboriginals they and their children would be denied Indian status, whereas the opposite was the case for men who married non-Aboriginal women (Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies, 354). I mention Canada because Sue was from Montreal. 37 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 2. 38 Lynne Pearce, Popular Romance and Its Readers, in Corinne Saunders, ed., A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 533. 39 Thompson, Racial Ideas and Gendered Intimacies, 354.

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Here love/sex is bought from racialized and sexualized objects whose young bodies are conquered and dominated. As Jasbir Puar reminds us, The sexual is always already inscribed in necropolitical power grids implicating corporeal conquest, colonial domination and death.40 Necropolitics shapes Legba, a character named for the orisha, the seducer of women, the giver of eroticized life who governs the threshold to the spirit world and who as master of the crossroads can help you find the way if you are lost.41 As such he is an important symbol of transracial love/sex at the crossroads of tourism and on the liminal location of the beach. His role in death is to show Ellen that she still loves and to free Brenda to love other black men through showing the other side of paradise where state necropower shapes black bodies as disposable, as always-already ghosts embedded in the social and material life of Haiti. Sex tourism also places young black mens bodies as disposable even in the face of love, because their lives do not register within the realm of legal status.42 Legbas death only registers within the realm of affect, the momentary grief felt by Ellen and Brenda, the sorrow felt by Albert for the death of one so young, the strange ungrievability of his death as life gets back to normal for the women almost as soon as his body is removed from the beach.43 Like other parts of the Caribbean, Haiti had a long history of creation in the Anglo-US imaginary as a place for travel and consumption of the bodies of racialized, forbidden others:
The Caribbean has been repeatedly imagined and narrated as a tropical paradise in which the land, plants, resources, bodies and cultures of its inhabitants are open to be invaded and occupied, bought, moved, used, viewed and consumed in various ways. It is represented as the perpetual Garden of Eden in which visitors can indulge all their desires and find a haven for relaxation, rejuvenation and sensuous abandon.44

The Caribbean is the location of escapist tourism and the site of danger from criminals, unstable governments, disease and desperate boat people.45 This Anglo-American view of the Caribbean is based on a history of slavery, colonialism, and travel writing that also led to the development of Caribbeanist discourse in France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Within Anglo-US Caribbeanist discourse the Caribbean is a place of dangerous hybridisation or intermixing of East and West.46 By the late eighteenth century it came to represent a site of potential racial degeneracy for Europeans because of racial mixing. European and North American travel writers used Africanist discourses in relation to Haiti, a black republic since 1791, when Toussaint Louverture led the rebellion. Haiti was associated with Vodou, cannibalism, and barbarism in nineteenth-century travel writing. By
40 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 112. 41 Elizabeth McAlister, Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 42 Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 43 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), and Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). 44 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), 13. 45 Ibid., 108. 46 Ibid., 110.

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the early twentieth century these had become powerful explanations for Haitian failures of self-government and were used to justify military intervention such as the American occupation of Haiti from July 1915 to August 1934, and later occupationsin September 1994, to return President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and remove the military rule of General Raoul Cdras, and to aid Aristides departure in 2004 (although under the United Nations banner, the United States was the prime mover here).47 In the final scene of Heading South Brenda, after tasting Haiti, decides to keep traveling south. She is on a boat and as she looks back toward a fast-disappearing Haiti, we hear her thoughts:
Of course I wont go back home. Besides, I dont have a house anymore or a husband. I want nothing to do with men from the North. I want to visit other islands in the Caribbean: Cuba, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Martinique, Trinidad, Bahamas. They have such lovely names. I want to know them all.

Her thoughts demonstrate that through tourism the untouched primeval nature of people, flora, and landscape is repeatedly staged to perform as paradise so as to play out imperialist fantasies.48 Brendas desire to know all the islands is related to her rejection of Northern men. This incites us as viewers to take part by joining her in travel as she consumes black mens bodies, but from a safe distance, from a site in which tourists do not die.49 Like earlier travel writers Brenda is now traveling by boat through the islands. Her movement as a sex tourist fixes her through racial boundary marking as white, liberal, liberated, and those she encounters as backward, uncivilized, primitive, exotic, though romanticized, others.50 The ongoing politics of racialized sexual encounter in the Caribbean suggest that slaverys abolition did not end this arena of conflict over bodily control.51 In the late nineteenth century a new form of tourist consumption developed around the power relations of bodily proximity and domination in white Western consumption of black bodies. This can be traced from nineteenth-century tours through the islands to contemporary package-holidays and sex tourism. The consumer now goes to the Caribbean to use embodied services in direct co-presence with the black laboring sexual and service body.52 Objectification of naturalized black bodies in the film, as in travel writing, is linked to sexual interest in them.53 Sex tourism developed initially in those areas that had been rest-and-recreation spaces for the US, UK, French, Spanish, and Dutch militaryPort-au-Prince (Haiti), Kingston (Jamaica), and Havana (Cuba)all of which were at different times the epitome of tropical decadence and pleasure.54 Now sun/fun seekers replace bananas/sugar, since tourism is the top foreign exchange earner.
47 See ibid. 48 Ibid., 122. 49 Line taken from the film. 50 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 136. 51 Ibid., 136. 52 See Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, Female Sex Tourism: A Contradiction in Terms, Feminist Review 83, no. 1 (2006): 4259. 53 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 161. 54 Ibid., 163.

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Jacqueline Sanchez Taylors research highlights the prevalence of male prostitution in many Caribbean countries in the guise of romance tourism. Here, working-class men and boys are disempowered vis--vis wealthier tourists, whether men or women, and tourism slips easily into sex tourism. A key aspect of sex tourism is the availability of sexualized, racialized others at a low price so that tourists buy different forms of embodied racisms.55 In what sense does the contemporary global economy continue to consume Haitian bodies? Even before the last devastating earthquake, as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere Haiti has become synonymous with poverty, disease, political corruption, and AIDSthe latter just the most recent in a long series of diseases attributed to Haiti when the Center for Disease Control said in the 1980s that Haiti was the source of HIV infection. For example, in the sixteenth-century Europeans insisted that syphilis originated there and was brought back by Columbuss sailors. There is evidence that AIDS came to Haiti with the sex tourism that proliferated in the Caribbean in the 1970s.56 However, the United States shored up its boundaries by ignoring the sex tourism of its nationals and instead created a narrative of blame for Haitian others. Sex tourism disguised as love and romance makes us notice the intertwining of biopolitics and necropolitics in sex-work colonies.

Biopolitics and Necropolitics in Sex-Work Colonies

Ellen, Brenda, and Sue reap the financial, emotional, sexual, legal, and status independence that was a recent legacy of feminism. Through leaving white men behind at home as sexual and relationship partners they are transgressing the enduring rules of white heterosexual patriarchy established during colonial times. In postcolonial times they break the heterosexual colonial rules for white women by having sex with black men away from home without losing their status as white citizens. This undermines white heterosexual patriarchy, since the black male bodies once denied them during colonialism are now theirs to take penalty-free, as part of their privilege as North American liberated women. Even if they are not rich or at least middle class, they can still have their black beach boy once a year on holiday and locate this either as a romance or the missionary position of philanthropy toward black men, even if only for a week or two. In their beach bubble, their holiday romances with these young men are just an acceptable part of the beach scene. Sue is the only one who speaks of love. Brenda speaks of her first sexual encounter with Legba three years earlier, while Ellen speaks of Legba in terms of being unable to find anything close to him in Boston. There is a script of gender, race, power, and age in each of these womens stories that is elaborated as the story unfolds. This becomes clear in the scene Sex and Love. The women are eating dinner together in the hotel restaurant. Sue tells Ellen that there are many men there who would find her attractive. Ellen, who admits to being fifty-five, makes it plain that she
55 See Sanchez Taylor, Female Sex Tourism. 56 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 168.

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doesnt find these older white men attractive, and makes her position in dating/relationships in Boston very clear by saying, If youre over forty and not as dumb as a fashion model, the only guys you interest are natural-born losers or husbands whose wives are cheating on them. As the conversation continues Sue says that she would never date black men in Montreal, even though where she works there are at least ten, whereas in Haiti the men are very different; Brenda wonders whether this difference is related to the sun or the men being closer to nature, but then states that Haitian men are more gracious, and Ellen then makes the statement used as this essays epigraph. The scene tells of the womens complicity in the racialized power relations of a postcolonial market in young, black, poor mens bodies for sex in which as sovereign they choose who has a love/sex use value and who is disposable. These men are cheap commodities a dime a dozenand can be bought either with cash, or with gifts, if one is too shy to be frank about paying for love/sex. It also tells of the racism of the everyday worlds which they inhabitBoston, Savannah, Montrealtheir own racism toward black men at home and their exoticization of Haitians who are different because of the sun, closer to nature and, because they are stripped to the waist, ready for sexual consumption and disposal. Use and disposal reminds us of the intertwining of the biopolitics and necropolitics of love/sex in the postcolonial market in racialized, young, poor mens bodies. Ellen illustrates the slippage between love and sex in her encounters with young black men in Haiti when she asserts that she is not sure if it is love or sex that she is crazy about anymore. That is, she is no longer sure what the difference is between love and sex. This is a key point raised by Sanchez Taylor in her work on romance tourism in the Caribbean, in which tourist women feel they are falling in love, not making a money-for-sex transaction. This love/sex binary illustrates how sex, love, power, domination, and desire are intertwined across gender, race, age, and class lines. Within the film the impossibility of love/romance is asserted through reference to the inequality within which love/sex is mediated as we see in Legbas death. Further, the only women Legba seems to be attached to are his confidante and his mother (Violette Vincent), to whom he gives the money he earns as a sex worker and also visits when his life is at risk. This indicates that the only women who can really give him recognition as human are his countrywomen. Heading South points to the inadequacy, corruption, and falsity of an investment in keeping white heteropatriarchy, racial, and economic power in place. White heteropatriarchy is shown as corrupt and defunct by the womens words in their vignettes and their sexual choices in the young black men over whom they exert both racial and economic power. In this land where tourists dont die, their gender does not dispel their racial and economic power even while they break the miscegenation taboo of buying sex from black men. Sexual conquest of white women is not redemptive for the black beach boys, because being paid for sex situates them as sex workers not lovers, potential partners, or respectable citizens.

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The fact of the women seeking sex with young, black boys is what gives white heteropatriarchy a jolt. After all, why should the women have a fat, white, middle-aged lover when they can have a young, black, lithe, even underaged one? The sexual desires and practices of the women are never questioned, and pedophilia only seems to be a taboo in the case of Eddy (Jackenson Pierre Olmo Diaz), an apprentice beach boy. His youth and therefore lack of suitability is made clear by Legba as he interrupts Eddys dance on the beach with Brenda, and also by Ellens refusal of his advances. Within the Western romantic ideal, active female sexuality is only possible within monogamous, married heterosexuality.57 However, monogamy and marriage do not enter the heterosexuality of the nowhere-somewhere. Ellen acknowledges that Legba also has other lovers, such as the German woman who gave him a gold necklace and Brenda with whom she shares him. The only points at which marriage becomes an issue are in the last scenes between Legba and Ellen and Ellen and Brenda. The final scene between Ellen and Legba occurs after Legba is chased by Frank, who is armed with a gun, and everyone is worried that Legba has been killed. Eddy tells Ellen that Legba has returned. She drags him away from his discussion with Brenda and takes him to the kitchen to speak to him alone. Ellen wants to help him, so she offers him the possibility of getting out of there tomorrow with a passport; he could live with her, walk the streets fearless, he wouldnt have to work. They would be together forever, as in the Western romantic script, but Legba refuses white female rescue from other black men and, though afraid, chooses to face whatever comes next. Ellen has revealed her love for him but Legba rejects it. Ellen, who speaks about being in it for love/sex, could also have become involved as a way out of the loneliness of middle-aged spinsterhood in Boston and the boredom of her life teaching snobby girls until her next trip to Haiti. Ellen shows us two of the key features of romantic love in the Western tradition. One is that the dominant manhere, read dominant white womanis economically solvent and capable of rescuing his lover. This puts Ellen in the position of a masculine protagonist in this game of life and privilege, as opposed to Legbas status as an economically weaker, racially inferior, and therefore emasculated love object, though one with the agency to choose to die rather than live as a sex/love/romance slave. The other key feature that she shows is that her love for Legba is unique, exclusive, and nontransferable. How interesting that one who is so sexually open and so scathing toward men could then fall in love with an eighteen-year-old, poor, black beach boy whom she pays to fulfill her yearning for sexual excitement, eroticism, and being desired. She does not perform the norm of love becoming sex between two adults but rather of sex becoming unrequited love for an unequal beach boy. The defining end point of this romance is that Ellens love and her attempted white rescue fail because Legba exercises his agency to choose Haiti and death.
57 Pearce, Popular Romance and Its Readers, 535.

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What is also interesting about the scene Sex and Love is race and how this is used to distinguish between desirable black men (Haitian) and undesirable others (US/Canada). This is a deeply troubling racism in which black men at home, who are always already known to be too black, are separated out from those in the islands. Ellen also shows this when she tells Brenda that she is trying to make Legba look like a black man from Harlem because of the shirt that she bought him. She translates this into French for Legba, who then asks whether or not she likes men from Harlem and Ellen says no. There is an exoticism here that one would expect, since the boys are commodified alongside an awareness that it is only in this location that youth can be bought as cheaply. Exoticism and carnality go hand in hand with racial power relations based on economic power and white privilege. This is a privilege in which information about the boys lives is unnecessary for the Htel Petite Anse bubble, because all that matters is that your needs are satisfied. In terms of love/sex there are differences in the extent to which women endorse and identify with romantic cultural scripts.58 Ellen, for example, only speaks of love and sex, and berates Brenda after Legbas death: Poor Brenda. She is in pain, such pain. What were you thinking of, Brenda? Marrying him? Taking him back to Savannah, Georgia? Everything was alright before you came here with your syrupy idea of romantic love. What is interesting here is that Ellens versioning of Brendas feelings and motivations underlay her own last interaction with Legba. So in this way she shows that although she only speaks of love/sex, she has a romantic notion of marriage and living with the man you love. This is an inversion of the usual approach to romantic love and its cultural scripts, because the women here would depend on men not for economic stability or social prestige but only for romantic love, sexual gratification, and emotional intimacy, perhaps even domestic labor if they stayed home. However, their labor would be cast primarily as an affective one. In this postcolonial inversion of the romantic script, it is the womens race and class privilege that casts these young men as wonderful but weak and in need of nurturance/protection, thus reinforcing their lower status relative to themselves. The fact of buying the young mens bodies and affective labor in terms of care also relegates these men to the submissive position as these women can get what they desireyouth, love, and desire itself.59 For Legba it is only through death that submission ceases.

Choosing to Die as a Decolonial Moment

Through choosing to die Legba speaks back to the Haitian death worlds of sex tourism on the beach at Petite Anse and the nation, within the site of exception of Haiti as a proxy colony of the United States.60 Here, sovereignty dictates who is disposable and who is not.
58 Laurie A. Rudman and Kimberley Fairchild, The F Word: Is Feminism Compatible with Beauty and Romance?, Psychology of Women Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2007): 125. 59 See Gutirrez-Rodrguez, Migration, Domestic Work, Affect. 60 New and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. Mbembe, Necropolitics, 39.

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Frank shows this by killing Legba and dumping his body on the beach at Petite Anse, along with that of his young female confidante, who had been taken by Colonel Beauvais, kept as his mistress under Franks guard, and then killed. Like the fifteen-year-old girl being offered to Albert at the beginning of the film, this young womans death illustrates that the beach boys do exercise a degree of agency and masculine power not available to their female counterparts. For both young women, their beauty and gender render them helpless and totally at the mercy of others. They can exercise no sexual agency because they have no citizenship rights and no sexual freedom. In contrast, the beach boys can freely move from the resort to the city, fearlessly play soccer on the street, and have access to women tourists without endangering their reputations. However, even such male spatial and sexual freedom can be short-lived in death worlds. In death worlds the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption are blurred. Legbas death is the very instant in which he exercises agency: his power to choose to exist in his present conditions or to leave behind his existence as a twentieth-century slave without a home, without rights over his own body, and without political status.61 In a coercive state in which people are killed with impunity, the relationship between Baby Docs regime and US imperialism and military power positions these young people as living dead, disposable, whether as objects of sexual desire or failed citizens.62 Further, they have no sexual citizenship that guarantees protection from the violence of sex tourism or forced sex.63 In Legbas death we see a decolonial moment as he asserts his humanity by disidentifying from white North American privilege and its positioning of him as the exotic, desirable, but servile other. Indeed, his death shows the hollowness of the love/sex relationships that he engaged in, because the women knew nothing about his life or his particular circumstances. White Western heterosexual romances affirmation of personal happiness and fulfillment, home, reproductive possibility and genealogical continuity has little or no possibility of becoming reality when the men are young, poor, black, and Haitian, and the women are white, middle-aged, and North American.64 The womens lack or refusal of political awareness enables them to easily deny their racial and economic power over Haitian boys and see their relationships as friendship, love, and desire, as merely deeply affective. The deaths of Legba and his confidante unmask not only the inequality of sexual relations but also the racialized and gendered inequalities of the nation-state and how state coercion enables exploitative forms of intimacy in contemporary times. Legbas death highlights the futility of sexual conquests that seek to validate black male power and a romance that valorizes a certain future of love and security with a perfect, fetishized love object. Romance is always already affected by race and its (im)possibilities

61 Ibid., 40, 21. 62 Ibid., 39. 63 Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, 4. 64 Squire, Can an HIV-Positive Woman Find True Love?, 79.

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in terms of transracial intimacy. Decolonial affect as a speaking-back to the white Western romance is not only an outcome of the assertion of black agency in death but also the performative iteration of the (im)possibility of transracial intimacy in sex tourism as mutually affective, equal, and liberating.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous referees and Encarnacin Gutirrez-Rodrguez for their insightful comments.