Volume 3, No. 25: Read (Queer) Caribbean + Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cake

Greetings, book and treat people! I spent most of the weekend rereading (and writing about) Alexander Chee’s masterful memoir-in-essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. It’s been hard to settle back into working after such an intense reading (and writing and thinking and feeling) experience. The thunderstorms have helped!

I’ll be closing out the June Books for Trans Rights Fundraiser at the end of the week, so if you’ve been waiting to get some books, now’s your chance! A few of my favorites are still available, including Freedom House by KB Brookins and Milk Tongue by Irène P. Mathieu, two poetry collections I can’t stop thinking about.

In other news: Books & Bakes is just over two years old! It’s changed a lot in the past two years, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it keeps changing. One idea I’m tossing around right now is a weekly curated booklist of new queer releases for paying subscribers. Is this something you’d pay for? Please let me know in this one-question survey!

#ReadCaribbean is an initiative founded by Cindy (@bookofcinz), a Jamaican reader and all-around book person who uses her platform to celebrate Caribbean lit and encourages everyone else to do the same! Five years ago she launched Read Caribbean Month, which happens every June. My own foray into Caribbean lit has been beautifully influenced by Kiki (@ifthisisparadise)—in fact, all three of these books are ones I doubt I would have read if she hadn’t recommended them!

I finished Cereus Blooms at Night last week and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s one of the best queer books I’ve ever read. So, in honor of this book and many others I have loved, here’s a Read Caribbean newsletter.

The Books

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid (Fiction, 1985)

I admit I hadn’t given much thought to Jamaica Kincaid until I joined Kiki’s We Read Jamaica Kincaid readalong, which has been an incredible experience so far. Reading her work has been a joy. Kincaid is an amazing writer; her books are thorny and surprising and often quite funny. Reading her is also opening up so many doorways in my brain about queerness and how we talk about it. Many of her books (including Annie John) are not labeled as queer. Kiki has pointed out, in her newsletters and in conversations we’ve had, that a lot of academic critique hasn’t adequately engaged with the queerness that is explicit (and implicit) in the text. This is just one reason I love reading in community so much.

There is so much going on in this brilliant 150-page book: identity formation, grief, queer self-discovery, the ways that culture, geography, and family shape (and sometimes warp) a person’s understanding of the world. Annie is a fierce mess who speaks her mind, who knows herself, who wants and longs and struggles. She falls in love with a classmate, Gwen, and later has similar feelings about another girl. There are so many passages in which she imagines a queer future. Dreaming about a girl she has a crush on, she says: “I took her to an island, where we lived together forever, I supposed, and fed on wild pigs and sea grapes.” In a moment with Gwen, she longs to be “sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires.”

The heart of the novel is Annie’s complicated relationship with her mother. It’s about the grief of that relationship breaking and changing. The relationships she has with other girls, for a time, are a site of ease and refuge away from that. These queer relationships and fantasies are one of the ways she begins to see a way into another kind of life. Queerness becomes portal and possibility and invention. In queerness, Annie is free to play and experiment. Her relationships with girls don’t have the same weight and heft that any potential relationship with a boy would have.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the weird false binary we (and I’m talking about my fellow white queers in the U.S.) like to uphold, that going through a phase—experimenting with queer relationships and growing out of them—is bad, while being loudly and only and always queer is good. What rot. This is not the way it works. Kincaid’s books open up so many more interesting avenues of understanding and thinking about sexuality, desire, girlhood, identity, and change.

Queerness doesn't have to “stick” to be real. It can be loose. Kincaid blurs the lines between queer desire and close friendship between women, and it’s okay, the lines can be blurry. Queerness can be a question, a possibility model, an idyll, a fantasy. It can be forever or it can be a passing moment. It is not ever only one thing.

Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (Fiction, 1996)

When I finished this book about a week ago, I thought, “Wow, that was maybe the best queer novel I have ever read. How I am going to write about it?” I am still trying to figure it out. I don’t think I can tackle the whole of this novel, its endless threads and depths, all the ways it plays with and excavates and reinvents queerness. I can’t take it on all at once. It’s too big. So I’ll just tackle one of its many pieces.

The novel is told, sort of and mostly, from the POV of Tyler, a nurse at the Paradise Alms House, a nursing home on an unnamed Caribbean island. He’s the only one who’s able and willing to take care of the newest resident, Mala Ramchandin, an old woman who everyone thinks is crazy because she doesn’t speak and she’s just be accused of murdering a man. Tyler and Mala see something in each other, some innate queer thing, and become close. Their closeness frees them both, in different ways, to become more themselves. The bond between them only becomes deeper and more complicated when someone from Mala’s past, and his trans son, Otoh, arrive to visit. These four characters form a sort of family unit, as Otoh and Tyler fall in love and Mala and Ambrose revisit old wounds. Tyler’s POV becomes Mala’s becomes her sister’s becomes Otoh’s, and slowly, Mala’s life story unfolds.

I learned after reading this novel that Shani Mootoo didn’t know the word trans when she wrote it in 1996. At first, I thought: Wow. How amazing that she wrote such empathetic, nuanced, and complicated trans and gender non-conforming characters without knowing the word. Two seconds later, my surprised vanished. This novel is steeped in a deep knowledge of queerness beyond language.

It’s in the ways the characters think of themselves, often apart from and in conflict with the expectations the world sets for them. It’s in the ways they see each other, the truths they recognize in each other. There is a bodily queer knowing in this book, in its lush sentences, in the way Mala thinks about and understands herself to be a part of nature, in the way that Otoh and Tyler make space for their differences and their sameness. It’s in the stacked stories, the polyphonic narration that slips from character to character, blurring the lines between past and present. It’s in the ways that stories of trauma are repeated, and in the specific healing the characters make for themselves and each other. Queerness is its own language in this novel. It shines out in a thousand messy ways: in the vastness of generational knowing and collective memory, the holiness of flowers, the beauty that comes from rot and decay, the uses of violence, the gender play, the wordless communication between Tyler and Mala. I don’t even know how to write about it. I could go on forever. It touched something star-deep inside me.

Perhaps Mala explains it best in this passage, in which she’s contemplating the decay of her garden:

The scent of decay was not offensive to her. It was the aroma of life refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was proof that noting truly ended, and she revelled in it as much as she did in the fragrance of cereus blossoms along the back wall of the house.

This book broke open for me everything I thought I knew about what makes a queer novel. It explodes all the labels and expands the possibilities of storytelling. It doesn’t stay inside the lines. I will be reading it again and again.

Kiki has written extensively about this book—about Mala, about cane and queerness, about Mootoo’s writing and more. I encourage you to check out her words.

The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo (Short Fiction, 2022)

This is a lovely collection of stories about (mostly) gay men in Trinidad, living their lives. It’s one of my favorite kinds of queer fiction: stories about ordinary life. Queer men navigating relationships, loss, family, jobs. There’s a quiet sureness underpinning the whole book—in the prose, in the specificity of the scenes, in the dialogue. Within the first few pages, I knew I was in the hands of a writer I could trust. I crave this feeling and cherish it whenever I encounter it.

The stories are lightly interconnected—someone’s hookup in one story is someone else’s boyfriend in another. Most of them take place in the Woodbrook neighborhood in Port of Spain, and the setting is so vivid and so beautifully rendered, with so many small details. I could feel so acutely the ways that place—the streets, the bars, the shops, that one cab driver, all the complicated geography we move in and among—shapes lives. It all felt especially poignant given the smallness of the queer community—the same people and places show up again and again.

There are a few heartbreaking stories with endings that will haunt me, as well as stories about how much easier it is to let go of yourself, to give in, than to fight and strive for what you want and/or need. There are a few gorgeous love stories that feel like small and perfect gifts. Also: it’s extremely funny!

Bagoo writes about domestic tenderness and the painful realities of queer life with equal power. It reminded me a lot of God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu, another favorite short story collection that perfectly balances joy and loss. It’s not just that Bagoo and Ifeakandu make space in their stories for the hard stuff and the really good stuff. It’s that they honor the multiplicity at the heart of queer life—often the hard stuff and the good stuff are messily intertwined.

The Bake

This week’s bake comes from my favorite baking cookbook, Snacking Cakes, which I will never stop baking from or shouting about because it’s perfect. And guess what?! Yossy Arefi has a NEW COOKBOOK COMING OUT! Snacking Bakes is coming out this fall and I cannot believe I just learned about it today. I can’t wait to make it my whole personality.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cake

I’ve made a ton of cakes from this cookbook, but for some reason I always skipped past this one. It just never sounded incredible to me, and I have no idea why, because now I’ve made it and I can tell you that it’s one of the best recipes in the book. I don’t even know what makes it so good. But it’s toasty and nutty and buttery and full of chocolate. The cinnamon and nutmeg are just right. I used maple sugar instead of brown sugar because I was out of brown sugar and had maple sugar leftover from Cookie Extravaganza. I enjoyed slices with breakfast (why not), after lunch, at teatime, and for dessert, obviously.

Worth It?

Yes! Don’t wait on this one.

The Bowl & The Beat

The Bowl: Panzanella with Buttery Zucchini & Herbs

Panzanella is the gift that keeps on giving. You can make it any season, with any veg, plus some cheese and herbs—winter squash and goat cheese, tomatoes and mozzarella, asparagus and Parmesan. It’s always delicious, because bread.

Drain a can of chickpeas and spread them out on a baking tray. Slice a small loaf of crusty bread into cubes and spread those out on the other half of the tray. Coat everything with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast at 400 for 10-15 minutes, just until the bread is golden and the chickpeas are starting to crisp up. Transfer to a large bowl.

Meanwhile, thinly slice 2-3 small zucchinis. Heat a few tablespoons of butter in a skillet and fry the zucchini on medium high heat until browned and golden, stirring once or twice. Add the juice of one lemon and a few teaspoons of mustard to the pan and stir to mix. Remove from the heat, let cool about 5 minutes, and add to the bowl with the bread and chickpeas.

Finely chop a bunch of fresh herbs—I used a big handful each of dill, parsley, and basil—and add them to the bowl. Crumble a block of feta and add that. Mix well. Taste and adjust seasonings. It’s tasty warm or at room temperature.

The Beat: The Secret Summer Promise by Keah Brown, read by Tamika Katon-Donegal

This is a YA novel about a girl with CP who’s determined to have the best summer ever, especially since she had to spend the pervious one recovering from surgery. So she makes a bucket list of summer activities to do with her bestie, Hailee…who she is sort of maybe in love with, oops. So far this is fun, but not especially memorable. Which is just fine—I’m not the target audience and I honestly wasn’t expecting it to rock my world. I’m always on the lookout for more books by and about queer disabled folks, and I enjoyed Brown’s essay collection, The Pretty One, so I’m happy to give this one a listen.

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

Two weeks ago I reviewed Pageboy, and if you follow me on Insta you might have heard my rant about the negative reviews it’s been getting on Goodreads. Guess what! Elliot Page doesn’t owe anyone a legible timeline, and I wrote a whole essay about it. I also made lists of some award-winning queer books you’ve probably never heard of and some of my favorite books of queer science and nature writing. My review of Lucky Red is up on BookPage. On AudioFile, I wrote about some of the queer audiobooks the newest Golden Voice narrators have performed.

Queer Your Year

News & Announcements

It’s time for the June raffle! This month’s prize is a beautiful collection of cards and stickers from Radical Emprints. You can submit your game card and find all the details here. You have until July 3 to submit. The winning prompts this month are: 3, 7, 12, 19, 23, 24, 28, and 34.

As always, don’t forget about the super fun prize packs! Everyone who submits a game card gets one, and they ship internationally. And please come join the Queer Your Year discord if you haven’t already! If you’re stuck on a prompt (or just want to chat about queer books), it’s the place to be.

Recs!

Prompt 20: A work of graphic nonfiction: I love graphic nonfiction so much! This is just a small selection of some of my favorites.

• Messy Roots by Laura Gao (Memoir)

• Fine by Rhea Ewing (Interviews about gender!)

• The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel (Memoir/exploration of fitness and exercise thorough history)

• Red Rock Baby Candy by Shira Spector (Parenting Memoir/a piece of art)

• Our Work is Everywhere by Syan Rose (Stories of queer healers, activists, and artists)

Prompt 31: Caribbean author: Since this newsletter’s theme is #ReadCaribbean, here are a few more recs! These are all books I’ve loved and reviewed here.

• At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid (Short Fiction)

• Antiman by Rajiv Mohabir (Memoir)

• In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (Fiction)

• Greenland by David Santos Donaldson (Fiction)

• Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez (Fiction

The Boost

• The Prison Book Collective is running low on queer books. They send free books to incarcerated people in North Carolina and Alabama. There are lots of ways you can support them even if you’re not local to the org, including buying books off their wishlist—more info here.

• The Spoonie Uni Project is collecting funds for their 2023 Juneteenth Disability Justice Fund through June 30th. Details on how to donate here.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I started taking pictures of buds on my walks this spring. Now I pay attention to leaves in ways I never used to. For example: I can’t get over ferns.

Catch you next week, bookish friends! I’ll probably write about rereading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, which might be my favorite nonfiction book. If you want to read it, you can subscribe here.