Stormy Weather

Sometimes a story’s setting is its most powerful character. This is true of the Caribbean in H. Nigel Thomas’s A Different Hurricane. In it, golden sands and sparkling waters provide a backdrop for a society strained by prejudice and the lingering effects of colonization. The titular tempest is cultural; the storm is one of social unrest and tension, stirred by inequalities rather than by the weather. And regardless of how characters brace themselves for it, they are inevitably swept up in its destructive path.

In a 2015 Xtra profile coinciding with the publication of an earlier novel, No Safeguards, Thomas spoke of growing up queer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Although he had been based in Montreal for nearly five decades, he discussed the enduring influence of his adolescence on his writing, particularly the public displays of violence he witnessed against gay men. “Effeminacy and homosexuality were considered to be one and the same thing,” he said, explaining the cruelty he faced as a child. Some of these harrowing images make their way into A Different Hurricane, which follows one man’s lifelong struggle with his sexuality and the impact of his shame on those closest to him.

We meet Gordon in 2017, exactly one year after the death of his wife, Maureen. The semi-retired bureaucrat stands on his porch in Kingstown overlooking the Grenadines Wharf. He has been driven out of bed by thoughts of his lover and of his adult daughter, Frida, soon to land on a flight from Toronto; and by anxiety over the latter possibly learning of the former. He paces nervously, fearful of being discovered: “What will Frida ask him when she arrives today?”

Just after his daughter was born, Gordon left to attend university in Montreal. There he discovered a taste of sexual freedom and had a brief but transformative relationship with a man. Since returning from his stint in Quebec, he has kept his queerness a secret for his own safety (homosexuality was — and remains — illegal in the island country). Memories of his violent father, who was a dishonest sex addict, have also compelled him to forsake this aspect of himself and focus on his paternal duties.

Gordon’s complicated relationship with parenthood drives the retrospective novel. His condemnation of widespread misogyny and homophobia is challenged by the way he treated his family when Frida was a child. The non-linear narrative traces his morally conflicted behaviour in middle age back to his troubled youth. It also includes significant excerpts of the journal that Maureen left behind for their daughter. These sections bring us into the mind of a dying woman trying to sort through her past. In her empathetic eyes, her husband’s repression was well intentioned but harmful. “I’m glad that when/if Frida finds out about her father it will be after I’m gone,” she writes. “But, if it happens while I’m still around, I’ll try to help her understand why Gordon has had to wear this mask for so long.” While Gordon has succeeded in breaking an intergenerational pattern of physical abuse, he has nonetheless perpetuated the patrilineal cycle of deceit. His lies have come from a vulnerable place — to protect his reputation and his loved ones — but they have been as damaging as those of his father.

Maureen also grappled with her identity in the face of religious and societal mechanisms beyond her control. The major decisions of her life, particularly around her body and her autonomy, were made by other people. After converting to Pentecostal Christianity, her mother, Maggie, was abandoned by her father, an event that had a lasting impact on Maureen’s sense of self. Later, when she found out she was pregnant, it was Maggie who discouraged her from getting an abortion. (In the 1960s, abortion was still considered murder in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.) And when both she and Gordon were diagnosed with AIDS, which ultimately claimed her life, she became further implicated in his lie. “Now I, too, wear the mask,” her journal reads. “What is this doing to my authentic self?” In Maureen, Thomas captures a time and place where to be a single young woman was to be viewed as a failure, while to be married meant to lose one’s freedom and, in her case, her health.

Hurricanes form over warm, calm waters, sucking up humid air that then cools into massive clouds. The perfect conditions for the storms in these characters’ lives are similarly created by many coalescing factors. Thomas has produced an elevated political criticism that reveals a complex system of pain. Like forces of nature, the criminalization of homosexuality and of abortion and the broader culture that supports those measures shape the environment in which this family tragedy unfolds.

The critic bell hooks once defined “the essence of queer . . . not as being about who you’re having sex with.” Although that could “be a dimension of it,” being queer is really about “the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” In that sense, Thomas’s novel is an insightful story of queerness. It examines people who are incompatible with their surroundings and the internal contradictions that allow them to survive — none of which are without consequence. A Different Hurricane is a perceptive look at the storms we all face and the ways we try (and fail) to protect one another as we weather them.