Mr Loverman

“What is more, we must believe that our best years are ahead of us, not behind us.”

Despite his aging body, Barry insists that he should still be able to enjoy himself and live life to the fullest. He wants to finally be with his true love, Morris, and argues that it’s not too late.

“And so what if me and my people choose to mash up the h-english linguish whenever we feel like it, drop our prepositions with our panties, piss in the pot of correct syntax and spelling, and mangle our grammar at random? Is this not our postmodern, postcolonial prerogative?”

Barry’s speech is inflected by Caribbean patois, but he knows standard English. His choice of words and nonstandard grammar are forms of cultural expression that he’s proud of. The comparison to sex (“drop our prepositions with our panties”) and the image of “piss[ing] in the pot” also make it clear that Barry’s use of language is a subversive act—a deliberate “mangling” of the language of colonization.

“I am not putting up with you putting your thing about with those trampy cows no more.”

Carmel accuses Barry of sleeping with other women, whom she characterizes as promiscuous and dehumanizes by comparing them to animals. Though the quote characterizes Carmel as judgmental, that judgment does not, ironically, extend to gay people in this instance: Because Carmel has a heteronormative understanding of the world, she doesn’t even consider that Barry could be sleeping with men.

“[Y]ou almost stroke his cheek, but what if he wakes up and asks you what you doing?”

This quote indicates Carmel’s desperation for physical intimacy with Barry. She is too restrained to initiate intimacy herself, and she is too shy and scared to express her true desires. The passage foreshadows that her story, like Barry’s, will be one of Deception, Desire, and the Repression of Emotional Truths.

“I was afraid I’d be up before a judge on some trumped-up charge of indecent exposure; or end up lying on an operating table with a bar of wood between my teeth and electric volts destroying parts of my brain forever; or in the crazy house pumped full of drugs that would eventually drive a sane man mad.”

Barry avoids coming out as gay due to fear of being punished for it. His references to electric volts and drugs evoke conversion therapy, which is premised on the idea that being gay is a mental illness that can and should be cured. This institutional violence contributes to the anti-gay atmosphere that permeates much of Barry’s world, developing the theme of Anti-Gay Bias, Violence, and the Fear of Coming Out.

“This country has over fifty million citizens, whereas we didn’t even have fifty thousand in the whole of Antigua and Barbuda. Folk could get lost here, be anonymous, lead they own quiet lives. In this city you can live on the same street as your neighbors for eighty years and not even say good morning unless there’s a war on and you forced to share a bomb shelter. Back home everybody kept their eye on everything and everyone.”

Barry feels that everyone in Antigua polices each other’s behavior according to what is socially acceptable. Although Barry feels that this is less the case in England, Barry is surrounded by Antiguan immigrants and therefore feels unable to live openly as a gay man, which his community largely deems unacceptable.

“You just spent three hours in a church that’s supposed to preach love, kindness, forgiveness, and spiritual enlightenment, so why you come back spewing vitriol?”

Barry believes that the church is hypocritical. Whereas many Christians preach the virtues of love and forgiveness, Carmel and her friends return from church spreading hateful anti-gay rhetoric. Though he challenges her on this, he is not yet ready to come out as gay himself.

“‘If Melissa is one of those lesbian characters,’ she adds, rising to her theme, ‘it is an abomination. Does it not say in Romans that if man lies with man as he lies with woman, he will surely be put to death? Same goes with woman-woman business.’”

Merty’s rhetoric indicates her harsh anti-gay views; she believes that gay people should be punished and even put to death. She uses the Bible to justify her hateful beliefs, implying that the church has contributed to her views.

“Of course I wouldn’t jump for joy, but as I said, it would be up to him. Most likely it would be…a phase. All teenagers go through phases.”

Though Donna initially stands up against the churchwomen and their anti-gay bias, she reveals her hypocrisy when she says she would be upset if Daniel were gay. What’s more, she invokes the idea that being gay is a “phase,” which is commonly used to invalidate the experiences of queer people. This indicates that heteronormative expectations are common even among progressive people.

“Soon as you stepped over the threshold of your financial future, the manager’s smile glaciered. Didn’t matter how viable your proposal, how squeaky clean your finances, how impeccable your references, how speaky-spokey you was. I am not a man given to sourness, but I left those banks with my mouth filled with the bile of bitter gourd. I ain’t no political animal neither, but, pray tell, had not our labor drip-fed plantation profits to this country for hundreds of years before manumission? Had not thousands of our young men fought in two world wars for this land? Were not we immigrants paying our taxes and making our way as good citizens of this country?”

Barry reflects on the institutional racism that prevents Black people from getting bank loans. He notes bitterly that England relied on Black people’s labor to achieve its world standing, only to deny them their own place and dignity in society. However, he does not voice this frustration except to the reader—another example of repression. 

“In that moment, I wanted to tell this stranger, this Merle, this girl from the tiny island of Montserrat, that I had commensurate preferences too, but I couldn’t be a brave warrior like her. I wanted to tell her about Morris. I wanted to sing his name out into the night.”

Barry feels inspired by the much younger Merle, who is openly gay. In the moment, he yearns to tell her that he’s also gay and to share with her the love that he feels for Morris. However, Barry is unable to connect openly with her in this way because he fears the consequences.

“I didn’t really appreciate all of that attention seeking behavior of those gay liberationists. They should-a kept the noise down a bit. As well you know, I believe in discretion.”

Barry’s opinion indicates his internalized anti-gay bias. Though he criticizes his community’s policing of sexual behavior, he insists that gay people should not be too open about their orientation. This diminishment of the work of gay liberationists contradicts Barry’s own desire to love Morris openly.

“Marriage is forever and forever is not finite, it is in-finite he also says that people who are at it like bunnies goin’ be dining with Lucifer, and as for the homos, they goin’ end up raped by Lucifer himself, and they won’t get no kicks from it either, because his scorching hot rod’s so big it will go in one end and come out the other.”

This quote indicates Carmel’s church’s violently anti-gay bias, as the pastor expresses the belief that gay people will be subject to eternal torture; it particularly invokes a strain of disgust surrounding the idea of sex between men, implying that rape is an appropriate punishment for such behavior. This effect of this rhetoric is evident in Carmel’s own anti-gay beliefs.

“[I]t’s not that you don’t love your husband it’s just that at the age of thirty-six you been waiting twenty years for him to love you.”

While noting what she is grateful for in prayer, Carmel takes a detour and finds herself praying for her husband’s death. She feels that Barry prevents her from following Jesus’s teachings about love because although Carmel loves her husband, she doesn’t feel that the feeling is reciprocated. The passage underscores Carmel’s intense and unvoiced frustration, further humanizing her despite her negative qualities.

“I didn’t understand then that when your people come from nothing, each subsequent generation is supposed to supersede the achievements of its parents.”

Barry didn’t have a good relationship with his father due to the expectations his father placed on him. This resulted in Barry repressing his grief when his father died. Only later in life can Barry recognize that these expectations are often bigger than the individual and passed down through generations, as parents with very little must sustain themselves by hoping for their children’s success.

“Something in me snaps, the way it does when folk hold things in so long they start acting beyond common sense, beyond reason. ‘Yes, I am a cocksucker,’ I reply, just as quietly, just as sinisterly, not quite knowing how those words exited my mouth.”

In a heated fight about anti-gay music, Barry comes out to Daniel and his friends. This was not planned, and Barry uses a slur to describe himself, only to be shocked by his actions. Decades of repressed emotions surface in this moment.

“[W]hen you teased him about shaving, he did when you teased he should buy a smarter suit, he did.”

Carmel’s affair with Reuben shows her the type of attention and affection that she truly desires. She notices that Reuben listens to her and respects her opinions and needs. This contrasts with Barry’s neglect of her and gives her a taste of the authentic love and desire her husband (unbeknownst to her) enjoys with Morris.

“[A]nd you felt yourself becoming someone else someone you’d never been your self.”

This quote indicates Carmel’s sexual liberation. She has always had to repress her sexual desires due to her religious and cultural beliefs. She couldn’t even explore her sexuality in marriage because her husband was never receptive to her advances. Now that she has finally given in to her desire, she feels fulfilled despite her religious beliefs.

“‘Let us not forget,’ he continues, ‘that prior to Christianity sub-Saharan Africa had indigenous religions with their own moral beliefs. The Zande warriors of Zaire, the Berbers of Siwa in Egypt, transvestism in Madagascar, a boy’s rite of passage in Benin. This is what’s so twisted about it all. It’s homophobia, not homosexuality, that was imported to Africa, because European missionaries regarded it as a sin. Take Angola, prior to colonial intervention, homosexuals were accepted, not persecuted. It was the Portuguese who criminalized it.’”

Lola, Maxine’s queer friend who is completing a doctorate on LGBT history in Africa, argues that Western colonialism brought anti-LGBT sentiment to Africa. Lola, as part of the LGBT community, educates Barry and Morris to aid them in their coming-out journey, developing the theme of The Importance of Community to Marginalized People. He also articulates some of the intersections of identity that the novel itself is concerned with.

“Fifty years with a man who used me as his cover story to protect his disgusting business, making a mockery of me. How yuh think that make me feel?”

Carmel’s confrontation with Barry is the novel’s climax. Carmel, having heard the truth about Barry’s affair with Morris, sets herself free from her marriage. She recognizes that Barry has used her to cover up his orientation. Her language, however, is characterized by anti-gay bias.

“Shut up. You a sick man, Barry, and the only person who can help you now is God.”

Carmel does not outgrow her anti-gay bias. In the end, she still believes that Barry’s orientation is a sickness that God alone can cure. She doesn’t communicate with Barry after this, even after he writes her an apology.

“All-a this space and sky and greenery is like being in another country altogether. As we driving deeper and deeper into it, I starting to feel like a tourist, like we somewhere foreign, somewhere abroad.”

While Barry has lived in England for 50 years, he has remained entirely in London, as he understood that to be the safest space for Caribbean immigrants. Barry and Morris’s travel shows that they still have much to see and explore, even as elderly men in a country they’ve lived in for most of their lives.