“We Are Animal. So What?”

This essay is a reading of Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) that thinks through the author’s contributions on LGBTQ+ history, art, and activism in the Caribbean. It begins with a look at how the animal is wielded discursively to deride queerness and thinks through the constructions of animality. Central to much of the essay is the framing of how for queer people Gosine’s ideas of either rejecting the animal or reclaiming it can be read in Colin Robinson’s poetry, and how liberation for the queer subject comes at a fraught cost. The essay concludes by looking at Gosine’s notions of “wrecking work” and uses them to read the history of Indian indenture in the literary arts.