Introductory Remarks to “Virgin Capital: Tami Navarro and Tamara K. Nopper in Conversation”
In A Burst of Light and Other Essays, an account of her living with cancer, Audre Lorde concludes the epilogue with, “I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity.” She dates the epilogue August 1987 and gives three locations: Carriacou, Grenada; Anguilla, British West Indies, and St. Croix, Virgin Islands.
A few paragraphs before, Lorde describes her battle against cancer: “I visualize daily winning the battles going on inside my body, and this is an important part of fighting for my life. In those visualizations, the cancer at times takes on the face and shape of my most implacable enemies, those I fight and resist most fiercely. Sometimes the wanton cells in my liver become Bull Connor and his police dogs completely smothered, rendered impotent in Birmingham, Alabama by a mighty avalanche of young, determined Black marchers moving across him toward their future. P.W. Botha’s bloated face of apartheid squashed into the earth beneath an onslaught of the slow rhythmic advance of furious Blackness. Black South African women moving through my blood destroying passbooks. Fireburn Mary sweeping over the Cruzan countryside, axe and torch in hand.”
Lorde does not detail who Fireburn Mary is, but the mention of her is an inclusion of the Virgin Islands in her examples of Black diasporic rebellion and another instance of how Black women in particular figure in her freedom dreams. Fireburn Mary is Mary Thomas, one of the leaders of a labor and anti-police revolt in St. Croix in 1878, in which, for days, plantations and buildings were set on fire. At the request of the Danish government, U.S. troops stationed in Puerto Rico would violently put down the rebellion. Also known as Queen Mary, Thomas was one of several Black women or queens, as they are politically praised, tried and incarcerated for their role in the rebellion.
Lorde would live her last years in St. Croix with her partner, Gloria I. Joseph, Hampshire College professor, author, and co-founder, with Lorde and others, of the St. Croix Women’s Coalition, which Lorde described as “a counseling and advocacy community group focused upon domestic violence.” In an interview with Callaloo journal founder and editor Charles H. Rowell, Lorde was asked why she moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Lorde responded, “Why did I come here? After three separate bouts with cancer it became very clear to me that I had to change my environment, that I needed a situation where I could continue my work for as long as I was blessed to continue it, but without having to face the pressures of New York. I needed to live my life where stepping out each day was not like going to war. Not that we are not always involved in the war which continues; it will continue until we are all free. But on the level of locks on the door, dealing with subways, traffic, winter cold, shoveling snow-I no longer had the physical stamina to do that as well as my own work. These are some of the reasons I had to leave the Northeast. Coming to the U.S. Virgin Islands was a combination of many things. I was raised, Charles, in a West Indian household; my parents came from Barbados and Grenada.”
When asked by Rowell to be more specific of how living in the Virgin Islands differs from living on the mainland, Lorde replied: “As a Black woman, an African-Caribbean American woman, there are certain realities of our battles here that are similar to those of many others who are part of the African Diaspora. The U.S. Virgin Islands is a part of the Caribbean. We are also for better or ill-and for the most part ill-supposedly part of the United States; we are a ‘territory,’ which is a polite word for a colony.”
As the interview was conducted in the summer of 1990, the experience of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and the arduous rebuilding efforts, were preoccupations of Lorde’s. She discussed with Rowell how mainlanders may have been aware of how the hurricane affected Black people on the mainland but not so much those on the Virgin Islands. In doing so, she gestures at how fragile diasporic political bridges can be: “when Hurricane Hugo smashed the ‘minor outlying islands’ totally destroying the homes and livelihood of 66,000 people, when our communities were in upheaval, that was not of particular interest to Detroit, Chicago, California, or New York. And Black people in those places don’t realize that these are Black communities that were decimated. Now you can say that one of the functions of this is to teach us a certain amount of humility. That may or may not be true. The point is, what happens on these islands is directly involved with what is going on with Black people on the mainland and all over the world. I am speaking politically and economically as well as socially. For example, how many people are aware that on this tiny Caribbean island is the largest oil refinery in the Western hemisphere, Hess Oil of the Virgin Islands?”
Dr. Tami Navarro’s book Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands, is not about Audre Lorde, although she opens the book with an epigraph from Lorde, a line from her poem “Judith’s Fancy,” that appeared in Lorde’s final volume of poetry titled The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. But through Dr. Navarro’s examination of the Economic Development Commission (EDC), a development initiative established by the Virgin Islands government in 2001 that “linked the economic fate of this eighty-four-square mile island to financial developments on Wall Street,” Virgin Islands provides a rich anthropology of finance and in the process, explores many of the themes that preoccupied Lorde.
Questions about the relationship between slavery, colonialism, non-sovereignty, and in the current era, neoliberalism. How to think about time and history in relation to the present. Specifically, addressing concerns and accusations about the EDC that she heard from people who participated in her study, which included claims of the program being a return to slavery, Dr. Navarro writes, “I attempt to capture the ‘haunting’ of the EDC program, the palpable fear of past wrongs reemerging in/through the present, with the phrase spectral time—a term that I use to gesture toward the fear and anticipation of violence—here anticipated as an economic and structural, rather than necessarily physical, threat.” Dr. Navarro also considers how capitalism, and as she stresses in her book, racial capitalism, structures Black life and what role the state plays in both facilitating and regulating these capitalist institutions and processes. Additionally, Virgin Capital explores Black identity and diasporic understandings of Blackness as situated in relationship to the economy, geography, national boundaries, and notions of belonging, home, and being native. Finally, Virgin Capital considers the employment, literally and figuratively, of Black women in relation to the EDC program, and how those dubbed “EDC girls” serve as stand-ins for both critics and proponents of the development initiative.
Dr. Navarro accomplishes all of this by using as a point of departure some of the EDC’s parameters, such as financial services companies being granted an exemption of 90 percent of U.S. federal income taxes if they relocate to the U.S. Virgin Islands, the residency requirement of living in the Virgin Islands 183 days a year, and the expectation to hire local workers, contract with local companies, and give to charitable causes. Ultimately, as an anthropology of finance, Dr. Navarro’s Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands traces “the effects of economic development on quotidian life.”