Abstract
The literature of the Indo-Caribbean is replete with stories of migration and enslavement of bonded laborers brought from India. The West Indian literary tradition has for a long period overlooked the issue of real representation of East Indian female folk. The Indo-Caribbean female writers started contesting their space in the West Indies literature in the 1970s and 80s. This chapter argues that Ramabai Espinet's anthology Nuclear Seasons (1991) delineates the evolving identity of East Indian indentured female laborers from the state of complete ‘obfuscation' to ‘self-assertion'. The expressions of an anguished individual who faces cultural alienation and displacement owing to her hyphenated identity forms the major subject of the poems in the collection under study. The chapter analyses and establishes the ascendance of the East Indian indentured female laborers from the state of complete ‘annihilation' to ‘self-actualization' and final ‘recuperation' as has been portrayed by Espinet.
TopBackground
Rajkumari Singh, Ramabai Espinet, Mahadai Das, Shaani Mootoo, Laxmi Persaud and many other Indian creative writers from West Indian soil strongly contested the negative projection of Indo-Caribbean women. Rajkumari Singh, an Indo-Guyanese writer with an active political background conferred dignity to the term ‘Coolie’ which was hitherto an extremely pejorative connotation. Rajkumari Singh in her article, ‘I am a Coolie’ (1973), strongly gives voice to the muffled identity of thousands of coolie men and women and asserts her pride of being a coolie woman. Her poem, “Per Ajie: A Tribute to the First Immigrant Woman” celebrates the status of ‘Coolitude’ of great grandmothers.
Per Ajie/ I can see How in stature/
Thou didst grow/ Shoulders up Head held high/
The challenge/ In thine eye (Singh, 1993, p. 245)
The term ‘Coolitude’ was first coined by a Mauritian writer Khal Tora Bully, through which he gave an identity to the experiences of coolies. Tora Bully outlines the evolution and definition of the concept of ‘Coolitude’, particularly within the framework of ‘Negritude’ and ‘Coolitude’ in the chapter titled “Some Theoretical Premises of Coolitude”:
The recollection of a common phase of history and need to redress the state of oblivion and neglect attached to the condition of the Negro, and to that of Coolie. The descendants of indentured laborers, like those of slaves, often knew very little of their past history. They were ignorant of the cultural implication of the voyage. One of the aims of coolitude is also to foster a larger community of vision encompassing the experiences of people of African descent and fostering the interaction with the later immigrant groups in those colonial societies, to which coolies migrated in the period immediately following the abolition of slavery, even though Indian laborer was already present during slavery. (Bully & Carter, 2002, p. 145)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Miscegenation: Interracial marriages and alliances.
Jazz: A type of music of black American origin which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century.
El Dorado: A mythical land of precious stones and gold.
Pariah: Socially out-caste or a member of a subclass.
Megalomaniac: An obsession with power and wealth.
Middle Passage: The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade.
Kala-Pani: The kala-pani (lit. ... black water) represents the condemnation of the overreaching seas in Hinduism. According to this prohibition, crossing the seas to foreign lands causes the loss of one's social respectability, as well as the putrefaction of one's cultural character and posterity.
Dougla Identity: The offspring of Indo-African unions.
Girmitiyas: The name derived from the term Girmit, a corruption of the English word, agreement. Girmitiyas, also known as Jahajis, were indentured laborers from British India transported to work on plantations in Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, and the Caribbean as part of the Indian indenture system.