What is Girmitiyas

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.