Touching the shores of home: Guyana,Indo-Caribbeanness,feminism,and return

I write these reflections as I work on travel plans to return to Guyana after a long absence to launch a book collection that I edited with my Trinidadian collaborator, Gabrielle Hosein, on the shapes that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought take. Our aim with such a project was to show the ways in which a genealogy of Caribbean Indian and dougla ¹ feminist theorizing and enactments was tied not to Indianness as defined by the subcontinent or by people’s ideas about the subcontinent but rather was deeply rooted in the complex traumatized space of the Caribbean and the concatenation of slavery, indentureship, and the plantation complex to be found there. In tracking iterations of feminist consciousness from the generations of the indentured, the post-indentured, the post-independence, into the second diasporas of Indo-Caribbeans, we were explicitly and implicitly thinking through what defines home, indigeneity, and belonging. This is a much longer arc of questioning for me, begun since I left Guyana at age 11.

I was old enough, then, to know that I did not want to leave the only home I had known. I insisted that my parents leave me behind, but there was no room for such a suggestion. For them, home was only possible where we were all together even if it meant leaving behind the graves of our loved ones, something that still causes my mother pain as she thinks of those lonely, untended resting places (of parents, sisters, brothers, aunts, and cousins and of countless other souls tied to her by bonds that surpass blood). When she returns home, she goes on a solemn series of elegiac visits to commune with each departed one, to uproot lovingly the weeds from the graves, to remind the occupants of her love, of her faithful recall in the diaspora of birthdays, wedding anniversaries, death anniversaries, all of the moments that marked their lives among the living and her own memories of them. These visits are more important than the ones to the market to renew contact with old friends; to inhale deeply the smells of home; and to plunge hands into the parcels of fish, vegetables, and fruits that no non-Caribbean grocer in the diaspora recognizes the names of, although here they flow smoothly like the coveted breezes in the heat of the morning. Home is the taste on your tongue of a ripe mango, not one picked green and forced ripe so that it can travel better, but one from the rich array of varieties found in the tropics, not just the insipid Tommy Atkins that has come to define the fruit for American tongues. As the juice of a home mango trickled down my arm during a previous moment of return, the taste ignited memories of a childhood spent in trees, spent on back steps in the moonlight during a blackout. Reveling in these reanimated memories, I eagerly sought out the items then less likely to be found at a Saturday market—psydium, dunks, monkey apple, awara, cokrit—ones whose descriptions I trip over as I attempt to portray them to friends, husband, and daughters in my American locales. Home is where your language easily fits experience, where you do not stumble often doing work of cultural translation.

Return is not the only thing that triggers these thoughts, however. In these tempestuous times of global resurgence of xenophobia and white nationalism, I fear that my American passport is not enough to authenticate my citizenship in my American home (home now for much longer than Guyana has been), where I worry that when my neighbors see my brown body, they automatically ascribe parasitic illegitimacy to it and to my immigrant status. Yet, this sense of citizenship feeling insecure and subject to abrupt and sometimes violent revocation if you are a non-white American is nothing new, not something birthed by a Trump administration, as African Americans especially have always known. To be Indo-Guyanese in the diaspora is to be perpetually subject to queries about where is your real home and what constitutes belonging. Few are satisfied with the answers given to the question posed in multiple forms: “What are you?” “Where are you from?” “What nationality are you?” “Where are your parents from?” “Are you Indian?” “I’ve been to your country!” “Where is that?” “Ghana?” “Your English is very good.” “My nanny is from Guyana.” “You look exactly like this girl I know who is [insert any number of ethnicities or nationalities here].” The challenge of explaining Caribbean Indianness to those outside the indentureship diaspora ² is great, as is the self-examination involved in coming to a clear definition of it for oneself when you fit no expected narrative of Indian cultural authenticity with Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Hinduism, Scottishness, non-Indian-language-speaking, dark skin, light skin, and rich gyal/poor bhai histories all mixed up in your story of origins.

To be caught in such impossible moments of unsatisfactory explanations is to be made aware of how much my Indianness (which is apparently what marks me most to the outside observer) is inextricable from my Caribbeanness and all of the unseen histories of struggles, conflicts, and solidarities to be found therein. The things that define home for me cross racial and class boundaries as well as the boundaries of time and space. Guyana was with me when I first laid eyes on Cambodia and Vietnam with the bottom houses where men and women were busy cooking for their families and bringing old motorcycles back to life; on the backwaters of Kerala as some of the world’s most ancient Christians washed their clothes along the banks of the river and shimmied up coconut trees; as I laid eyes on Haiti for the first time and saw the true darkness that descends upon Port-au-Prince at night, the same darkness that used to descend upon Port Mourant with its many homes not connected to electricity, phone lines, or plumbing, darkness alleviated only by the light of the moon as we sat on our back step and listened to the soughing of the leaves of the coconut and tamarind trees and inhaled the smoke of mosquito coils and burning trash.

But Guyana was also with me when I spoke French in Paris and was assumed to be a Mauritian. Keenly aware of my privilege in being a traveler rather than a desperate immigrant, these experiences oriented my thinking to the larger indentureship diaspora and are one of several reasons that I find myself thinking more about the connections between Guyana and Mauritius, Trinidad and Fiji, Suriname and Sri Lanka than I do about the connection between India and these places. Indentureship initiated an irrevocable rupture with India. In my academic publications, I have explored the ways early and mid-20th-century writers and politicians in the Caribbean meditated on the question of where and how to locate home and its attendant affective ties. ³ As manifested in early Indo-Caribbean publications such as the Observer and the Spectator, the debates were intense over whether to put down deep roots in the region and define oneself through it or to locate oneself within an idea of “Greater India,” ⁴ although my research revealed that even those who fell on the more Indian nationalist side of the equation claimed the region as home. Even someone like H.P. Singh, who is considered the father of Indian nationalism in Trinidad and who sought the protection of Indian interests in the region as the possibility of independence neared, argued for not following too closely the model of India when it came to creating community in the region as he watched the subcontinent be ripped apart along religious lines during the horrors of Partition in 1947. More progressive thinkers like writer and editor Dennis Mahabir in 1948 in Trinidad were emphasizing a centripetal approach to Trinidad and a centrifugal one to India and urging an embrace of a broader regional identity via support of West Indian federation.

In some ways, these debates are moot points in today’s Caribbean as clearly the region is unquestionably home to Indians, but, in other ways, questions of home are increasingly fraught. Technology and cheaper air travel make it easier to explore connections to other Caribbean nations and to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, and also to subcontinental exports of Indian movies, music, goods, clothing, jewelry, and aesthetics, leading to greater rigidity and conformity in understandings of Indianness and disdain for local creolization now deemed inauthentic. The stakes of this is evident in Caribbean Muslim communities as Wahhabist imams and teachings enter the Caribbean, and hybridized Caribbean Islam with rich, long traditions of cross-community and cross-gender collaborations reshapes itself to fit to more rigid requirements of purity and segregation. Adoption of more conservative dress for women is not only an interesting marker of this realignment but also an important site for resistance and for individual agency and self-expression. ⁵

The introduction of multiple new sites of diaspora for Guyanese of all classes, races, and religions (it is said that Guyana’s diaspora is now as big as its population at home ⁶ ) means more competing pulls for claims of home. How do you define home when you can now move easily between the home space and the diasporic sites, taking your affective, economic, and national statuses with you? Movements back and forth to the region for Carnival especially have become ways of consolidating feelings of authenticity, regional affiliation, and ties and status in the new diasporic sites. ⁷ This has resulted in more flexible, capacious understandings of belonging and home, ones that do not rely on what were always artificially constructed ideas about cultural and national purity and ones that were never fully afforded to colonial subjects. Rather, we find daily examples of those who find home in their mobile bodies, who forge community out of diverse strands of difference (experienced in multiple ways), and who deploy a broad arsenal of cultural and affective ties to position themselves economically, politically, and socially.

The question of home—its promises, possibilities, and hauntings—is particularly pressing in the field of Caribbean feminism that I have been exploring in my academic work. In the area of Indo-Caribbean feminism especially, genealogies of violence and trauma are intricately tied to place and space. The year 2017 is the 100th anniversary of the official end of the system of indentureship, an ending that was brought about in part because of concerns about the treatment of Indian women within that labor system. Primary among objections to the system was the “immoral” behavior engaged in by and imposed upon indentured Indian women. The fact that this anniversary also coincides with the near beheading of an Indo-Caribbean woman—Rajwantie Baldeo—by her ex-partner on a sidewalk outside her place of work in Queens, NY, in December 2016 reminds us of the continued policing of women’s bodies and the massive amount of work that still needs to be done to achieve gender justice in our communities. ⁸ These types of spectacular violence are often tied to histories of the disproportionate gender ratios of the plantation. Faith Smith has argued that the initial scarcity of Indian women was a deliberate strategy on the part of planters to discourage a permanent community of Indians in the region. ⁹ Patterns begun on the plantation—of attempts to control female bodies deemed unruly and prone to leveraging their scarcity to negotiate better conditions for themselves and their children—are still played out in diasporic spaces and in new generations of Indo-Caribbeans. These continuing patterns of intimate partner violence can also be seen as connected to histories of Indian women’s collusion with their own oppression as Indians moved from the end of their labor contracts to establishing home in the Caribbean: the cohering of community was seen as requiring constricted gendered norms where women were pushed back into the domestic sphere from their occupation of public spaces of labor and self-advocacy. ¹⁰ The fact that acts of violent control of Indian women’s sexuality and ability to move freely in public spaces continue to reverberate in the diaspora reminds us of the ways in which trauma and colonial era histories of injustice haunt Caribbean people even as we imagine diasporas as sites of freedom and greater opportunity. Desperately required is a historical consciousness that is attuned to legacies of both resistance and persistent systems of oppression both in the Caribbean and in our new homes, wherever they may be. The efforts required for such self-education and political mobilization is substantial since silencing or whitewashing of these legacies continues to be the norm globally.

In the wake of the January 2017 Women’s March centered in the United States but with global iterations, Isis Semaj-Hall (an academic who is herself intimately acquainted with the multiple valences of home—she is from the Caribbean, trained in the States, and has now returned to teach in Jamaica) asked friends on Facebook why there were not more parallel protests by women within the Caribbean as we saw in India, Kenya, and elsewhere in the Global South. Some friends responded about the schadenfreude involved in seeing American chickens coming home to roost, and others mentioned the long specific histories of colonization and people having their own local issues with which to contend. For me, home is forever entwined with the battles that must be fought in the region and the ones here in the United States and on the ground of other homes of women of color. Social media has made it easier to connect these struggles and simultaneously to lessen their urgency when seen at a distance and in the context of other needs and global issues. What does it mean to “like” an article about the high rates of suicide, child abuse, or domestic violence in Guyana, without doing anything concretely to address it? Transnational citizenship carries with it both pleasures and enormous responsibilities, especially to the less empowered communities left behind. Caribbean people have historically felt that responsibility keenly as remittances from the migrated can sometimes exceed the gross national product (GNP) of their home countries. That dedication to easing the burdens of individual family members, however, is all too often not extended to commitments to institutional change that would make life at home more just for the most vulnerable and dispossessed. While there are limits to the political leadership roles that those who live outside a country should take, forging alliances with and supporting those who are working for on-the-ground change with locally specific strategies are often missing from the online social justice warrior ethos.

As a scholar, the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) has also been a home—for research, for bibliophilia, for friendship, for cross-regional understanding, for finding others who combine the strange path of scholarship and academic aspirations and appreciation of the fraught pleasures of home. CSA has also been a space for finding others who recognize the complexity of crossing spaces in brown bodies and of claiming them multiply while needing to be constantly aware of and vigilant about the privileges our migration brought us compared to those who remained at home, whom we both envy and commiserate with at times. To be at home in my scholarship is also to collaborate with and maintain ties with scholars and activists working in the region, to not just force my Caribbean literary studies into the circumscribed spaces that US academia would allow it but to connect meaningfully with the work and teaching being done at home even as I bring to bear upon those collaborations my own perspectives wrought by distance, time, travel, and personal yearning.

My sense of myself as a woman, as a Guyanese woman, and as a Caribbean woman is irrevocably shaped by my having switched countries and my awareness of the ways in which I am viewed relative to other immigrants (documented or not) and to others darker than I am (be they citizens or not). The ambiguity that Indo-Caribbeanness represents in the United States and in other global spaces allows room for dialogue—dialogue that is often shut down when the eye of the beholder is confronted with blackness and is ready to ascribe pre-scripted narratives of race and non-belonging. Most Indo-Caribbeans will forever be yoked to the subcontinent in a simplistic equation even when our alliances lie more with the Amerindian, African, Chinese, Portuguese, Syrian, dougla, and other spectacular mixes of our home spaces and the ones encountered in the diaspora, ones that defy those easy scripts.

I wonder what my eyes will behold when I return to Guyana shortly, when I use not the Torani and the Makouria ferry boats to cross the Berbice river but the new bridge, when I see for the first time the naked plot of land where my childhood home once stood. We had to tear it down as it became a hazard when others recognized its unoccupied state and harvested its bones to make better homes for themselves. We cared still for the danger that was posed to our neighbors and friends left behind. I wonder how home will shift in my heart when I behold that gaping wound, small comfort that the land will never be sold, when I cannot smell the wood of the house heated by the sun, the beloved musty odour of the books that first introduced me to the wider world, when I cannot run my hand along the windowsill where my grandmother sat ever gazing at the tops of the coconut and dunks trees, at the house of her daughter who had long ago left to live in New York, at the empty plot waiting in vain for another child to return and live upon it. There lie the acrid remnants of my grandfather’s dream of a world where he would live surrounded by his children.

I have come full circle to where my parents were when they told me they would not leave me behind in Guyana to live a boarding house while I attended Bishops High School. Home is where my children and the rest of my immediate family are. The friends I am closest to in this world all share this same uncertain grounding of home, and so physical proximity is unnecessary to the ties that bind us. We are each other’s homes as we challenge boundaries around gender, race, class, chauvinism, and exclusionary nationalism. I wish my daughters similarly complex understandings of belonging and home and the unexpected and ever unfolding path of solidarities that they will be set upon.