A Caribbean Katha Revisioning the IndoCaribbean 'Crisis of Being and Belonging'.pdf PDF

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction 1-52 Chapter 1 53-100 Chapter 2 101-153 Chapter 3 154-194 Chapter 4 195-247 Chapter 5 248-308 Chapter 6 309-366 Conclusion 367-391 Bibliography 392-445 i INTRODUCTION The existence of a people often referred to today as IndoCaribbean or Indo-Caribbean is a result ...

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A Caribbean Katha Revisioning the IndoCaribbean 'Crisis of Being and Belonging'.pdf Vijay Maharaj

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Introduction

1-52

Chapter 1

53-100

Chapter 2

101-153

Chapter 3

154-194

Chapter 4

195-247

Chapter 5

248-308

Chapter 6

309-366

Conclusion

367-391

Bibliography

392-445

i

INTRODUCTION The existence of a people often referred to today as IndoCaribbean or Indo-Caribbean is a result of the colonial scheme through which Indian indentured labour replaced or supplemented slave labour on Caribbean plantations. Their presence is deeply embedded in, and forms an integral component of, contemporary life in the region. Salman Rushdie captures the considerable achievement this represents when he asserts:

The migrant suffers, traditionally, a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and code is very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own. And this is what makes migrants such important figures: because roots, language and social norms have been three of the most important parts of the definition of what it is to be a human being. The migrant, denied all three, is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human. (277-78) However, while the idea of “a triple disruption” is a succinctly condensed articulation of the condition of migrancy, the celebration of post-migration self-construction, of the newness of being-human-in-the-world, elides its often conflicted nature. Indeed, newness is mitigated by the fact that self re-fashioning may be embedded in the very nexus of categorising concepts implicit in “roots, language and social norms.” These are often not “denied” to migrants and their descendants but become, rather, infinitely more complex, difficult to negotiate and deeply affective, especially since they are implicated in the troublesome identity markers of tradition, history, culture, race, ethnicity, gender and nation.1

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In addition, whereas in pre-migration circumstances, “roots, language and social norms” may have been taken for granted, “disruption” generates self-awareness and usually demands translation and explanation. The success of these processes is by no means guaranteed. Apathy, confusion, rebellion and anarchy are a few of the, by no means unusual, negative outcomes. Like migrants and their descendants elsewhere, for this group, therefore, questions of selfhood may often not be just the familiar: ‘Who are we?’ or ‘Who am I?’ but includes more importantly the question: ‘Who am I becoming?’ Moreover, the pathological: ‘Am I?’ and ‘Where am I?’ are not unexpected.2 The narrator in Harischandra Khemraj’s Cosmic Dance voices this dilemma:

So, what am I to make of us? Indeed, what am I to make of myself? I shift about with a fickleness which baffles clear definition. Sometimes, like now, I feel like taking myself by the scruff of the neck and saying: ‘Come here, you son-of-a-bitch! Who are you? Where are you? (67) Additionally, according to Kusha Haraksingh, “problems start when the gauntlet is taken up, not to fit in to something already fixed, but to be given an equal opportunity to contribute to the final shape of a malleable entity” (40). This is particularly evident in the socio-political arena. Some strategies adopted in the process of self re-fashioning are rejected because they are perceived, not as contributions to the “shape of a malleable entity,” but as rejection of Caribbeanness. Rejection can take a variety of forms, ranging from subtle forms of stereotyping and other discriminative practices to physical violence. Rhonda Cobham’s assertion, for example, about the “uniquely East Indian tendency to remain isolated from the mainstream of Caribbean society” shares in a widespread perception of the group and reflects the rejected-rejecting paradigm (21). Hers is a mild

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echo of Selwyn Ryan’s claim that “[t]he newcomers were decidedly rigid in their determination to preserve the purity of the Indian race” (Race and Nationalism 22). Their views are reinforced by Aisha Khan’s ethnographic findings: “people assured me that ‘Indian and Negro don’t mix.’ They meant socially, culturally, and sexually” (Callaloo 9). Furthermore, according to Ian Mc Donald, “East Indian allegiance to race, religion, culture and customs in Trinidad and Tobago and in Guyana [is]…potentially the most divisive of all allegiances in the region” (31). His statement resounds with the notion of migrant recalcitrance in assimilating to the lifestyles developed before their arrival and Haraksingh’s observation that “he who comes later is required to fit in by those who came earlier” (40). Implicit in the statement also is the idea of Caribbean self-formation between “two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative…the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture” (Hall, “Cultural Identity” 395). “Allegiance” to “race, religion, culture and customs” is perceived not as “simultaneously operative” but as aligned along “the vector of similarity and continuity” on a trajectory away from the “vector of difference and rupture” that is more widely accepted as leading to the formation of a new Caribbean self. Arguing along these lines by citing fictional examples such as Mitzie’s antipathy to Philomen in C. L. R. James’ Minty Alley and the Laventille community’s rejection of Pariag in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, George Lamming states that “there is abundant evidence in many of our narratives of that perception of the Indian as alien and other.” He asserts moreover that, “[t]his has been a major part of the thought and feeling of many citizens of African descent and a particularly stubborn conviction among the black middle classes of Trinidad and Guyana.” Using Gordon Rohlehr’s seminal studies of 3

calypso lyrics of the 1930s to 1960s, he also discusses the double bind that these people can find themselves in when:

Indian achievement in politics or business has been regarded as an example of an Indian strategy for conquest and even where such achievement did not exist, there could still be heard the satirical assault on those Indians who appeared to identify too readily with a creolising process. (“Language and the Politics of Ethnicity” 14)

Haraksingh contends that this rejected-rejecting problem is ontological, socio-cultural, historical and political, amounting to “a crisis of being and belonging: of being oneself, however defined, and at the same time of belonging and being regarded as belonging” (38). The “crisis” has engaged the fulsome interest of intellectuals in many fields. Many have expressed their interest and concerns in literary forms and today a relatively large corpus of literary interpretations of the issue exists. Like other work in the human sciences, the literary texts attempt to explain the group’s relations to the shifting socio-cultural and political landscape and various self-conceptions developed in the circumstances. The texts cover the full range of the historical period, from the initial dispersion to the Caribbean to contemporary global dispersions out of the region. They are often critical interventions imperative to their time. However, although this body of literary work about negotiations of a sense of self and belonging in changing contexts exists, there are not many extensive literary analyses in which it is used as a discursive and counter-discursive resource for a complex, context-specific understanding of these Caribbean people.3 This gap is the primary motivation for the study, which is intended as prolegomenon for this kind of research. If, as J. Michael Dash asserts, “there is a lack of systematic

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theorizing in the region; [and] the most original thought can be found in imaginative writing,” then it is a matter of critical, cultural and socio-political importance that “imaginative writing” be used to examine Caribbean realities (Other America 9). Moreover, according to Lamming, history and the social sciences fail to fully grasp the irreducible mystery of human behaviour. He deplores their methodological limitations and rejects the neat one-dimensional interpretations of three-dimensional individual complexities.4 This is a perspective with which other writers would concur.5 In addition, the postcolonial moment is defined by the need for explanations that sift through the ideological underpinnings of discourse to arrive at what Veena Das characterises as “the splitting of the various types of speech produced into statements of referential truth in the indicative present” (“Subaltern as Perspective” 316). One can argue that the literary texts provide the Caribbean with the space Das seeks for the “subaltern” through Indian historiography. Literature may be a place for finding workable ‘truth’ of use in the Caribbean present, since, as Kenneth Ramchand observes, “novelists apply themselves with unusual urgency and unanimity to an analysis and interpretation of their society’s ills” (West Indian Novel 4). Indeed, Ramchand’s point of view is held by many critics, such as Barbara Christian and Terry Eagleton, about literary works in general.6 While literature is not intended to accurately depict life, it comprises purposive constructions which provide versions of life that elucidate writers’ concerns for an interpretive community. From this perspective, the power of literature as a discursive and counter-discursive resource is evident. This study uses literature as such a resource to hone what is fundamentally a social issue into a research problem to which literary studies can contribute. It asks: How do

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different fictional representations imagine or construct the lives of the indentured Indian labourers and their descendants from the time of their arrival to the period of independence? In other words: How does literary discourse conceive being and belonging for the individual or the group during this time? How do the various conceptions delineate the ‘crisis of being and belonging’? Why does it exist and what does it comprise? How could it be resolved? Furthermore, as Khan observes, “mixing” as “a literal and metaphoric expression for all forms of experience…is among the most persevering of cultural themes in most Caribbean and Latin American countries” (Callaloo 2). The final and arguably the most important critical questions are therefore: How do the literary texts treat with the trope of mixing with regard to being and belonging? What relation is imagined between mixing and the ‘crisis’ or its resolution? The study begins by accepting Stuart Hall’s argument that: “[c]ultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning” (“Cultural Identity” 395). It also posits that the unmentioned subject of the making in Hall’s argument may be as much a creature of perception as of reality and that ‘positioning’ may be equally a facet of individual agency as it is an effect of social conditions. The traces of this are apparent in multifarious, polysemic or slippery designator signifiers such as coolie, Indian, East Indian, Asian Indian, Hindustani, IndoCaribbean or Indo-Caribbean, Indo- prefixed to other regional terms, Caribbean people of Indian ancestry, and people of Indian or South Asian origin, varied forms of promotion or rejection of the designators and a corresponding volatility of the signified.7 Each term is in some way compromised, deficient or limited, imbricated in a complex politics of inclusion and exclusion and carrying heavy ideological

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baggage. This in itself is very much a dimension of the allegation that a ‘crisis of being and belonging’ exists and an indication of the complexity of the analytic task. Rather than rationalising any single ethnic signifier, therefore, the study defers naming and uses the term that is most appropriate to the context of its use, with descriptive, not prescriptive intent.8 The study thus positions itself, to use Shalini Puri’s words, in “the deconstruction of ‘the people’ as a fabricated identity, [but] I place the idea of imagining ‘the people’ in democratic and egalitarian ways as a political achievement worth struggling for” (Caribbean Postcolonial 12). A methodological problem arises, however, from the desire to use literature in this way, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s advice is followed to overcome it. In 1986, at the height of debates on the consolidation of an African-American literary criticism, Gates exhorted critics:

…to theorize about black literatures, we must do what all theorists do. And that is to read the texts that comprise our literary tradition, formulate (by reasoning from observed facts) useful principles of criticism from within that textual tradition, then draw upon these to read the texts that make up that tradition…One must know one’s textual terrain before it can be explored; one must know one’s literary tradition before it can be theorized about. (“Talkin’ That Talk” 205)

As Luce Irigaray insists, however, “a strategy suits a situation; a strategy is not a theory” (4). While this study is less about theorising, if this is taken to mean “the systematic account of the nature of literature and of methods for analyzing it,” than about making what the texts have to say in relation to the study’s questions apparent, which is but a minor subset of the larger project of theorisation, Gates’ dictum is equally valid for finding the 7

strategy to do so.9 Moreover, that it is Gates’ work which points to a strategy is not coincidental. Although African-American theory is the product of very specific historical conditions and distinct institutional struggles, it does provide approaches to minority problems elsewhere. For example, later in the discussion, Toni Morrison’s concept of the “supplement of minority representation” has been found useful for clarifying a point and W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness” is central to understanding aspects of self-representation. The use of concepts generated by African-American theory is not meant to suggest, however, that it is being adopted for this study. As the following discussion of the Caribbean tradition, to which Gates’ urging led, shows, this is not what it is all about.

The Caribbean Tradition In the Caribbean context, the tradition to be heeded in finding the best strategy may be heuristically conceived as encompassing a critical and a creative component. The creative element may be viewed as characterised by a postmodern angst which has developed as a result of living in a world where nothing is certain and everything is possible. While this is alternately lamented and celebrated as the intractable reality of the postmodern present – a Euro-American perspective emanating from places of power and privilege – it is not a new phenomenon in the Caribbean. It is in fact the foundation of the Caribbean world. Selfhood is radically contingent on circumstances in such a world and is intrinsically changeable from moment to moment. The region’s literature is therefore distinguished by a desire to moderate uncertainty and explore possibilities. The literary text tries to either describe what is, to facilitate decisions about how to proceed from a basis of knowledge, or to prescribe what ought to be so that possibilities are imaginatively worked

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out before they are launched in reality. Moreover, even when it is not possible for writers to speak out of a particular Caribbean experience, there is no want of the desire to speak to the experience. Because of the myriad ways in which this occurs, if a defining aesthetic were to be named for Caribbean literature, that body of literary texts which speaks of Caribbean experiences, it would be polyphonic contradictoriness, many voices raised in contention over the same subject.10 This characteristic demands an immanent critical practice that can engage it. Such a critical practice has been long in the making. Borrowing Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s terms helps to identify its goals: “a proliferation of images: a multiplication of complex probes: a cooperative effort from us all” (Contradictory Omens 6). This kind of Caribbean critical praxis avoids what Dash refers to as:

…the troubling contemporary critical tendency to view Caribbean literature in terms of a larger theoretical discourse, whether postcolonial, postmodernist or primitivist, which is part of the current intellectual zeitgeist of the romance of otherness. (Other America x)

Dash’s statement is a call to adapt rather than adopt theoretical frameworks developed elsewhere which can result in making the literary text fit the theory rather than the other way around. Caribbean critics have been set against such tendencies, a stance which gives to criticism the defining trait of avoidance of “intellectual indentureship,” to use Gates’ terms or “water-with-berries” models in Sylvia Wynter’s terms.11 Most recently this trait and the critical vigilance it requires are noticeable in Alison Donnell’s Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature. Donnell argues that literary texts that lend themselves to particular

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interpretive techniques form the Caribbean canon and she interrogates the exclusions they facilitate and the deflections “away from their local historical and intellectual bearings” (136). But avoidance techniques are visible from the earliest critical works. Ramchand and others were able to mount an attack on the received literary canon and to use the method of close reading to good effect in the analysis of Caribbean literature. Ramchand complains, however, about “the difficulty of trying to see the West Indian novel in its social and cultural context while offering a critique in more or less pure literary terms” (West Indian Novel v). Critics were hamstrung by the desire to “critique in…pure literary terms.” This was partially because of the need to develop syllabi and teaching tools for the new literatures that drew on approaches already developed by the traditions of teaching literature elsewhere. It meant, however, that conservative academic interpretations were often underwritten by the interest of various critical perspectives in questions about the nature of literature and principles of criticism.12 This tended to foreclose on the use of literature as a discursive and counter-discursive resource. Other critics have been more radical. Brathwaite “attempts both to construct a West Indian literary tradition and to ‘root’ literature and criticism in the specifics of Caribbean natural and social landscape” (Clarke 3).13 He drew on the parallels between jazz and African-American traditions and Caribbean literature and music in order to do this. He used structuralist analyses to show the linkage between jazz and “the American Negro expression based on Africa” and local forms of music and “a West Indian Negro expression based on Africa” (“Jazz” 56). Richard L.W. Clarke observes that this type of approach

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results in a Caribbean criticism of “ineluctable syncretism” comprising a “bricolage” of philosophical and theoretical discourses (3). There is today a significant body of work that contributes to the construction of the bricolage by the appropriation of local or autochthonou...