Coolitude

Vocabularies of Coolitude: South Africa

Francine Simon

Rajiv Mohabir
Thungachi by Francine Simon

In her debut collection Thungachi (2017, Uhlanga Press) Francine Simon draws from the vast well of her Coolie inheritance to create poetry that speaks through the vocabularies of indenture. Being of Christian and Hindu Tamilian descent, Simon begins her book with the indenture story, fulfilling Vijay Mishra’s prescription that Indian Labor Diaspora be haunted by its traumas of oceanic crossings.

In her debut collection Thungachi (2017, Uhlanga Press), Francine Simon draws from the vast well of her Coolie inheritance to create poetry that speaks through the vocabularies of indenture. Being of Christian and Hindu Tamilian descent, Simon begins her book with the indenture story, fulfilling Vijay Mishra’s prescription that the Indian labor diaspora be haunted by its traumas of oceanic crossings.

Simon in the first poem writes,

Vocabularies of Coolitude: Mauritius

Khalil Torabully

Rajiv Mohabir
'Chair Corail: Fragments Coolies' by Khal Torabully

To extend my look into Pirbhai’s vocabularies of indenture I consider Khalil Torabully’s poetry, the generator of the Coolitude concept. It is through his conceptualization of Coolitude that the Mauritian poet establishes a discourse that empowers the Indian labor diaspora to begin to draw connections between themselves despite national identities. 

Caribbean vocabularies of Coolitude: Surinam and Trinidad

Rajiv Mohabir
Logie

Articulating the Caribbean as one geopolitical place has been a problematic that Silvio Torres-Saillant has delineated in his book Caribbean Poetics: Toward and Aesthetics of West Indian Literature. Torres-Saillant posits that in order to understand the literature being produced in the Caribbean the reader must first understand that ideas of literature, literary theory, and language are not necessarily universal. What he means is that the Caribbean must be understood in terms of its own history before any claims can be made about the literary merit of its writings.

Coolitude poetics interview with Sudesh Mishra

Rajiv Mohabir
Sudesh Mishra

Sudesh Mishra is the author of five books of poetry, including Tandava (Meanjin Press), Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (Otago University Press), and The Lives of Coat Hangers (Otago University Press); two critical monographs, Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English (Flinders University) and Diaspora Criticism (Edinburgh University Press); two plays, Ferringhi and The International Dateline (Institute of Pacific Studies, Suva); and several short stories.

Fiji Indian Girmitiya poetry

Rajiv Mohabir
New arrivals

Indian indenture migration to Fiji began relatively later than the trade to the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, starting in 1879 and ending in 1920, according to Sudesh Mishra’s article “Time and Girmit.” Coolies in Fiji suffered the same deception that laborers suffered at the hands of the arkotiya — the passage to plantation bound them to five-year renewable contracts. Yet the situation in Fiji was different specifically because of the indigenous Fijian presence in the governmental affairs. There were indigenous people present in Surinam and Guyana but their representation in governmental affairs was marginal, unlike the situation of the colonies in Fiji.

Vocabularies of indenture in the Indian labor diaspora

Rajiv Mohabir
Girmitiya women working

In her book Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific, Miriam Pirbhai articulates the specificities of diaspora that are usually overlooked by scholars like Vijay Mishra in their approach to understanding the concerns of the Indian Labor Diaspora as unified. The context of each writer is usually neglected in favor of pointing out cohesion between national groups without a consideration of the nuances that shade each diasporic context.

Coolitude poetics: Interview with Gaitura Bahadur

Rajiv Mohabir

Coolie Woman interweaves the author’s journey to uncover the mystery behind her great-grandmother’s exit from India, pregnant and alone in 1903, with the larger epic journey of Indian indentured women to the Caribbean as sugar plantation laborers from 1838–1917. The book is cross-genre, as much immigrant memoir and immersion journalism as it is narrative history or collective biography.

BIO

'Coolie Woman' and trans-creation

Rajiv Mohabir

Gaiutra Bahadur came to visit the University of Hawai‘i while I was there as a graduate student. She gave a presentation on her book which emerged as a kind of light to guide my own writing. In Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Bahadur begins her process of investigating Caribbean history with the oral histories of her family. In pursuit of information about her great grandmother, Sujaria, Bahadur wonders about the particularities that women faced during the period of Indian Indenture.

Coolie Woman

Gaiutra Bahadur came to visit the University of Hawai‘i while I was there as a graduate student. She gave a presentation on her book which emerged as a kind of light to guide my own writing. In Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Bahadur begins her process of investigating Caribbean history with the oral histories of her family. In pursuit of information about her great grandmother, Sujaria, Bahadur wonders about the particularities that women faced during the period of Indian Indenture.

She begins her book with the assertion that,

The archive and the poet

Rajiv Mohabir

As a relatively invisible community in the United States, you face many issues of representation. You’ve read that insulting article about how a white journalist “discovered” us off of the A train. How are you written about? How do you write about yourself and your community? Do you use formal poems to express your musicality of language — the sonnet or villanelle? Do you use postmodern methods of fragmentation and collage from a brown perspective? What sources do you draw from? What is important to you as a writer?

As a relatively invisible community in the United States, you face many issues of representation. You’ve read that insulting article about how a white journalist “discovered” us off of the A train. How are you written about? How do you write about yourself and your community? Do you use formal poems to express your musicality of language — the sonnet or villanelle? Do you use postmodern methods of fragmentation and collage from a brown perspective? What sources do you draw from? What is important to you as a writer?

Girmit ideology, douglarization, and Kala Pani poetics

More theories of the Indian Labor Diaspora

Rajiv Mohabir
Above: The original uploader was Greensburger at English Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Coolitude is not the only way that scholars have written about the Indian Labor Diaspora; in fact it is one of several. The others I will briefly outline below, citing major sources and outlining their tenets. They move from girmit ideology to douglarization to Kala Pani poetics, each one invested in locating a subjectivity that is both specific to the particularities of each new diasporic context.

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