Gaiutra Bahadur

Coolitude hauntings

Rajiv Mohabir
Sewdas Mohabir

Jane Wong, author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016), puts Asian American poetry into conversation with the sociological text by Avery Gordon. In her video “Going Toward the Ghost” she asks, how do these specters arise? She defines Poetics of Haunting as “where our history dwells in the strange liminal space of the past, present, and future combined.” She asks why she, the child of immigrants, feels the pains of her past so intensely when she herself did not undergo the horrors of her ancestors or parents.

Jane Wong, author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016), puts Asian American poetry into conversation with the sociological text by Avery Gordon. In her video “Going Toward the Ghost” she asks, how do these specters arise? She defines the poetics of haunting as “where our history dwells in the strange liminal space of the past, present, and future combined.” She asks why she, the child of immigrants, feels the pains of her past so intensely when she herself did not undergo the horrors of her ancestors or parents.

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,

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