The Metamorphic Indo-Caribbean
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ “CALLING THE MAGICIAN”: THE METAMORPHIC INDO-CARIBBEAN A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE with an emphasis in FEMINIST STUDIES by Aliyah R. Khan September 2012 The Dissertation of Aliyah R. Khan is approved: Professor Carla Freccero, Chair Professor Vilashini Cooppan Professor Anjali Arondekar Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Aliyah R. Khan 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………...vi Introduction: The Magical Indo-Caribbean………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Land and Self: Mimicry and Doubling in the Metamorphic Caribbean……………..24 Chapter 2: Jahaji Bahen Becomings: From Ship Sister to President……………………………84 Chapter 3: “More Coloured Animals”: Indigenous Indians and the Return of Myth…………..166 Chapter 4: Viveka and Valmiki: The Queer Indo-Caribbean Family…………………………..233 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...293 iii ABSTRACT Aliyah R. Khan “Calling the Magician”: The Metamorphic Indo-Caribbean This dissertation examines the relationship between bodily shapeshifting in the literature of the Asian Indian Caribbean and the construction of postcolonial Indo- Caribbean identity. Metamorphosis, in opposition to hybridity, is the lens through which I examine the political and literary relationship between the Indo- and Afro- Caribbean. In contrast to creolization, mestizaje, and other hybridizations, various forms of metamorphosis, including mimicry and doubling, provide agency in the colonial and postcolonial context. Metamorphosis suggests ways of intervening in the historic ethnic and political divides in postcolonial Caribbean nations like Trinidad and Guyana. It is thus the key literary figure deployed in the texts under consideration. The Indo-Caribbean is a distinct subgenre within Anglophone Caribbean literature that includes works produced by the descendants of nineteenth-century East Indian indentured laborers in, primarily, Trinidad and Guyana. Most of the texts examined in this dissertation are written and set in the 1960s and beyond, i.e., during and after the Caribbean independence period. While employing the common theme in Caribbean literature of indigenizing post-independence national identities, Indo- Caribbean literature focuses on tensions over the acculturation and assimilation of East Indian indentured laborers and their descendants into Afro-Creole culture— iv tensions that are expressed on the bodies of women and queer people. The literature also engages with the larger Caribbean fabulist literary tradition of animal-human shapeshifting, and socio-political interventions by land-based spirits. I draw on fiction and poetry by Shani Mootoo, Ramabai Espinet, Ryhaan Shah, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, and others to show how Indo-Caribbean literature imaginatively configures the way bodies function in the national space and in the natural environment. Race, gender, politics, sexuality, and the definition of being human are interconnected and always in flux in the Caribbean colony and postcolony. Metamorphosis offers a non-assimilationist intervention into the Indo- Afro-Caribbean divide by articulating and promoting an ever-changing ontological (and thus epistemological) diversity in a way that static conceptions of hybridity cannot. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank my dissertation committee—Carla Freccero, Vilashini Cooppan, and Anjali Arondekar—for their careful reading and thoughtful feedback. I am especially grateful to Carla Freccero, whose work and professional dedication inspire me, and whose humane care for her students is exceptional. This dissertation was completed with the generous support of the University of California President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship. I am also grateful for the financial support of the UCSC Literature Department, the UC Institute for Humanities Research, and the UCSC Graduate Division. I received timely guidance from many non-committee members of the UCSC Literature faculty, including Wlad Godzich. The Literature Department has been for me an intellectually inspirational and supportive community of people who are both bright and kind. The coffee shops, redwoods, and Pacific beaches of idyllic Santa Cruz also played integral support roles in this project. Maria Frangos’ friendship, humor, advice, discourses upon Kingdom Animalia and events of the day, and provision of a magnificent feline companion, Poofies, have been instrumental to my happiness and work in Santa Cruz. I am indebted to Penelope Williams, whose long-distance talks and deep friendship have sustained me throughout the most difficult times. Heidi Morse’s masterful copyediting skills have been invaluable to me. I also thank her for being an unstinting source of affection, adventure, and food in the past year. vi I am grateful to Erik Bachman for the camaraderie, and to both him and Christine Lupo-Montgomery, the members of my dissertation writing group, for their encouragement and time. Many other friends near and far stood in solidarity with me, offered their children and pets as wonderfully distracting companions, and talked me through this process: Sabrina Hom, Sara Orning, Liz Roberts, Rachel Bryant Anderson, Simina Calin, and Irini Neofotistos, among others. Finally, I am grateful to my family: to my parents, Jan and Salima Khan, for a lifetime of love and support, and to my brother, Javed Khan, for being himself. This is our story, and the story of those who came before us. To you and them I owe this work. vii “Beast” In Gibraltar Straits, pirates in search of El Dorado masked and machete-bearing kidnapped me. Holding me to ransom, they took my jewels and my secrets and dismembered me. The reckoning lasted for years. Limbs and parts eventually grew: a new nose, arms skilful and stronger, sight after the gutted pits could bear a leaf. It took centuries. In the cave where they kept me, a strange beast grew. With his skin of glistening jewels and his deadly tongue, even I was afraid of him. In the dark Ajanta caves of my breast ever since he has stayed, with his measure of venom, his exact poison and scintillating glitter. At a certain hour, I almost love him. —Mahadai Das Ah didn’t know that coolie people could write. —Ismith Khan INTRODUCTION The Magical Indo-Caribbean The Caribbean has no civilization because the Caribbean shuns poetry. Scandalously. We have lost the meaning of the symbol. The literal has devoured our world. Scandalously. …The most vital thing is to re-establish a personal, fresh, compelling, magical contact with things. The revolution will be social and poetic or will not be. I don’t hide the fact that I expect everything from a new barbarism. —Aimé Césaire, “Calling the Magician” 120-121 Caribbean literature—its fiction, poetry, and biomythographies, in which individuals’ biographical stories serve as universalizing myths of the nation and its citizens—has been associated in the realm of “world literature” with magic, marvelous realism, and various iterations of the unreal since Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949).1 In this way, Caribbean literature is the original postcolonial literature, which seeks ways of reframing the colonial narrative of history from the perspective of the formerly enslaved and the oppressed indigenous. 1 Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso, the “marvelous real,” precedes Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s literary tradition of “magical realism.” In El reino’s original prologue, which is generally not included in English translations of the novel, Carpentier describes the marvelous real as beginning with “una inesperada alteración de la realidad (el milagro)...una ampliación de las escalas y categorías de la realidad, percibidas con particular intensidad en virtud de una exaltación del espíritu que lo conduce a un modo de ‘estado límite.’ Para empezar, la sensación de lo maravilloso presupone una fe.” (“An unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle)…an extensión of the scales and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of spirit that leads to a mode of ‘limit state.’ To begin with, the sense of the marvelous presupposes a faith.” My translation). 2 Before Carpentier, the Martinican Aimé Césaire borrowed from the French surrealists in the 1930s to define Afro-Caribbeanness in terms of a magical poiesis, Négritude.2 Négritude as a francophone literary movement is generally associated with a poetics that exposed the global colonial suffering of all black people, and advocated for Marxist pan-Africanness and a cultural turn to Africa as solutions to imperialism and European hegemony. Césaire, most famous for his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939) and Discours sur le colonialisme (1955), saw anti-colonial revolutionary potential in surrealism’s artistic automatism: the oppressed black unconscious could be released through such semiotically rejuvenating “magical contact,” which is necessarily preceded by a rejection of the barbarism of the real. As such, says Césaire, “I’m calling upon the magician…I’m calling upon the Enraged” (122). In the contemporary academy, magical and marvelous realism are deemed characteristic of Latin American and Caribbean literature because of the extremity of the loss of ancestral histories and the surreally harsh conditions of slavery and servitude in the Americas.3 The descendants of slaves must perform the irony of inventing ancestral histories in