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1. A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
Small Axe, Volume 22, Number 2, July 2018 (No. 56), pp. 232-243 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article
Access provided by your subscribing institution. (1 Nov 2018 14:18 GMT)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/701234

2. small axe 56 • July 2018 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-6985947 © Small Axe, Inc.
A Letter to My
Great-Grandmother
Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
Dear Ma,
As I write these words, nine silver bracelets clink on my left wrist. If we sat facing each other,
there would be two gold bracelets on yours, possibly with a design of cocoa pods on the
ends. My memory is unclear. Too busy with youth, I never paused to look, and their detail is
lost to me. Today, I don’t know if they were inherited, gifted as mahr (dowry), or bought with
money you earned.
Were we able to speak with each other now, what questions would we ask, what silences
would fill spaces in our exchange, and what memories would we share? There are so many
moments when I’ve wanted answers from the past, to gather the pieces that stitch together
into “a body that walks in history.”1
Why turn to the past? Is it loss that propels navigation through memory, imagination, and
analysis? Is it arrival at new coordinates and conditions in life? Is it turning to face the world
on one’s own terms—Indian, Caribbean, and feminist—and having to figure out what you will
carry in your jahajin bundle as you cross boundaries and borders?
Besides love and blood, what is our connection, Ma? On one of the fingers on my left
hand, the side with the keys “d,” “e,” “t,” “r,” and “s” of indentureship and almost all the let-
ters of dark waters, I wear my father’s mother’s wedding band. It’s more yellow gold than one
1 Griselda Pollock, “Trouble in the Archives,” Differences 4 (1992): 28; cited in Nalini Mohabir, “Picturing an Afterlife of
Indenture,” Small Axe, no. 53 (November 2017): 91.

3. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 233
finds typical today, thicker than my own wedding band and fitted next to it. It feels almost as
if, across decades, the marriage and motherhood stories of Taimoon, born on 14 November
1913, and daughter of Kapooran and Shah Mohammed Hosein of Balmain, Couva, are just as
proximate to and touch mine. Indeed, they do, for our foremothers’ choices and compromises
have decisive consequences on our own lives, influencing what we think and write, and the
pauses and silences at our fingertips.
My beras (wrist bracelets) are deliberate, for I feel they are a material reminder of you and
of tradition—Indian women’s tradition of “labour, labour resistance, and liberation.” Whether
in everyday wearing or in other forms such as art, dancing, and writing, such reminders are
venerated. There is a glass case in Rattan Jewelers, writes Joy Mahabir, and inside is a silver
churia (connected bracelet worn from elbow to wrist) treated “with the same reverence as the
framed pictures of Hindu gods, their offerings of red hibiscus flowers surrounding it.”2
Lured
by promises of work, wages, and saving, and seduced and bought by as well as traded over
such metallic wealth, Indian women have an intimacy with gold and silver that powerfully
places their labor, bodies, and ideals of beauty in the midst of an extractive empire,3
one born
first from the dream of gold and silver and then the reign of King Sugar. As Halima Kassim
points out for Muslim women, jewelry may have bound them to marriage and family, but
when pawned or sold it also provided a resource for self-determination, developing a family
business, or buying land.4
I’ve written about you as so many Indian women before me have written about their
foremothers, and as we continue to today. With clinking in my ear as I type, why write this
letter to you?
Gaiutra Bahadur writes about her own great-grandmother, Sujaria, who journeyed to
the Caribbean as an indentured worker, pregnant and alone, in 1903. She traces her great-
grandmother back to her village in India, without ever being sure if she found her true family.
And, she traces Sujaria’s route from the depots in Calcutta to plantation life in Guyana, all the
while asking whether her experience was like that of other women who came as indentured
workers and relating how their collective records tell us much we need to know about the inner
workings of the British Empire. Gaiutra follows the story as far as such tracing can go, filling
in family memories, photos, and archives with questions. It’s panoramic and personal, like
Sujaria is guiding Gaiutra through history to the impact of an indentured past on women today.
As a graduate student just beginning to ask questions about how to be an Indian woman
in the Caribbean, I first read Patricia Mohammed’s study of the negotiation of gender relations
2 Joy Mahabir, “Communal Style: Indo-Caribbean Women’s Jewelry,” Small Axe, no. 53 (November 2017): 115, 112.
3 “Specifically as a direct symbol of labor,” Joy continues, “Indo-Caribbean jewelry . . . was understood by indentured
women as ‘a text that made visible their role in the economic and social systems of indentureship’” (ibid., 115). She quotes
her “Alternative Texts: Indo-Caribbean Women’s Jewelry,” Caribbean Vistas 1, no. 1 (2003): 7, caribbeanvistas.wordpress
.com/mahabiralternativejewelry1.
4 Halima Sa’adia Kassim, “Rings, Gifts, and Shekels: Marriage and Dowry within the Indo-Muslim Community in Trini-
dad: 1930 to the Globalized Present,” in Rosanne Kanhai, ed., Bindi: The Multifaceted Lives of Indo-Caribbean Women
(Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2011), 77.

4. 234 [ Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ] A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
in the last decades of indentureship, the time when you grew into womanhood. The book
opens with a picture of her parents, and, to this day, she draws on her mother’s story as it
has shaped her own.
“She was born into a generation who had to endure some of the resistant patriarchal
strictures that bound their lives,” Patricia says, reflecting on her mother, “so I saw the freedoms
and possibilities of my own life constantly in relation to the restrictions imposed on hers.”5
Women, seen through a girl’s eyes when she was young and a feminist’s eyes when she
began to study, led her to write about “the compromises, the arguments, the conflicts in the
domestic sphere, or in the wider society, by legislation, media debates, or other organized
or unorganized forms of female or male resistance,” and how they altered patriarchal scripts
from India.6
Accomplished teacher Anna Mahase, writing of her mother, Rookabai, says, “My
mother was a born leader of women and children. But the only one she could not lead was
my father. He always had his own way.”7
Stories of Indian womanhood, drawn from the Ramayan, typically idealize a sacrificial,
dutiful, and respectable figure such as Sita, making many young women wonder how to
manage being both Indian and self-determining at the same time, despite the fact that Sita
can be analyzed “as an individual in her own right.” She “challenges her husband for not want-
ing her to accompany him to the forest, confronts and chastises her abductor Ravan, holds
herself in very high esteem and marries only he who proves worthy of her,” later leaving Ram
in disgust to follow her mother, making the crossing while pregnant, like Sujaria.8
It’s as if Indo-Caribbean and feminism are awkwardly fitted words, to be lived in ways you
hide from your family or as a marker of your irreverence to the teachings of priests, pundits,
and imams. For Gaiutra, who returned to Guyana after adolescence in the United States, “the
deepest alienation came from the unspoken rules about what women should not and could
not do,” particularly after women’s collusions to ensure survival of their community rebuilt the
family “on concrete pillars of custom, religion and strictly defined gender roles.”9
In Matikor, the first collection of Indian women’s feminist writing and research that was
open about sexuality, violence, and rights in Indo-Caribbean women’s lives, Sheila Rampersad
painfully and proudly accounts for her mother’s survival. It is a story of violence, poverty,
alcoholism, and sexual-economic exchange that ends with liberation and triumph, a small
house, and quiet, comfortable peace. The lasting words are her mother’s, that no one “will
control her life again.”10
Sheila, like Sharlene Khan, from South Africa, makes stories of her
5 Patricia Mohammed, e-mail conversation with author, 22 August 2017.
6 Patricia Mohammed, Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad, 1917–1947 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 14.
7 Anna Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter: The Autobiography of Anna Mahase Snr., 1899–1978 (Claxton Bay, Trinidad: Royard,
1992), 13 (italics in original).
8 Sherry-Ann Singh, “Women in the Ramayana Tradition in Trinidad,” in Kanhai, Bindi, 37.
9 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 12, 206; hereafter
cited in the text.
10 Sheila Rampersad, “My Mother, Myself: A Personal Narrative,” in Rosanne Kanhai, ed., Matikor: The Politics of Identity for
Indo-Caribbean Women (St. Augustine, Trinidad: School of Continuing Studies, 1999), 129.

5. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 235
grandmother’s and mother’s experiences of violence visible, highlighting her own education
as an escape from cycles of abuse.11
Janice Kanhai-Winter’s memory, in “My Aaji,” doesn’t
include any violence. Rather, her grandmother’s story is one of family stability, acute business
acumen, matriarchy, and strict respectability—there were Bible Quoting Nanas and Cigarette
Smoking Nanas, as Shani Mootoo calls them.12
Do you know this story, Ma? When my grandmother Taimoon gave birth to a third
daughter, she wanted to call her Zairee, but my grandfather registered her as Taimoon, after
my grandmother. Disregarding both my grandfather’s ultimate decision and the official certifi-
cate, Taimoon called her Zairee anyway and, eventually, so did everyone else in the family.13
What experiences and desires nurtured such insistence? Did it come with costs and other
compromises? Patricia Mohammed says, “Our notions of gender equality . . . were planted
there by the examples of our foremothers and fathers.”14
It’s daily-Quran-reading, name-I-
chose-insisting grandmothers like mine, who couldn’t protect her children from sexual abuse
but who managed to support five children after her husband died, whose vulnerabilities and
strengths, sacrifices and small acts of defiance are our complicated legacy. However awkward,
Indo-Caribbean and feminism have always fitted together by necessity.
This is a legacy of women’s dreaming, strategizing, learning, laboring, and organizing to
resist, withstand, or outlive violence, to express sexual desires and experience erotic plea-
sure, and to manage the demands and rewards of respectability. Our great-grandmothers and
grandmothers were complex characters, not simply self-sacrificing. Colonial indentureship
records show them “on deathbeds, giving birth, losing children, going mad, being driven to
suicide, engaged in infanticide, rejecting or being rejected by shipboard husbands, demanding
that husbands prove themselves, stowing away, crying, cursing, possibly in love and clearly
in anguish” (61).
They could be unruly and heroic. They were imperfect yet resilient, resourceful, and deter-
mined survivors who changed lives, families, and communities as they sought to “shape their
own lives in ways that preserved their dignity . . . against the backdrop of plantation societies”
(100). These were the kind of women in whom we can see struggles, choices, regrets, compro-
mises, victories, and secrets, so much closer to our own lives despite the span of more than
a century. And, closer than Mecca to me here at my computer, weren’t you too named Aisha?
There were large acts of insubordination and self-definition in the histories of indentured
Indian women who came to Trinidad as independently waged workers, who unapologetically
left men who did not satisfy them, who participated in workers’ public resistance, and whose
11 See Jordache A. Ellapen, “When the Moon Waxes Red: Afro-Asian Feminist Intimacies and the Aesthetics of Indenture,”
Small Axe, no. 53 (November 2017): 96.
12 Shani Mootoo, The Cereus Blooms at Night (New York: Avon, 1996), 24.
13 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Diary of a Mothering Worker: Post 134,” grrlscene (blog), 23 January 2014, grrlscene.wordpress
.com/2014/01/23/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-january-23-2014.
14 Patricia Mohammed, “Like Sugar in Coffee: Third Wave Feminism and the Caribbean,” Social and Economic Studies 52,
no. 3 (2003): 8.

6. 236 [ Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ] A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
confrontations with inequality led them to be seen as the wrong kind of woman, deserving
of shame, punishment, and even death. Depicted as sluts or victims, resisting or courting
advances, “was there some disconcerting middle ground,” asks Gaiutra, “in a landscape of
want and coercion, of biscuits with sugar and a leather strap?” (61).
And she asks question after question about Sujaria:
What, then, was the truth? Into which category of recruit did my great-grandmother fall? Who
was she? Displaced peasant, runaway wife, kidnap victim, Vaishnavite pilgrim or widow? Was
the burn mark on her left leg a scar from escaping a husband’s funeral pyre? Was she a prosti-
tute, or did indenture save her from sex work? . . . Did the system liberate women, or con them
into a new kind of bondage? Did it save them from a life of shame, or ship them directly to it?
Were coolie women caught in the clutches of unscrupulous recruiters who tricked them? Were
they, quite to the contrary, choosing to flee? Were these two possibilities mutually exclusive,
or could both things be true? (39)
Yet, “the archives leave gaps,” she sighs.
Missing, with few exceptions, are the voices of the women themselves. They did not leave
behind diaries or letters. The vast majority wasn’t literate, in English or in any Indian language.
They did not tell their own stories, except indirectly, through the often-biased prism of govern-
ment investigators and court officials who occasionally took their testimonies. The relative
silence of coolie women in the sum total of history reflects their lack of power. But could it also
reflect a strategy by women who had secrets to keep? Is it possible that, on some level, each
individual silence was a plan? . . . Is it possible that my great-grandmother would not want me
to know why and how she left? Would she deliberately disappear behind a curtain to escape
questions about her past? (32)
Gaiutra writes about her great-grandmother, but I hear her writing to her, see her some-
times staring into the distance at the past, conjuring her as she sat typing, asking of her:
Would you “possibly have foreseen me someday asking such impertinent questions?” (47).
It’s no surprise that, on the cover of Anna Mahase’s book, the ghost of her mother in orhni
and long dress is colored ocean blue, is both transparent and present in the background, and
rests an aged hand, with a bera visible on her wrist, on the girl, outlined in black and white
like the progeny of printed text, as she stands looking directly at us from the foreground,
book in hand.15
“Indentureship is virtually inseparable from an Indo-Caribbean identity,” Nalini Mohabir
observes.16
That does not mean always reviewing “the trauma of ocean crossings; darkness
onboard the ship; the degradation of plantation, labor, race, capital.” Rather, indentureship
and its afterlife are “a place of memory . . . perceptible somewhere between the actual and
metaphorical,” evident and erased, felt or seen and ghostly.17
15 Mahase, My Mother’s Daughter.
16 Mohabir, “Picturing an Afterlife of Indenture,” 82.
17 Ibid., 93.

7. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 237
Maybe that’s why I’m writing to you, Ma. Maybe this is the conversation we might have
had, and it haunts me.
A Muslim girl, going to the Canadian Mission Presbyterian school at the turn of the twen-
tieth century in Iere Village, as you did, among some of the earliest descendants of indentured
workers, I think you would understand the difference that education makes. You can see it
in the language in this letter; a bookish vocabulary, its textbook text. Joy Mahabir points to
a “Naparima tradition” of Indo-Trinidadian girls’ empowerment through schooling and “the
reverence for intellectual development that indentured women passed on to their daughters.”18
It has been revolutionary.19
Schooling must have shaped you too, but it’s too late to ask how. I picture you standing
at the front of the spacious wooden house on Princes’ Town main road, in the rectangle parlor
where you sold newspapers, wearing a light blue calf-length dress, your lace orhni resting on
silver hair, your plump parrot in a cage at the open wooden window to your right. I wonder at
your thoughts on everything you read in those newspapers, first page to last. You were well
informed about global events—the First World War, British and American suffragettes, the
Indian independence movement and the bloody birth of Pakistan, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia,
Tubal Uriah Butler’s fight against colonial authorities in Trinidad, our own twin-island inde-
pendence, and the increasingly public voice of women and feminists in the 1970s Caribbean,
when my earliest memories of you begin.
Surprisingly, it only recently occurred to me that Indian women would have held their
own informed opinions from at least the turn of the twentieth century. There are few public
archives, letters, or diaries recording kitchen-table-articulated or newspaper-shop-nurtured
political perspectives, leaving mainly questions to purposefully write into history. Almost no
Indo-Caribbean women have written about their foremothers’ political views. What were
yours? Did you read the Spectator, which listed Dr. Amala Ramcharan as an associate editor
in the last years of the 1940s? The journal was published in Port of Spain and “circulated
to at least twenty-nine different towns in Trinidad and to British Guiana and claimed sub-
scribers in London, East and South Africa, Canada and the USA.” What did you think of the
Indo-Caribbean women featured in its pages, those women winning scholarships to study
overseas, “attending international women’s conferences, and participating in the civil dis-
obedience movement of India in the 1930s?”20
Did you know of workers and labor leaders
like Saheedan Ramroop, born in 1922, who began to work as a cane cutter when she was
just ten years old?21
18 Joy Mahabir, “Naparima Feminism: Lineage of an Indo-Caribbean Feminism” (paper presented at the 40th Annual
Caribbean Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, 25–29 May 2015).
19 Patricia Mohammed, “A Vindication for Indo-Caribbean Feminism,” in Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, eds., Indo-
Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 31.
20 Lisa Outar, “Post-indentureship Cosmopolitan Feminism: Indo-Caribbean and Indo-Mauritian Women’s Writing and the
Public Sphere,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 95–96, 97.
21 Nesha Haniff, “Saheedan Ramroop: Cane-cutter,” in Kanhai, Matikor, 175.

8. 238 [ Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ] A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
Quiet, pious woman that you were, and daughter of an Afghan-descended, Muslim leader,
what had you been taught about Aisha, third wife of the Prophet Muhammad, born at the turn
of the seventh century, who delivered public speeches, became directly involved in war and
even battles, and was considered knowledgeable about poetry, medicine, and politics? As a
girl, what kind of woman did you aspire to be? Did you get to fulfill those dreams?
Guyanese novelist Ryhaan Shah crafts a story of a Muslim grandmother who was a reader
too. “Oh, the ideas she had, that one! It was socialism this and socialism that,” she writes.
“[Nani was always] more serious-minded and reading all kinds of books that she got from
god knows where. Daddy said it was no use her killing herself so over those books since they
wouldn’t help her mind a home and family, but she just kept on reading and reading.”22
In the
end, stepping beyond her expected role as woman and wife in her efforts as a sugar workers’
labor leader led to shame and silencing.
Yet the history of Muslim women’s public engagement shows them, in the same period of
the 1930s, beginning to deliver lectures to mixed audiences, to become members of elected
mosque boards and councils, to hold meetings to develop women’s groups, and to participate
in debates on a range of topics, including “Be it resolved that Muslim women deserve an equal
social status with men.”23
From the 1950s, the Young Muslim Women’s Association, the San Juan Muslim Ladies
Organization, and the Islamic Ladies Social and Cultural Association began to be established.
The ASJA Ladies Association was represented at the first world conference on the status of
women held in Mexico City in 1975. Muslim women also have a history of pushback against
partitions narrowing their space for prayer in the masjid,24
and challenges to their exclusion
from voting in organizational elections when they perceived their jamaat (association) being a
“boys’ club” for far too long.25
Muslim women have also long been part of Caribbean feminist
response to issues such as violence against women.26
Interestingly, Indian women’s early
public and associational politics have no presence in Gaiutra’s narrative. Yet, Indian women
were battling not only in interpersonal relationships and through the courts but also in polit-
ical groups such as the Women’s Political and Economic Organization (WPEO, founded in
1946 in Guyana). Later, Rajkumari Singh (1923–79) and Mahadai Das (1954–2003) were both
22 Ryhaan Shah, A Silent Life (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2005), 18, 19.
23 Halima Sa’adia Kassim, “Education, Community Organisations and Gender Among Indo-Muslims of Trinidad, 1917–1962”
(PhD diss., University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, 1999).
24 See Rhoda Reddock, “‘Up against a Wall’: Muslim Women’s Struggle to Reclaim Masjid Space in Trinidad and Tobago,” in
Aisha Khan, ed., Islam and the Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 232–42; Feroza Rose Moham-
med, Speak Out: Perspectives of a Muslim Woman from the Caribbean (Caroni: Lexicon Trinidad, 2009); Halima Kassim,
“The Depths of Rose, ‘A Wind That Rose’: A Woman Called Feroza Rose Mohammed,” in Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and
Lisa Outar, eds., “Indo-Caribbean Feminisms: Charting Crossings in Geography, Discourse, and Politics,” special issue,
Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 6 (2012): 1–14.
25 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Democracy, Gender, and Indian Muslim Modernity in Trinidad,” in Khan, Islam and the Americas,
256–61.
26 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Diary of a Mothering Worker: Post 225,” grrlscene (blog), 16 November 2016, grrlscene
.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-november-16-2016/.

9. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 239
“political leaders and creative writers in the 1970s, negotiating gender, ethnicity, and class.”27
However, as Anita Baksh points out, Singh’s mother Alice Bhagwandai Singh was involved in
the Red Cross and YWCA and founded both the Balak Saharta Mandalee in 1936, to assist
poor Indian women and children, and the British Guiana Dramatic Society, after she married
Singh’s father and moved to Guyana.
Sometimes, despite their “understated stridency,” Indian women continue “as a result
of the indenture legacy, to be viewed as largely rural and uneducated, primarily as nurturer
rather than career women, with lives that were overly controlled by patriarchal Indian males.”28
“Was that what it would mean to be a ‘coolie woman’: to be disgraced and powerless to do
anything about it? To not only be powerless but made to feel just how powerless she was?”
Gaiutra asks (70). For her, then, bringing coolie women to life in her book is about tracing
their survival of or death by epic and everyday violence, up to today. As she says of conjugal
violence in Guyana, “Most households in Guyana’s villages possess a cutlass. It’s still the tool
to chop cane, and it’s still an instrument to dismember women” (194).
Indenture stereotypes frame the narrative of violence now as they did then, even in
this depiction. Indian women had culturally creative and civic lives that this narrative makes
invisible; they had stories that included education, politics, and the founding of women’s
organizations. Trinidadian Gema Ramkeesoon, for example, writes of becoming involved in
social work and of the establishment of nurseries, girls’ hostels, school feeding programs,
and the Trinidad and Tobago Youth Council, as well as the largest group of Anglican women,
the Mother’s Union, from the 1920s on.29
You were attending school more than one hundred years ago, Ma. Your story is one
illustrating the aspirations Muslim men brought for their daughters,30
even religious leaders
like your father, Syed Abdul Aziz, who was twenty-one years old when he traveled to Trinidad
in 1883 as an indentured worker on the ship Lee.31
I remember you in orhni, never hijab. I
remember you able to read Urdu and Arabic as well as English. What explains this? How does
it challenge stereotypes about Indian women in the period of indentureship? How does this
challenge dominant stereotypes of violence and mutilated womanhood? How should it shape
our global challenges to gender roles and violent masculinity today?
27 Anita Baksh, “Indentureship, Land, and Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought in the Literature of Rajkumari Singh and Mahadai
Das,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 74.
28 Patricia Mohammed, “Vindication,” 30.
29 Gema Ramkeesoon, “Early Women’s Organizations in Trinidad: 1920s to 1950s,” in Patricia Mohammed and Catherine
Shepherd, eds., Gender in Caribbean Development (Mona/St. Augustine/Cave Hill: University of the West Indies Women
and Development Studies Project, 1999), 355.
30 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Diary of a Mothering Worker: Post 194,” grrlscene (blog), 2 June 2015, grrlscene.wordpress.com
/2015/06/11/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-june-2-2015.
31 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Diary of a Mothering Worker: Post 191,” grrlscene (blog), 12 May 2015, grrlscene.wordpress
.com/2015/05/18/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-may-12-2015.

10. 240 [ Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ] A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
Would I call these coolie woman stories? Would you, Ma? “Was your blood spilled that I
might reject my history,” writes Mahadai Das, a prescient ghost in this conversation.32
Rajku-
mari Singh called on us to claim and proclaim this “c-word” with all its naming.33
Coolietude
is about the meaning, form, and practice of the afterlife of indentureship.34
It is memory work
in the present. “I take no offence. . . . My paternal grandmom cut cane. . . . I am proud of my
heritage and wouldn’t be here if she didn’t do every single thing she did,” writes lawyer Ekta
Rampersad.35
Yet there is more. Aneela Bhagwat, who grew up in the Pichakaree (Indo-Trinidadian folk
music) movement, responds,
Coolie has been used in Trinidad as a racist and derogatory term to refer to Indo Trinis. And
also used against Indo Trinis by other Indo Trinis to distance themselves, as reference to those
who are unrefined, who don’t mix well, whose social graces are awkward, who aren’t sufficiently
creolised. But it’s also owned as well, to lay claim to the experience of indenture, of rurality, or
agricultural and labour roots, to traditions much ridiculed but now in vogue: from eating roti to
“oiling” one’s self in coconut oil from head to toe. It is a term you think about before you name
your child because while a nice Bhojpourie name like Lilawatie rolls off the tongue so naturally
and is imbibed with so much meaning and history, somebody somewhere will giggle snidely
so you decide on something easily digestible, something that can go both ways and work in all
social situations, something that won’t be made fun of on a playground or a meme.36
And even among douglas (children of Indian and African ancestors). “Granny call me
‘coolie boy’ like two days ago,” young Muhammad Muwakil admits. “My experience of the
word is that it was used to refer to me, a more apparently mixed son in a predominantly African
community and family, in a kind of joking somewhat derogatory sense, I hated it for a long,
long time now. . . . Now I still hate it yes, lol.”37
Imagine what this means for my daughter, also a dougla, Ma. What do I teach her? Should
I make sure that, in a place where mixing is considered to bring either the threat of Indianness
or its loss, she can claim to be a coolie girl too?38
Or do I turn to words that were never colonial
32 Mahadai Das, “They Came in Ships,” in I Want to Be a Poetess of My People (Georgetown, Guyana: National History and
Arts Council, 1977), 15–16.
33 Rajkumari Singh, “I Am a Coolie,” in Ian McDonald, ed., They Came in Ships: An Anthology of Indo-Guyanese Prose and
Poetry (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 1998), 85–87.
34 Andil Gosine, “After Indenture,” Small Axe, no. 53 (November 2017): 65.
35 Ekta Rampersad, Facebook message to author, 18 July 2017.
36 Aneela Bhagwat, Facebook message to author, 18 July 2017.
37 Muhammad Muwakil, Facebook message to author, 18 July 2017.
38 See Rhoda Reddock, “‘Douglarisation’ and the Politics of Gender Relations in Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago: A
Preliminary Exploration,” Contemporary Issues in Social Sciences: A Caribbean Perspective 1 (1999): 98–124; Rhoda
Reddock, “‘Split Me in Two’: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race-Mixing in the Trinidad and Tobago Nation,” in Rebecca Chiyoko
King O’Riain et al., eds., Global Mixed Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 44–67; Gabrielle Jamela Hosein,
“Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualisation,” in Hosein and
Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 213.

11. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 241
officials’ and which, therefore, do not have to be reclaimed?39
Could she one day name her
feminism jahaji bhain or jahajin?40
Born in the wake of long, long voyages, her name is the swirl of many oceans. Those
seventeen letters are hardly enough stepping stones to trace back the paths that led to who
she is today. Like your presence as a reader of these pages, Ma, she’ll just have to write out-
side the boxes and in the margins of the page, defying the rules of what Véronique Bragard
calls an “ocean of a Western-made historical discourse as well as a world of publication and
criticism” that can wreck our remembering like so many ships.41
“The ancestors . . . /,” Gaiutra
quotes David Dabydeen, “. . . lie like texts / Waiting to be written by the children” (17).42
Writ-
ten how? In statements and questions, in autobiographies and histories, poetry and fiction?
In a letter? Is there a form or language or sequence of keys best for writing about intimacy
with the afterlife of indenture?
I returned to your house, your father’s house, last year. That house held papers, photo-
graphs, books, and letters; precious, irreplaceable objects tucked in drawers and cupboards.
Such immeasurable loss swept over me as I stood on its demolished site. The grass swayed
at my feet as wind explored the emptiness.43
The Lee’s ship records, like those of the Clyde on
which Sujaria sailed in 1903, were destroyed. This felt like an entire history had been erased,
leaving a space bar to blankly fill a sentence. “Memory work,” Annette Khun argues, “is a
method and practice of unearthing and making public untold stories of ‘lives lived out in the
borderlands, lives for which the central interpretive devices of culture don’t quite work.’”44
The
crossing was a “magician’s box” (4), ship records are missing, archives in wooden houses,
painted blue, are now simply uninhabited air, family memories are uncertain. Yet, I feel your
presence. Is that why I’m conjuring you, Ma?
Conversations about and, whether actual or imagined, also with foremothers have pro-
vided these matrilineal storylines for contemporary Indo-Caribbean feminisms. Indeed, Ma,
Indo-Caribbean feminist writing explicitly “draws on Indo-Caribbean diasporic cosmologies,
artifacts, archetypes, myths, and symbols, engagements with embodiment, popular cultural
expressions, the sacred and sexual.”45
We explore the intersections of Indianness, Caribbean-
ness, gender, and feminism with a view to transforming inequities in the region. It’s a sense of
rights and how to navigate them that emerges from looking at indentureship, the afterlife of
39 Mahabir, “Communal Style,” 116.
40 See Kavita Ashana Singh, “Comparative Caribbean Feminisms: Jahaji-bhain in Carnival,” in Hosein and Outar, Indo-
Caribbean Feminist Thought, 143–44.
41 Véronique Bragard, “Gendered Voyages into Coolietude: The Shaping of the Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literary Conscious-
ness,” Kunapipi 20, no. 1 (1988): 110.
42 Bahadur quotes David Dabydeen, “Coolie Odyssey,” in Coolie Odyssey (London: Hansib, 1988), 12.
43 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein, “Diary of a Mothering Worker: Post 189,” grrlscene (blog), 21 April 2015, grrlscene.wordpress
.com/2015/04/29/diary-of-a-mothering-worker-april-21-2015.
44 Annette Khun, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 1995), 8; Khun quotes Carolyn Steedman,
Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Verago, 1986), 5.
45 Gabrielle Jamela Hosein and Lisa Outar, “Introduction: Interrogating an Indo-Caribbean Feminist Epistemology,” in Hosein
and Outar, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 2.

12. 242 [ Gabrielle Jamela Hosein ] A Letter to My Great-Grandmother
indentured labor, and the examples that women have provided since they set foot on those
boats. There is, therefore, an “f-word” at work too, a desire to articulate and live economic,
sexual, and bodily autonomy in ways that challenge an emancipatory narrative of Western
modernity.
Ramabai Espinet describes this as an “epistemology of cane,” or knowledge born
from indentured experience of exploitation and coercion, and its legacy for women’s labor
struggles—waged, unwaged, underpaid, domestic, sexual, and reproductive—and their resis-
tance to and resilience amid conditions of violence, impunity, indignity, and inequity.46
Others
call it a kala pani discourse that creates “woman-centred mythologies of interrelatedness and
connection”47
and even “a new view of women’s rights” (90) as these jahaji-bhain (ship sisters)
or jahajins birthed them across oceans.48
As one of the most recent, Gaiutra’s book follows this tradition of turning to matrilineality
and the personal; centering women’s bodies and experience; making sex, love, and violence
visible; highlighting women’s agency and vulnerabilities; and reflecting on implications for
gender relations, women’s rights, and contemporary Caribbean feminisms. Conversations
we never had thought we could have, not so, Ma? When Gaiutra finished her epic book, did
she ask herself, Would Sujaria be proud of me? And if you were to read about so many of our
great-grandmothers, Ma, how might you feel?
Perhaps Gaiutra could only have written her book at this time, with forty years of Indo-
Caribbean feminist scholarship like pieces of a churia she could forge together and wield,
unafraid of its power. Perhaps that is why it has taken me until now to put this letter on paper,
Ma. Public and political spaces have hardly opened for Indian women in the Caribbean and
its diaspora to be all things they choose rather than everything expected or respected. So
matrilineal lines and feminist genealogies are our jahajin bundles, our resources for feminist
concerns, navigations, and mobilizing, the ghostly objects in our counterarchive.
Bracelets clinking during public activism just as much as in bed during sex, while working
within feminist academia, and during the afternoon hours my daughter and I bathe in the river.
Those beras are memory work too: “Women’s bodies, covered with thick silver from wrist to
elbow, ankle to mid-calf, would become walking banks, repositories of their families’ wealth.
The metal carapace served another purpose too, that of a weapon that could crush the head
of an unwary attacker when wielded by an arm unafraid of the swing of its power.”49
What’s clear today, as it was when you were my age, is women’s daily struggle to live
self-defined lives, to survive violence and without violence in a globally exploitative political
economic system whose structural conditions still lead “people to do what they otherwise
46 Ramabai Espinet, “The Absent Voice: Unearthing the Female Epistemology of CANE” (paper presented at the conference
Sugarcane and Society, Toronto, July 1989).
47 Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the “Kala Pani” (Kingston: University of
the West Indies Press, 2004), 10.
48 Peggy Mohan, Jahajin (New Delhi: HarperCollins and the India Today Group, 2007).
49 Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2003), 300.

13. SX56 [ 7.2018 ] 243
wouldn’t” (151). Sex, love, honor, violence, exploitation, alcoholism, dependence, aspiration,
loss, pride, piety, and precarity are laid bare everywhere in these mutilated landscapes.
Violence is the central narrative in Gaiutra’s book, Ma, but more interesting are all the other
threads that are so easy to miss in what seems to be a story of victims and survival. In writing
about you, following Gaiutra’s return to Sujaria, and writing to you, following her techniques
of “memory work,” I’ve tried to show how postindentureship feminist writing such as Coolie
Woman presents examples of counterarchival imaginaries and “postindenture aesthetics.”50
In
other words, Indo-Caribbean feminist writing, such as Gaiutra’s, is often born from creatively
tracing matrilineal intellectual and political genealogies. Indian women have turned to the
intimate and personal in imaginative ways to understand foremothers’ aspirations, idiosyn-
crasies, individual plot twists, and knowledge about their rights and the world and their lega-
cies. These are beyond the margins of archives, in missing diaries and letters and unrecorded
conversations and silences between women. What, then, do we do?
The way that Coolie Woman tries to answer this question is among its most important
contributions, inspiring me to write to you in a way that enacts its experiments with form. How-
ever, as I’ve also traced here, “coolie woman” lives are more diverse than represented by the
struggle with violence, and those histories are silenced by a narrow approach to indentureship
and its afterlife. For this reason, it is important that genealogies of education and knowledge,
associational life and politics also fill our pages, recording differences of class and religion
and challenging stereotypical but familiar archival truths.
Who we accept ourselves as and empower ourselves to be is shaped by the historical
stories we are told. Such stories enable us to understand the parts cleaved by the magician’s
box or, maybe, cut open by cutlass, and no longer whole. They provide a basis for feminism
that doesn’t feel like loss, for we are simply holding close and carrying in our bundles our
great-grandmothers’ aspirations to pursue “an unsettling liberation” (90), despite the costs.
Their stories are in our blood, our beras, and our memories, in our footsteps and photographs,
and at our fingertips. Their ghosts are familiar with old challenges we still encounter and life-
or-death struggles to negotiate power. At the end, all I can picture is jahajins’ diverse pursuit of
dreams, not yet fulfilled, and how much more we must achieve. Ma, do you agree? I imagine
you nodding as you read.
Love,
Gabi
50 On counterarchival imaginaries, see Mohabir, “Picturing,” 92. On postindenture aesthetics, Mohabir writes, “I envision a
postindenture aesthetics using the presence of pictoral cues, metaphoric visual expression, and thematic and symbolic
complexities through institutional and personal archives” (85).