Voyages Across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman Aliyah Khan CARIBBEAN LESBIANS DO NOT EXIST. So we are told. . . . Of course, Caribbean lesbians do exist. As soon as I write this — as soon as I say it — I am attacked and dismissed: not my existence, but my authenticity as a Caribbean person and whether or not I have a legitimate claim on that identity. . . . How does a living, breathing, loving person prove her existence? And why should she have to? — Rosamond King In much of the Anglophone Caribbean, homosexuality is both legislatively illegal and viewed by the general public and government oficials as a product of “colonial inluence” — an antisocial import allegedly propagated by white tourists and foreign media — even as antigay colonial Anglican religiosity, imported US evangelical values, and British Victorian constitutional laws became naturalized postcolonially as “Caribbean.” Many vociferous Caribbean cultural purists also conveniently forget that they and the Caribbean itself are in and of the West. In a typical Guyanese Stabroek News letter to the editor, one signiicantly named “Abu Bakr,” speaking on behalf of Muslim Indo-Guyanese and by extension the whole country, wrote in 2010: We are assured that in India and Africa our folks were, before the Westerners imposed their alien laws, happily sodomising each other without let or hindrance. We are therefore to be persuaded of the liberating virtues of deviation from the natural order. The argumentation is false, the ethnology contrived. If anything at all the current advocates of gay rights are examples of a neo-colonialist tendency to mimic every fad and fashion that is born in the former metropoles. Gays soldered themselves onto the human GLQ 22:2 DOI 10.1215/10642684-3428771 © 2016 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 250 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES rights wagon in the West. . . . We have got to ensure that we live in a clean world.1 As is necessary for the aspiring second coming of the caliph, Bakr is well versed in the rhetoric of imperial metropole and periphery. Homophobia in the Caribbean is rather more about citizenship and national belonging than it is about ignorance or even religiosity. Frantz Fanon (2008: 157 – 58n44) himself argued in 1967 that while male transvestites existed in Martinique and the Caribbean, “in Europe, on the other hand, I have known several Martinicans who became homosexuals, always passive.” Colonialism and the inferiority complex of the colonized in Europe — Fanon says it is there that Martinicans are exposed to the Oedipus complex — thus create Caribbean homosexuals, who repeat history as “passive” partners to white men (ibid.). Nadia Ellis (2015: 896) shows that in this Fanonian moment at the end of colonialism, “any intersection in the analysis between race and homosexuality left the black queer igure shadowy, unformed, at just the moment when the white ‘homosexual,’ as a clearly deined subject, was coming into view.” Afro-Caribbean men who migrated to postwar Britain were viewed as either heterosexual predators of white women or “vulnerable prey” who could be “swept away by the city streets and corrupted by decrepit, malingering English men” (ibid.: 896). The Caribbean’s insistent transnationalism and paradoxical rooting in migrancy was a sexual and political danger for the colonial man aspiring to postcoloniality: if travel to the European metropole made one a homosexual, symbolically and bodily disciplined by yet another dominant white man, one had better stay put and focus on building a new nation an ocean away. Eudine Barriteau (2003: 11) rightly argues that the resulting “male marginalization thesis,” which paints Caribbean men as eternal victims whose masculinity must be restored by the postcolonial state, is a particular stumbling block for Caribbean feminism and does a general disservice to the complexity of gender roles in the global south. The discursive weakness of positioning Caribbean male sexuality as dependent on European victimization is exploited on the conservative side of the political spectrum by Bakr and his bigoted cohorts, who echo the belief in the colonial creation of homosexuality but have also cottoned on to a fundamental truth of Joseph Massad’s classic analysis of the insidiousness of the “Gay International”: that LGBTQ issues are framed globally in terms of Western neoliberal human rights discourse, to the detriment of indigenous forms of self-expression and activism. Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean culture, though, are inherently hybridized discourses constructed through ongoing migration and encounter with the other, be it India or the AfroCaribbean. In this shifting identitarian terrain, Caribbean denunciations of homo- Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN sexuality devolve quickly, as demonstrated, into talk of cleanliness, purity, natural orders, and disgust. As usual, distaste for and disavowal of homosexuals is the one thing on which Indo- and Afro-Caribbeans, be they Hindu, Muslim, or Christian, agree.2 The 1838 – 1917 transoceanic indentured trade that brought laborers from India to work on British, French, and Dutch plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere resulted in populations in Trinidad and Guyana that are demographically almost evenly split between the descendants of Indian indentured laborers and African slaves.3 The subject of Indo-Caribbean scholarship and historical identity in this schema is usually the jahaji bhai. This fraternal “ship brother” relationship replaced the bonds of family and caste aboard the (indenture)ships of the British East India Company. Less than one-third of the migrants were women; they formed their own jahaji bahin, “ship sister,” bonds, as demonstrated in the historical account of the 1885 rape and murder of one Maharani (“Princess”), whose female Indian friends acted as advocates for her case aboard ship and upon landing in British Guiana, in deiance of the lack of credibility given Indian men and all women under colonial British jurisprudence (Shepherd 2002).4 The jahaji bhai narrative of survival gives Indo-Caribbean people their own heterosexual, transoceanic story of labor and racial oppression with which to parallel and counter the nationalist discourse of Afro-Caribbean slavery and postcolonial entitlement to land and rule. Indo-Caribbeans are thus maneuvered into the hybrid, oceancrossing paradigms of Caribbean area studies because the jahaji bhai survived, as the Indo-Trinidadian historian Ron Ramdin (1994: 13) says, “the other Middle Passage,” and as the British scholar Hugh Tinker (1993: 3) puts it, “a new system of slavery.” This formulation is resisted or at least complicated by Verene Shepherd (2002: xviii) and some other Caribbean scholars, who argue — correctly — that while many of the material conditions of Indo-Caribbean indentureship were the same as slavery and indeed the indentured lived in the logie barracks vacated by African slaves, an individual bound by an indentureship contract with an end date did not have the same life experience as a chattel slave whose life was spent in and children were born into servitude. Mutual suffering during colonial transoceanic ship journeys has proved to be a relatively crude basis for ethnic afiliation and alliance in postcolonial Trinidad and Guyana, where many Indo-Caribbean people still embrace the Bhojpuri Hindi-Caribbean nationalist slogan “apan jaat,” voting with one’s race or caste. Nonetheless, Indo-Caribbean people’s endurance of the kala pani, “black water,” transatlantic voyage is enough to igure them as properly transoceanic and therefore properly Caribbean in national discourses characterized and limited by what M. Jacqui Alexander (1994: 6) deftly identiies in Trini- Published by Duke University Press 251 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 252 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES dadian politics as the “heterosexual imperative of citizenship.” Nineteenth-century Hindus believed that the metonymic kala pani crossing would cause them to lose caste status; their origin story begins with loss, and so postcolonial “recovery” of jahaji bhai stories has meshed well with what Anjali Arondekar (2015: 99) calls the archival “language of search and rescue” and its “attachments to loss.” Jahaji bhai relationships are characterized as strictly fraternal and familial, a way to create a racial-cultural imagined community, inding suitable heterosexual marriage partners, and strengthening Hindu or Muslim religious ties. As Sean LokaisinghMeighoo (2000: 87) emphasizes, “There is no homosexual subject in jahaji bhai culture.” The wearisome search for more hidden historical homosexuals should now be on; we must ferret and trot out queer aboriginal nonconforming genders and behaviors and identities to show Bakr that we were in fact “happily sodomising each other without let or hindrance” before the advent of the British and their perversions both political and sexual. What is the Indo-Caribbean addition to what Arondekar (2015: 101) calls the “veracity archive” of historical homosexuality, with its “salviic truths”? The possibility with which we must contend is that there may not be one; that while questing for queers in the historical record may uncover a few instances of interest, we may not ind the ancestor we are looking for. Arondekar calls for reframing the hunt for historical homosexuals as a “return to a history of sexuality . . . not through a call to loss (of object and/or materials), but rather through radical abundance, through an archive that is incommensurable and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary.” Perhaps the majority of the vast archive of Indian indentureship is made up of numbers: numbers of people, numbered people, numbers of goods, numbers of plantations, numbers of ships and sailors, numbers upon numbers of the mind-numbing bureaucratic minutiae of empire. Whether or not they speak to a history of sexuality, the individual stories of indentureship weave through and under these numbers while resisting their quantiication. In this essay I show, irst, that the jahaji bhai narrative of community and cultural survival elides at least one documented case of Indian indentured men engaged in same-sex acts aboard ship. One case, though, is evidence of “radical abundance” rather than homosexual subjectivity. The details of this case were scrupulously recorded by the British, though that nation of shopkeepers and their meticulous accounts never acknowledged the possibility of women loving women aboard ship. There is no Indo-Caribbean equivalent of the Afro-Surinamese and Afro-Caribbean mati sexual and emotional relationship between female shipmates as described by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2008: 192, 198). But as Rosanne Kanhai and Brinda Mehta show, Indian matikor female-only wedding dances Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN aboard ships were rather queer — not because every homosocial space is queer but because Indian women simulated sex acts with each other’s bodies under the guise of celebrating heterosexual marriage and procreation.5 Such same-sex shipboard stories are glossed over as aberrant behavior by Indo-Caribbean nationalist cultural discourse. It is not even a question of homosexual act versus queer identity; the jahaji bhai narrative blatantly denies the existence or possibility of either. As Arondekar (2009: 7) asserts, “Homosexuality emerges as the structural secret of the archive, without whose concealment the archive ceases to exist.” The archive of Indo-Caribbean indentureship and the story of a people it generates, with its unending details of gender, class, religious, and racial suffering, is rendered curiously impersonal by the absence of the homosexual. I irst focus on the archival recovery of the story of two indentured Indian men, Mohangoo and Nabi Baksh, caught in lagrante delicto in 1898 while being transported aboard the British ship Mersey to the cane ields of British Guiana. Both men disappear from the historical record upon disembarkation in British Guiana. But in the context of the never-ending Indo-Caribbean search for origins, where contemporary community members routinely comb colonial archives from Kingston to Kew for names of obscure ancestral villages and villagers in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, we can claim Mohangoo and Baksh as perhaps not linear ancestors but kin. Who else will hear the postcolonial dua (supplication) of the few IndoCaribbean youths struggling in 2015 to keep Sangam, the sole Indo-Caribbean queer community organization, aloat, while the World Health Organization simultaneously reports the abominable statistic that Indo-Guyanese men have the highest suicide rate in the world (“Desperate Measures” 2014: 44)?6 In the second part of this essay I read the jahaji bahin — ship sister — as a queer subject through the igure of the Indo-Caribbean “mannish woman,” as illustrated by an Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian writer, Shani Mootoo, in her novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008). There are two pressing reasons for prefacing this contemporary reading with the archival jahaji bhai story of Mohangoo and Baksh: irst, that Indo-Caribbean popular histories sometimes speak of the situational ribaldry of women participating in matikor but never of men who love men, as the latter relation is a fundamental threat to the imagined ethnic community in the New World, as it (re)constitutes its patriarchal structure. This archival attention to same-sex practices of women rather than men is perhaps not as unusual as it seems: the colonial historical record does focus on incidences of male-male “unnatural” behavior, whereas the matikor narratives recuperated by Kanhai and Mehta are derived from oral histories, travel journals, and family stories, the type of invaluable archival material eschewed by oficial British record keepers. Sec- Published by Duke University Press 253 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 254 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES ond, the deconstruction of jahaji bhai heterosexual masculine subjectivity and its relation to community and state is a necessary precursor to elaborating any queer model of the Indo-Caribbean. There appear to be no recorded instances of sexual relationships between women in the archival records of Indo-Caribbean indentureship, though many of these records are lost to time and environmental damage. Literature, I argue, is not only a supplement to the historicity of the queerless archive. Literature is queer archive, and its idiomatic digressions, vagaries, hailing, signiications, and self-involvement challenge, as Arondekar (2015: 101) puts it, “the aura and/or seduction of ‘resistance’ . . . suturing subaltern archives to an oppositional imperative.” It does not add to the archive; it opens it. Valmiki’s Daughter, the tale of a young Indo-Trinidadian woman and her cultural, familial, and personal struggle with her lesbian sexuality, is Mootoo’s biomythographical “coming-out” novel: that is, the one in which the major IndoCaribbean protagonists are unquestionably homosexual, and which is a story about homosexuality.7 Most importantly, it appears to be the irst novel written in which the main character, Viveka Krishnu, is an Indo-Caribbean lesbian and mannish woman. I read Valmiki’s Daughter in the mode of autoethnography, or more properly, Audre Lorde’s biomythography, a subaltern genre of simultaneously writing the self and story of one’s people that originates in Lorde’s resistance to the silencing of the queer Afro-Caribbean zami woman. Zami or zanmi is Lorde’s (1982: 9) Grenadian and Carriacou term for lesbian, or perhaps more accurately, womanloving-woman. That women make, rather than are, zami is one of Lorde’s major concerns in her 1982 work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The text is a queer Caribbean feminist biomythography — Lorde was a New Yorker with parents from Grenada and Barbados, and identiied as a black Caribbean zami. Here I wish to emphasize the Caribbeanness of a written form that is not so different from the call-and-response “Krik? Krak!,” an Afro-Caribbean oral tale that involves both storyteller and audience as participants and subjects. A community storyteller like Lorde must ask “Krik?” and the community must respond “Krak!” for the story to begin. Biomythography is, in Lorde’s and other Caribbean writers’ conception, (auto)biography that heralds an imagined community through the mythicizing of one or a few individuals’ personal stories. Her charge to create particularly queer black biomythography was notably taken up by the activist and academic Wesley Crichlow (2004b: 217n1), who begins his sociological accounts of being a gay Afro-Trinidadian man by reclaiming the homophobic insult “buller man,” which he describes as “an indigenous derogatory epithet that I grew up with in Trinidad and Tobago, used to refer to men who have sex with other men. It is also widely used in some English-speaking Caribbean islands such as St Lucia, St Vincent Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN and Barbados.” Crichlow follows this reclamation by identifying himself as subaltern, “representing self and relating to other similar, yet unique experiences in a developmental exploration of other bullers’ lives and identities . . . as a subaltern I speak from a contested place” (ibid.: 187). He is thus simultaneously and consciously native informant and subaltern, a positioning that allows him to merge academic theorizing and social justice work. This, Crichlow and Lorde show, is critical Caribbean praxis. Like the Latin American subaltern genre testimonio, biomythography gives equal privilege to a speaker’s locus of enunciation and to the content of her words, and invites the audience to engage. Biomythography sidesteps genre debates over the authenticity of ictionalized autobiographies, choosing a position outside that structure of narrative. It is not that author and text are indistinguishable but that they bleed into each other in a way that must be acknowledged, especially when the subject has been heretofore unspoken and the speaker’s community voiceless. For Lorde, biomythography, the story of the self speaking its truth, is somewhere to begin queer representation. That her biomythography is also an Afro-Caribbeandescendant woman’s story is emphasized in the narrative’s opening lines after the prologue: “Grenadians and Barbadians walk like African peoples. Trinidadians do not. When I visited Grenada I saw the root of my mother’s powers walking through the streets. I thought, this is the country of my foremothers, my forebearing mothers, those Black island women who deined themselves by what they did” (Lorde 1982: 9). The Trinidadian inability to “walk like African peoples” is a tantalizing detail that reminds one, irst, that unlike Grenada and Barbados, almost half of the Trinidadian population is Indo-Trinidadian and, second, that biology is not Afro- or Indo-Caribbean destiny. In her examination of the intersections of feminist and queer literary production in the Caribbean, Vera Kutzinski identiies Mootoo’s iction as indeed falling within the genre of queer Caribbean testimony. Writing about Cereus Blooms at Night, Kutzinski (2001: 194) calls it “a ictional autobiography that is also a biography . . . a variation on the form of the testimonio.” Excluding prologue and epilogue, each of the four parts of Valmiki’s Daughter is titled “Your Journey: Part [section number],” with the inal section titled “Your Journey Home.” The address to the reader begs the question of the narrator’s identity in this third-person narrative, a subtle indication that there is a storyteller to ask “Krik?” and an audience being taken on a journey who must reply “Krak!” Thus I read Valmiki’s Daughter as a community story and argue that, though a privileged genre of literature, the novel is also archive. It is a work of origins, of queer Caribbean biomythography. Published by Duke University Press 255 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 256 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES Ship Brothers Biomythography is one way of telling a personal and communal story under the constrained circumstances of indentured migration. The jahaji bhai, “shipbrother,” relationship that took the place of biological family for indentured Indian men during and after their sea voyages to the Caribbean is, says LokaisinghMeighoo, the general, male-privileging signiier of all Indo-Caribbean identity. It is also a signiier whose deployers are (suspiciously) quick to deny erotic subtext, possibilities, or origins: While jahaji bahin or “ship sister” is occasionally used in certain IndoCaribbean cultural practices, it is the usual case that jahaji bhai functions as a “gender-neutral” term. Of course, so-called gender-neutral terms are always-already gendered as masculine, in the sense that “man” functions as the gender-neutral term for “humanity” . . . recuperation of the Indo-Caribbean homoerotic subtext within jahaji bhai culture threatens not only the entire jahaji bhai culture of Indo-Caribbean studies, but all Indo-Caribbean male homosocial spaces as somehow queer. (LokaisinghMeighoo 2000: 80, 91) While it may seem logical to assume that some same-sex sexual relationships occurred in the stressful homosocial environment of the colonial ship, even historians of the Indo-Caribbean generally give a wide berth to such a possibility.8 The uncomfortable subtext of jahaji bhai Indo-Caribbean studies and literature is that the bonds between indentured male shipmates were probably sexual, but that is a problem: a problem for postcolonial formulations of Indo-Caribbean cultural identity, and a notable dificulty for relatively nascent Indo-Caribbean feminism, which is often focused on addressing rampant domestic violence against Indian women. Same-sex shipboard relationships therefore tend to be dismissed and criminalized as situational, in the manner of relationships between emotionally and sexually lonely prison inmates. Such relationships are never discussed in terms of pleasure, choice, or a persistent behavior or identity. But the colonial historical record does on occasion contradict its own supposition of necessity and desperation. As early as 1649, the British Royal Navy recorded a shipboard incident involving a sixteen-year-old sailor, John Durrant of Stepney, and one “Abdul Rhyme, a ‘Hindostan peon’ ”: The feature of the case that seemed to irritate the captain who conducted the trial was not that buggery had been committed repeatedly or that it Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN had been done with the boy’s consent. The horror of the event was that an English lad had allowed himself to be penetrated by a heathen, Abdul Rhyme, a “Hindostan peon.” Numerous witnesses testiied to having seen the two frequently involved in buggery and in mutual masturbation on the quarter deck as well as below . . . the rantings of the trial’s presiding oficer indicate he was more agitated by acts of miscegenation that disrupted the operation of the total institution than buggery, which was an ordinary part of the vessel’s functioning. Indeed the tendency to regard interracial sex as far more serious than homosexuality was not a peculiarity of this particular captain or a feature of life aboard an individual ship. (Burg 1983: 159) Though the sentence in Stuart England for buggery aboard ship was death, the accused here were each given forty lashes, wounds to be rubbed with saltwater, and an extended diet of bread and water. Triply damning “passive” intercourse with a same-sex member of a subject race was the concern of the long-deceased English captain, but the record of consent and the acknowledgment of the frequency of same-sex acts aboard ship are far more interesting. British colonial records are far more likely to refer to homosexuality in vague and situational terms, especially in the nineteenth-century era of Indian indenture. The historian of indenture Tinker (1993: 204 – 5) notes two reports in which same-sex acts among indentured Indian men were blamed on the dearth of indentured Indian women: in 1874 the British consul in Reunion claimed the lack of Indian women “gives rise to other acts of depravity of so disgusting a nature they cannot be referred to”; and former Malaya high commissioner Sir John Anderson testiied to the 1909 Sanderson Committee that “not among the Tamils; [but] amongst the Northern Indians there is a good deal of unnatural crime.” Unmentionable “acts of depravity” and “unnatural crime” were typically the beginning and end of Victorian and Edwardian descriptions of male homosexuality in the colonies — unless homosexual acts threatened British sovereignty and inancial gain. On October 31, 1898, the British “coolie ship” Mersey, having completed the September – December leg of its annual round-trip journey from Calcutta, docked in British Guiana with a cargo of rice and 673 Indian indentured contract laborers.9 In duration it was a relatively typical oceanic journey, with favorable winds — it was even a bit shorter than usual, at 110 days, or about three and a half months. On December 7, 1898, the governor’s ofice of British Guiana generated the usual oficial inspection report of the voyage to the Colonial Ofice in England (Sendall 2008).10 But this report contained some unusual details: the proceedings of an investigation into an alleged act of sodomy that had occurred on board. Published by Duke University Press 257 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 258 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES A. H. Alexander, the immigration agent-general of British Guiana, was charged with investigating the incident four days after the ship docked. He summarized the incident as follows: On the 25th: September, the Surgeon Superintendent made the following entry in regard to an alleged case of Sodomy: “No: 696 Nobibux m, 20 years, and No: 351 Mohangu, m. 22 years, were caught about midnight by a Sirdar named Rambocus committing sodomy.11 When brought up before the captain and myself they both confessed their guilt. Nobibux stated for the last ten years he had allowed men to commit acts of beastliness: he had no doubt induced Mohangu to do this criminal act[.] Nobibux was put in irons and Mohangu, after blistering his penis, was made to holy stone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily . . . It would appear that Nobibux was kept in irons from the 25th: September to the end of the voyage. (Sendall 1898: 13 – 14)12 The surgeon superintendent of coolie ships was responsible for all doctoring and medical matters, but was contracted only for the length of the voyage. On this particular voyage of the Mersey, the surgeon — and penile blisterer — was one Dr. Arthur Harrison. Upon questioning by Alexander, Harrison corroborated his log entry, testifying that the sirdar “Rambocus” “stated that at about midnight he was on watch in between decks and saw something unusual between these two men, they being under one blanket; he pulled off the blanket and saw them committing Sodomy” (Sendall 1898: 31). Rambocus called the head sirdar Salikram to the scene, who then asked them why they were doing this wrong thing. . . . they at irst denied it and afterwards they confessed they did it for pleasure. . . . The men were then questioned and asked if the charge was true. They both at once confessed. Nabibux said “I have done it” and Mohungu said the same as far as I can remember. . . . Nabibux was put in irons and fastened to a stanchion. Mohungu was placed in hospital and ordered to holystone from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I blistered the penis of Mohungu. I did so as a punishment as I thought he deserved it. I did so at once on concluding the enquiry. The Captain was aware of it. Mohungu was the man who committed the act on Nabibuccus. I blistered him as a preventative, as he might have attempted the act again. I have known cases where the penis has been blistered, as a preventative treatment, in case of Masturbation with boys. I have power of punishment on board, subject to a consultation with Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN the Captain, and entry in the ships log, I did consult in this case, and it was logged. At the time I blistered the man I did not think of the crime he had committed against the criminal law of England. I did not look on it in that light, but as a matter of discipline on board ship. I made no special examination of the private parts of either of the men, I cannot say if the act was committed or not. (ibid.: 32) Alexander later questioned Rambocus, and the latter gave contradictory testimony, alternately reafirming and recanting details of what he believed that he had seen. The archive records each iteration of Rambocus’s testimony, presenting the researcher with the interesting dilemma of which of the stories to believe. In light of the “confession” of the two men (obtained under unknown conditions), Alexander chose to believe the story in which Rambocus saw them engaging in sodomy. Alexander’s choice of story becomes the fact of the archival record, and it is conveniently the story that best lends itself to a recuperative search for a history of Indo-Caribbean homosexuality. Though the preponderance of evidence and testimony points to the two indentured men having spent some time one night in some sort of physical contact, it must be acknowledged that no one other than they could say “what really happened.” The confused — or deiant! — Rambocus’s thwarting of a contemporary desire for queer “salviic truths” is, however, no reason to be disappointed with the archive’s refusal to produce deinitively homosexual subjects. There is still a story worth telling. In Harrison’s reckoning, the presumption of sodomy was enough to assume guilt and enact punishment, though the degree of punishment depended, as it often does, on position as active or passive partner. Counter to discourses in which the penetrated partner is adjudged the true homosexual in need of sanction, Mohangoo, the twenty-two-year-old man who “committed the act,” was treated — tortured — more harshly than Baksh, the twenty-year-old man who admitted to multiple offenses: being penetrated, “inducing” the other to commit the act, and having a ten-year history of sexual relationships with other men in colonial India.13 In burning Mohangoo’s penis as a “preventative,” the power-mad Harrison was perhaps suggesting that Mohangoo at least was a morally salvageable Victorian colonial subject, whereas Baksh may have been too far gone into Asiatic homosexual debauchery to warrant more than the token chaining-up afforded those found guilty of any crime aboard ship. In his testimony Harrison also reafirmed the space of the ship upon the sea as outside the legal boundaries of the state: colonial shipboard law was unto itself, and the captain and doctor ruled together as Published by Duke University Press 259 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 260 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES sovereigns. In the end, Harrison was punished with the deduction of £100 of his £673 voyage pay and Alexander’s notiication to the colonial government that “he is not to be employed again” (underlined in the original report) (Sendall 1898: 3). Harris was sanctioned not because sodomy — a criminal offense — did not warrant medicalized investigation and correction of assumed underlying pathology but because the colonial government required that maritime incidents be adjudicated under British law rather than through vigilante shipboard justice. Alexander noted that the men should have been tried in court in British Guiana and that Harrison “acted in violation of Rule No 165, relating to colonial Emigration, which strictly prohibits harsh treatment of the people” (Sendall 1898: 2 – 3, 17). Underlying this seeming concern for the health and safety of the indentured, I read the strong suggestion that the hapless Harrison should be denied his birthright of participation in the English project because he injured a subject body under a labor contract, akin to committing property damage. This footnote in the history of Indo-Caribbean indentureship is tantalizing for several reasons: irst, because of the rarity of the legal charge of sodomy between Indian jahaji bhai, not even involving wayward English sailors like John Durrant; second, because after the investigation, the colonial government held an Englishman — the surgeon — responsible for punishing the men without the permission of either the Indian or the colonial Guiana government, symbolically docking his pay for the voyage; third, because in addition to the testimony of the white British oficers, the investigator also asked for and documented the testimony of some of the Indians involved, notably the sirdar Rambocus who had found the men; fourth, as noted above, because of the difference in the two indentured men’s punishments; and ifth, because Baksh named himself a habitual participant in sexual activities with other men in India, and the men said that they had committed the act for reasons of will and pleasure. The historical record suggests that these men were not heterosexuals who engaged in same-sex acts because they were isolated from women and desperate; they chose to do so because they derived pleasure from it, and Baksh at least had had sex with men when women had been available to him. Any claim that either of the two men had some sort of gay or queer identity would be improbable and anachronistic; what is worth noting, though, is that these Indo-Caribbean kala pani ancestors construed sex with each other as affectively positive.14 Tinsley argues for this possibility in the case of same-sex sexual contact between enslaved Africans, as relationships between shipmates read as queer relationships. Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex-loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean loor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of marking Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodiied lesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths. Reading for shipmates does not offer to clarify, to tell a documentable story of Atlantic, Caribbean, immigrant, or “gay” pasts. Instead it disrupts provocatively. Fomented in Atlantic crosscurrents, black queerness itself becomes a crosscurrent through which to view hybrid, resistant subjectivities — opaquely, not transparently. (Tinsley 2008: 199) While Mohangoo and Baksh certainly committed a provocative disruption to the normative order, their case is also a documentable story, though not one that necessarily documents the preexistence of a queer identity. This incident is too rare to claim it as part of a heretofore-unidentiied queer jahaji bhai praxis of resistance, except in an individualistic affective sense: the men did what they thought would feel good, British and Indians be damned.15 Copies of the two men’s original indentureship passes are included with Alexander’s report and give some indication of their fates: they were sent to British Guianese sugar plantations that were very far apart, Mohangoo to an estate named Rose Hall on the east coast and his alleged victim Baksh to another called Vergenoegen on the west coast of British Guiana (Sendall 1898: 38 – 39). As noted by an unknown hand on the side of the passes, Mohangoo was a Seetapore Hindu of the Ahir cow-herding caste, and Baksh was a Muslim from Faizabad. This religious difference ironically echoes the fact that in the colonial period, it was not just Hindu caste barriers that broke down but also interreligious social and marital divisions between Muslims and Hindus — it was and is race that is the deining element of Indian community membership in the Caribbean. Once there was a large enough stable population, however, interreligious barriers, though not Hindu caste ones, were to some extent reestablished. Indian community survival and cultural perpetuation demanded denial of early colonial sexual freedoms and a speedy return to visible heterosexual, patriarchal, and reproductive orthodoxy. Queer Exilic Biomythography Caribbean studies has always been formulated as a transnational and transoceanic arm of area studies. The Caribbean is Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s (1992: 3) “repeating island,” Stuart Hall’s (2003: 240) triple “presences,” Roberto Fernández Retamar’s (1979) Caliban in the encounter with Europe, Fernando Ortíz’s (2001) trans- Published by Duke University Press 261 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 262 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES culturative mestizo, and a rhizomatic node of Paul Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic, populated by paradigmatic cultural and bodily hybrids that are obscenely quotidian. In 1891 José Martí (2005) himself tells us that in Nuestra América, Our America, “no hay razas.” There are no races, because in the Caribbean there is only the unraced, all-raced Creole. This Caribbean master narrative of hybridity stipulates the normativity of the hybrid and the creolized; as Viranjini Munasinghe (2002: 679) argues, racial mixing and “impurity” is reconstructed as racial purity in the nationalist production of race in postindependence Trinidad and other Caribbean locales. By dint of deining themselves as discretely Indo-Caribbean, and not simply Caribbean, the descendants of Indian indentured laborers were and are deemed “unmixables,” ironically unit for participation in the postcolonial Caribbean nationalist project (ibid.: 682). The imperfectly assimilated IndoCaribbean is thus excluded from Caribbean area studies in its traditional guise of hybridity studies. In Caribbean studies, oceanic area is stabilized irst by hybridity and then by exile. The historical subject of the archive and the self/subject of queer biomythographical iction work in tandem to disrupt this iteration of area studies, demanding recognition of the particularity of the Indo-Caribbean story while illustrating, as Arondekar (2009: 5) says, “area studies as vitally constitutive of the histories of sexuality, and vice versa.” Sexuality is a newer discussion for both Indo-Caribbean-speciic and general Caribbean area studies, though after the mid-twentieth-century irst generation of (male) Indo-Caribbean writers like V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, gender was not absent from the discourse. As Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar (2012: 3) note, through the work of Indo-Caribbean women writers like Mahadai Das and artists like Rajkumari Singh, “the image of the coolie woman, in particular, is one that continues to be iconic in any discussion of Indo-Caribbean femininity. . . . The harnessing of those ancestors to narratives of self-sacriice and familial commitment, however, sometimes downplays the revolutionary nature of the choices some of those early women made.” In such narratives the term coolie is rehabilitated from its racialized labor history, but in the service of a politics of respectability. After an indentureship period featuring a severe gender imbalance, unprecedented freedom of mate choice for women, and resulting extreme relationship violence, a structure of extended patriarchal family — deined here as the eldest man and father as head of household, with ultimate say over the schooling, employment, marital choices, religious and social interactions of all other family members, including and especially adult women — reasserted itself. “The institution of family was reconstructed from the ruins it was in during indenture,” says Gaiutra Bahadur (2014: 205 – 6), with “the retreat Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN of women into the domestic sphere. This was done for survival’s sake: the family was a collective economic unit, based on a division of labor by sex, with women working unpaid at home.” Postindenture, women lost the wages they had earned as weeders on sugar plantations. Moving from a logie, the converted slave barracks in which the indentured lived, to even a small house, also required signiicantly more domestic labor. The Rāmāyana Sita narrative of the virtues of domesticity — beloved above all other Hindu epic texts in the Caribbean, as documented by Paul Younger (2010) and Steven Vertovec (2000) — mutually reinforced the economics of postindenture until Indo-Caribbean feminine respectability became synonymous with being the homemaking wife of a man. Indo-Caribbean feminism — as theorized by Patricia Mohamed (1998), Kamala Kempadoo (2004), Rhoda Reddock (2008), and others — was until recently so busy deining itself against Afro-Caribbean feminism and addressing the dreadfully high rates of domestic violence against Indo-Caribbean women that same-sex sexuality was ignored or, worse, dismissed as antithetical to feminist credibility. Kutzinski writes in 2001 that “even feminist critics . . . are still ‘searching for safe spaces,’ ideologically speaking, when it comes to approaching literary representations of gender and especially of female sexuality. What spells ideological safety, to today’s feminist scholars of Caribbean extraction, is heteronormativity” (168). As a rule, this Caribbean feminist attachment to heteronormativity is no longer the case: scholars like Yasmin Tambiah (2009), Gabrielle Hosein (2012) , Andil Gosine (2009), and Amar Wahab (2012), inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander’s pioneering work, have in recent years insisted on sexuality as part of Indo-Caribbean feminist discourse. But in community practice, for example, at Indian Arrival Day celebrations in Trinidad and Guyana, and at Diwali, Phagwah, and Eid parades and celebrations in the Indo-Caribbean immigrant overseas département of Richmond Hill, Queens, in New York City, historical memorialization tends to omit mention of the real origins and histories of many indentured women: as widows, runaways, prostitutes, bazaar girls, the unwanteds of colonial Anglo-India. Also ignored is that the dearth of women on the plantation led to a decades-long period of relaxation of Indian sexual mores, one early cause of the “coolie wife murders” of late nineteenth-century British Guiana.16 While domestic violence in marital relationships is a remembered source of sorrow, the community much prefers to forget the colonial period of sexual license and very occasional polyandry. The jahaji bahin is instead memorialized as mata-ji, mother to a nation in exile. Mariam Pirbhai (2010: 39) argues that there are other possibilities for the “jahaji-bhain principle” of feminine shipboard afiliation, where it can pro- Published by Duke University Press 263 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 264 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES vide a “platform for a cross-racial feminist alliance against gender, class and other forms of oppression in contemporary Caribbean societies. In these terms, the jahaji-bhain (or jahaji bahin) functions as a newly conceptualized ethics of inter-relation that includes the racial other as well as a more luid conception of Indo-Caribbeanness itself.” Even in the grand scheme of poverty, corruption, neoliberal globalization, tourism exploitation, domestic violence, racial violence, and any number of social ills plaguing sectors of the Anglophone Caribbean, there is no more present form of oppression than that surrounding homosexuality, because it is, as Crichlow (2004a: 55) repeats in his queer Afro-Trinidadian “buller” biomythography, the only circumstance under which all entities — state, school, community, biological family — are likely to violently reject the individual. There are novels that treat Afro-Caribbean queer female sexuality, including much of the work of Paule Marshall and Patricia Powell. In Caribbean queer studies, it is often implicitly permissible to set aside postcolonial debates over linguistic and racial identity because of the temporal urgency of the cause of queer sexuality, which at the very least involves mutual recognition of queer self and others, and with luck the cohesion of a queer Caribbean imagined community. IndoCaribbean religious and ethnic community-speciic queer concerns are subsumed and framed through the discourse of majority Afro-Caribbean Creole issues. Gender normativity is crucial to the survival and perpetuation of the IndoCaribbean minority community, which enforces common racial mores and rigid structures of public and private gender behavior to maintain cohesion. As a result, the queers of the Indo-Caribbean community require their own mythical stories to prove their very existence against the dominant jahaji bhai narrative of IndoCaribbean history. In Trinidad and Guyana, homosexuality disrupts the ethnonationalist project of Indo-Caribbean social and political inclusion that hinges on particular conceptions of Indian gender normativity, which includes the cultural importance of jahaji bahin marriage compliance as a value that ensures community survival. Queerness also troubles the Hindu and Muslim religious identities to which Indians clung as markers of their discreteness even as they lost their ancestral languages in a mere generation or two in the Caribbean. The protagonist of Valmiki’s Daughter, Viveka Krishnu, self-identiies not as queer but as a lesbian, or as Tinsley (2010: 8) prefers in her discussion of the links between Afro-Caribbean female lesbian attraction and labor, a Caribbean woman who loves women. The terms queer, homosexual, gay, and lesbian do have their own contextual Caribbean speciicity — Tinsley acknowledges, for instance, that lesbian has entered the Caribbean lexicon and is linked to Massad’s Gay International in both strategically useful and potentially harmful ways. There are Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN other woman-loving-woman-speciic signiiers in the Caribbean, including zanmi (Grenada/Carriacou), madivine (Haiti), mati (Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean), and the derogatory Jamaican “Man Royal” and “sodomite.” I adopt Tinsley’s (2010: 8) theoretical strategy of refusing to “crown any one noun or adjective ‘most’ emancipatory.” As Tinsley says, the tensions are simply too productive. Kutzinski (2001) notes that Mootoo herself is an Indo-TrinidadianCanadian lesbian writing her own experience, or at least extrapolating it into a community experience. In this vein, Valmiki’s Daughter, the irst Indo-Caribbean novel to feature a lesbian protagonist, is also biomythography. The female protagonist’s attempts to come to terms with her sexual attraction to women is mythologically familial — her father, Valmiki, is a closeted homosexual man who watches her progressively increasing visibility in Trinidad with alternating dismay and pride. Viveka inherits her father’s failed struggle, the futile attempt of most Caribbean homosexuals before her to live openly in their native lands. She attempts to transform it into something else by metamorphosing into something new: a visible lesbian. But there are as yet no models for her to follow in the Caribbean, and her knowledge of women like herself is conined to derogatory rumors, whispers, and insults. Viveka is seemingly excluded from jahaji bahin, “ship sister,” bonds of solidarity with other Indo-Caribbean women (including her own sister and mother) by dint of her sexuality. This is particularly lonely, as it gives her no recourse from an Indo-Caribbean patriarchal familial and societal structure that still makes space for her father, a closeted man who has sex with other men. She is more invisible than a man who hides in plain sight, as Valmiki does, under the guise of societally legitimized heterosexual extramarital affairs. This is true even though she is a “mannish woman,” which in Trinidad refers, most often, to a woman who presents as masculine in dress or appearance. But as Crichlow (2004a: 52 – 53) notes, while the Trinidadian men of his childhood performed heterosexuality in appearance and behavior as a matter of survival, anger toward zami queens seldom surfaced because most people expected women to carry themselves in traditional ways. Women played highly feminized gender roles, raising children, cleaning house, cooking, washing, dressing, and behaving in ways that excluded labels such as “lesbian,” “butch,” “zami,” or “man royal.” . . . Within a Trinidadian community, some codes of behaviour allowed women to go unmarked, less rigorously policed in terms of regulated notions of gender behaviour and their connections to sexuality. Notions of what it meant to look and act zami were not Published by Duke University Press 265 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 266 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES as overtly marked as notions of what it meant to look and act like a buller man. (52 – 53) In essence, unless women like Viveka actually speak their sexuality, the neighbors gossip but never act, so unfathomable is the idea that a Caribbean woman might voluntarily decline the very real social and inancial status brought her by a man. Her father, by contrast, works so hard in his ideally masculine roles as doctor, father, provider, and straight Romeo that he does manage to hide his sexual relationships with other men from everyone but his wife. He can live a double life because he is the Indo-Caribbean patriarch, with the freedom of movement and choice his lesbian daughter could never have. While there is some tolerated space for Indo-Caribbean male homosexuality in the arts — particularly and ironically in the propagation of Hindu Indian dance forms as evidence of community survival (Puar 2001) — Indo-Caribbean lesbians remain without voice, except in literary and scholarly realms. Alexander’s (1994) study of the revision of sodomy laws in 1986 Trinidad provides the legal context for Valmiki’s Daughter. In sum, Victorian laws relating to “buggery” and rape were reformulated under the rhetoric of “protecting women”; the end result was the 1986 “Sexual Offenses Act” under which all anal sex between persons of any sex or gender was criminalized (adults over sixteen were to receive twentyive years in prison), and lesbian sex was criminalized for the irst time under the rubric of “serious indecency” (adults over sixteen receive ive years in prison). In addition, all “prostitutes and homosexuals” were legally barred from entering the country. The term serious indecency should remind one of the aforementioned euphemistic colonial phrases “acts of depravity” and “unnatural crime”; constitutional law in the Caribbean Commonwealth draws heavily from imperial British common law. The 1986 legal provisions were upheld in 2000, though they are rarely, if ever, enforced. Valmiki’s Daughter describes a cultural milieu after 1986 and takes place over two years. The exact two years are not speciied, suggesting that postcolonial homophobia in Trinidad is an ongoing story. Mootoo takes on the classic trope of the postcolonial Caribbean exile as promulgated by the earlier work of Naipaul, Selvon, and the irst generation of Indo-Caribbean writer-exiles in Britain and Canada, but renders that igure truly postcolonial by queering it: irst, the politics of independence are past, and the Indian has already become Indo-Caribbean; and second, the Great White North(s) beckons Viveka with the promise of ostensibly queer-liberated Canada, but it has become just another transoceanic node to which she might travel, always bearing in mind that the return to Trinidad is a mere six-hour plane ride away. As Gayatri Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN Gopinath (2005: 165 – 66) says, Mootoo’s writing complicates exile by “trac[ing] the various forms of travel and motion undertaken by sexual subjects both within the home and away from it.” Exile, for this younger Indo-Caribbean generation, is not permanent, even when the exile is queer. Canada is framed in the novel as an anonymous respite from overbearing family; for the savvy postcolonial woman, foreign queer acceptance has temporary use-value that outweighs the burden of white anti-immigrant racism abroad. The biomythographer Crichlow (2004a: 69) pragmatically admits: While coming out at white gay and lesbian clubs, I already knew about racial harassment and the sexualization of racism within gay and lesbian communities. Even so, I felt great being in a dance club with other “gay people.” Race and racism did not preoccupy me — I just wanted to be free, to be a buller, to leave behind the frightening starkness of life under Black heterosexism and violence. At moments like these, I deliberately avoided invoking or adopting any type of race or political consciousness; I simply wanted to have fun, be a buller, without trying to justify it. In the absence of Black same-sex support groups, spaces, and agencies, Black people need white spaces in order to support and afirm their same-sex identity. Migrating north or west to white queer spaces, Crichlow argues, is a valid physical and psychological survival strategy in the absence of any natal community support — at least at irst. Then, as Lorde (1982: 176, 179) says in her biomythography, racial and other differences reassert themselves: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. . . . There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. . . . Downtown in the gay bars I was a closet student and an invisible Black.” This is a cruel logic of scarcity for lesbian women of color like Viveka, who decides in the end to leave her home country for Canada. As migrants, though, Crichlow and Viveka are different from the traditional literary igure of the postcolonial exile typical of the Caribbean (and Caribbean studies) nationalist framework of hybridity. The traditional Caribbean exile is he or she who has failed or refuses to hybridize at the moment of colonial independence, retreating from the barrenness of a postcolony teeming with Bhabhian and Naipaulian mimic men to the cultural wholeness of the “Mother Country.” Crichlow and Viveka also leave or want to leave, but not because they refuse Caribbean subjectivity or have any doubt about their particularly Trinidadian cultural or even national identity. What they refuse is a contemporary construct of postcolonial citizenship. The antithesis of the postcolonial Caribbean citizen is the Caribbean exile, but also, Published by Duke University Press 267 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 268 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES now, the Caribbean queer, igured as Munasinghe’s impure hybrid in a rebuke to the madly ironic notion of a postcolonial hybridity that with the complicity of jahaji bhai transnational Indo-Caribbean studies denies its constitutive queerness. Ship Sisters Valmiki’s Daughter posits from its very title onward that this daughter, Viveka Krishnu, is no queer Indo-European Lakshmi-Aphrodite, springing from the ocean to bless the world with divine feminine shakti. Viveka has a clear lineage. Her father, Valmiki, the masculine Indo-Caribbean jahaji bhai subject, opens the way — but it is Viveka, a woman who speaks her lesbian identity, who is brave and bright enough to morph herself in order to pass through. After all, in Sanskrit the name “Viveka” means no less than “wisdom” itself, with connotations of a higher human ethical ability to discern right from wrong. Names are important in the novel; Valmiki is named after the Vālmı̄ki, the sage who is said to have transcended his origins as an adivasi (indigenous person) and as a dacoit (brigand) to author the ancient Hindu epic the Rāmāyana. The ancient Vālmı̄ki’s transformation happens when he meets sages who ask him if his wife and children have a moral share in his sinning, since they survive on his thievery. He says yes; his wife and children say no. Shocked, he leaves them and falls into meditation for years, until an anthill grows up and covers him. The sages eventually return, whereupon Vālmı̄ki emerges from the anthill (vālmı̄k) an enlightened man, and they rename him after it (Leslie 2003: 186, 14 – 15). In Vālmı̄kish fashion, the novel’s Valmiki believes that his daughter should share the wages of sin. When he realizes that Viveka has begun a carelessly visible relationship with a woman, he says to himself, “She was beginning to live the life he had made choices to avoid. It was his doing. His fault. But how dare she? How dare she think only of herself. Had she no good sense after all? No sense of loyalty — if not loyalty, then responsibility — to her family, to society? To him?” (Mootoo 2010: 342 – 43). Unlike Vālmı̄ki the sage, who transcends his caste origins, the Trinidadian Valmiki never escapes the anthill of the closet and normative Hindu masculine destiny. State ideology is perpetuated by the normativization of certain social mores, such that communities can police their own members on behalf of the nation. In Trinidad parlance, at the age of twenty or so Viveka is “mannish.” Being called mannish by her younger sister Vashti early in the novel is the jolting catalyst for Viveka’s feelings of same-sex attraction to rise to the surface of her consciousness. Her sister looks at her critically and says Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN you do look kind of tough for a female . . . you have a tendency to be muscular. I mean, really: do you want big calves and harder arms — which you will get if you play sports? That’s so ugly on a . . . whatever. It makes us look mannish. Mom says you’re sort of mannish.” That was enough. The word mannish was unacceptable. . . . Later on, in the limbo of taxi travel, the dreaded word came to her again. Mannish. An onomatopoeic word that sounded as disgusting as what it suggested. (ibid.: 89 – 90, 114) Viveka does not yet know what she is, but she dreads what “mannish” signiies, and she walks around feeling strangely bound, harboring “the sensation that her arms were tightly bound to her body with yards and yards of clear Scotch tape” (ibid.: 98 – 99). Viveka and all the members of her family know that “something” is amiss with her, but no one dares say it aloud. “Mannish” in the Caribbean can refer to a masculine woman, an excessively patriarchal man, or a boy who acts older than his age. In all cases, there is a connotation of behavior that is so hypermasculine as to be socially unacceptable, an intriguing policing of the bounds of masculinity that can implicate men and women, adults and children. The mannish aspire to a masculinity that is imbued with societally destabilizing violence: mannish men are testosterone-charged potential perpetrators of violence, mannish boys come too early to violence, and mannish women demand violence from society as punishment for transgressing gender norms — they are “asking” for it. Being a mannish woman is particularly dangerous — not just for her physical safety but for the postcolonial national project. Viveka’s mannish appearance suggests that she might not reproduce. As Alexander (1994: 20) notes, “The archetypal source of state legitimation is anchored in the heterosexual family, the form of family crucial in the state’s view to the founding of the nation.” There is typically no place for the mannish lesbian woman in the family that is the microcosm of the nation; but the specter of the Indo-Caribbean mannish woman is a relatively new one in a region where gendered perceptions of Indo-Caribbean women begin with their iguration in colonial literature as particularly feminine, docile, and domestic in comparison with Afro-Caribbean women.17 Viveka is an Indo-Caribbean mannish woman. As a child, she is a stereotypical tomboy who loves sports and dismisses girls and women who primp and scheme for male attention. She sometimes imagines herself to be her brother, Anand, who died in infancy, and at other times believes herself to be a blondhaired white boy named Vince. Young Viveka imagines herself to be her brother for two reasons: irst, because she mistakenly believes that as an eldest sibling she should somehow have been able to protect him from death, and second, she is sub- Published by Duke University Press 269 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 270 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES consciously aware of her father, Valmiki, thinking that if his son had lived, the two children, particularly because of Viveka’s angular facial features, her lankiness, and her short hair, would have been unmistakable as siblings — and perhaps misidentiied as brothers (Mootoo 2010: 62). Viveka understands she is not feminine enough to be an acceptable daughter to her parents, so, she imagines, she might as well be their son. Her second masculine alter ego, Vince, was “strong, powerful, peaceful, and could do anything and everything. He had a horse he could ride. He didn’t speak much. He was kind. His name was Vince, short for ‘invincible.’ He was not in the least the bastard her father said all men were. Vince loved being outdoors” (ibid.: 110). Vince is a protective identity — he is perhaps even a mannish boy in his precociousness. At seven, it is Vince, not Viveka, who observes her father in the act of committing adultery with a white female neighbor — his closet cover is multiple affairs with women. She does not understand what she sees, so her Viveka self goes away, and Vince takes over. After witnessing this adulterous adult incident, the child “did not go straight home, but ran around and around the neighbourhood until, dripping with sweat, he limped, feet swollen, blistered, and bleeding, through the front gates of his parents’ house” (ibid.: 114). Vince, of course, is curiously white, though the child Viveka has no particular ideas about race or interaction with anyone who is white. She lives in the Trinidadian postcolony where colorism is no stranger, but whiteness is literary and foreign. Vince is modeled on the sporty, adventuresome English schoolboys of her storybooks. As an adult, Viveka does not consider herself other than female and attracted to women; she is not trans* and she is not bisexual. She is physically capable of having sex with a man, as her father is capable of having sex with women, but she derives no physical or emotional feeling from it and is merely a spectator. She is a masculine lesbian, and her style of lovemaking with the extremely feminine Anick, her foreign French lover who is married to an IndoTrinidadian man, is almost stereotypically dominant — she realizes this predilection immediately during their irst, much-anticipated sexual encounter. Making love to another woman for the irst time as a young adult is what purges Viveka of both masculine alter egos, her brother and the white boy. She imagines that Anand and Vince grow up into discrete young men and leave her: Tears suddenly ran down Viveka’s cheeks and she wiped them fast so that Anick wouldn’t know. She had felt, during the initial moments of their lovemaking, a sense of having taken on the form of a young man’s body. Her body had become, albeit briely, Vince’s body, and in other moments [her Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN dead baby brother] Anand’s. These two were suddenly young men: sturdy, muscled, handsome. As handsome as Anick was beautiful. It was strange how Vince and Anand had grown into such young men; this was the strongest sensation of that sort Viveka had ever had — of not being what she looked like, female. And yet, she knew now more than ever that her feelings and her way with Anick were hers and hers alone. Not a boy’s. Not a man’s. Whatever she was, these feelings were hers. . . . Perhaps she could be inished with Anand now. And with Vince. (ibid.: 322 – 23) Viveka in this moment realizes, quite simply, that she need not be a boy or man to desire women, and that perhaps this desire was, all along, the fundamental reason for the existence of Anand and Vince. Though the relationship with the Frenchwoman is doomed, engaging in it gives Viveka the courage to live visibly as a mannish woman — to cut her hair short and begin dressing in a more gender-neutral way, in deiance of her mother’s wishes. But the novel leaves undetermined what else an Indo-Trinidadian mannish woman identity might involve, implying that in the Indo-Caribbean, as anywhere else, queer identiications are simultaneously particular, luid, and perpetually under construction. Similarly, Crichlow (2004a: 53) points out that the sartorial appearance of masculinity is not always enough to label a woman as lesbian in Trinidad: Women wearing men’s overalls or doing physical work traditionally constructed as masculine did not challenge women’s traditional gender roles. If anything, some of the clothes women wore relected poverty, and it was acceptable for them to wear such clothing until they could afford something new. Clothes functioned as visible signs of identity that were subject to disruption and symbolic theft, and this challenged the role of clothes as grounds for gender. Furthermore, acts such as physical aggressiveness, when a woman was ighting for her “male partner, children, girl friend, or a good friend,” were reconigured and represented as very womanly — the act of a strong woman and at the same time a girlish thing to do. Observers never assumed that a woman protecting another woman from male violence had a sexual interest in her or that women who listened to one another’s problems had a same-sex attraction. Rather, women supported one another in response to violence and shared communal experiences. Alexander calls this a “gendered call to patriotic duty” (quoted in Crichlow 2004a: 53). Published by Duke University Press 271 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 272 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES Though Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2013: 25) (following Colette) ind speciically “mannish” lesbians in the middle-class female dandies of Victorian and Edwardian London and Paris, Jack Halberstam (1998) and others show that “female masculinity,” as typiied here by racialized working-class and poor women wearing traditionally masculine clothing, is not a phenomenon limited to the Caribbean. Halberstam suggests that normative feminine and masculine appearances in the same society take turns being “approximate” and “precise” (28), which leaves gendered dress simply relational. Class is an understated factor in Viveka’s narrative; as the daughter of a doctor, she is very comfortably upper middle class. Her masculine dress is more visible and open to sexualized interpretation than the masculine dress of a poor woman. Viveka’s responsibility to present herself as gender-normative extends beyond service to generalized postcolonial Caribbeanness and to the nation of Trinidad. She is also tasked with perpetuating the cultural and physical survival of her speciic upper-middle-class IndoTrinidadian community by being properly feminine. This is a duty that her traditional and marriage-minded Indian mother Devika understands and embraces: Educated women, [Devika] said, were aggressive, unladylike. The only professions she could imagine for either of her daughters in an age, she conceded, when women were demanding to spend time outside of the home, were catering, lower arranging . . . and teaching. . . . What she understood was preparing oneself for marriage. But marriage had never interested Viveka. (Mootoo 2010: 100 – 101) Unlike her daughter, Devika is highly concerned with the gender and class proprieties of being an upper-middle-class Indo-Caribbean woman (this is the family’s class location, as the patriarch Valmiki is a doctor). Devika perceives herself as a traditionally strong Indo-Caribbean woman because she can bear heavy burdens. That is the acceptable kind of martyred strength for an Indian woman, a strength that echoes colonial British representations of Indian indentured women as simultaneously docile, submissive, and hard workers. As Devika understands it, her familial role is as head of household. But her husband and daughter are willful and unmanageable, refusing to conform to their own apportioned roles in the nuclear family in any more than supericial ways. Their homosexuality is unthinkable, the greatest threat she could ever imagine to the sanctity of family and state, especially as it suggests a terrifying postcolonial community scenario where the IndoCaribbean child is cursed with the sins of the Indian father — the aspiring upright citizen haunted by a motley ancestral collection of homosexuals, prostitutes, and Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN runaways. But it is Viveka in her queerness and deiance who is the real jahaji bahin, a member of the sorority who had the courage to leave Trinidad. The literary trope of the Caribbean exile as promulgated by George Lamming, Selvon, Naipaul, and other (overwhelmingly male) writers of the irst postcolonial Caribbean generation is omnipresent in Valmiki’s Daughter, but the object and agent of struggle have shifted beyond a concern for the geopolitical that is rooted in mourning, nostalgia, and loss. No longer must the male postcolonial, scion of the jahaji bhai, escape becoming a mere mimic man by exiling himself in the British motherland. The independence question of Britishness or Indianness is reconciled in the generations after colonialism: Viveka is born an Indo-Caribbean woman, an identity with unique cultural substance. As a literary scholar, aspiring writer, and Indo-Trinidadian, she is rather irked by Naipaul, complaining that he makes Indians out to be ugly, stupid, concerned only with their narrow knife-edged slice of life. He’s criticizing his ancestors, but these are my ancestors too, and by implication he is criticizing me. And yet, I keep wanting to read on. He gets it right, but so what? . . . I don’t think he really hates us so much as he is gravely disappointed in what we have not become. (ibid.: 104 – 5) Viveka suggests, as other Caribbean writers and critics including even Derek Walcott have said, that there is no satisfying Naipaul, to whose literary genius and community representation all Indo-Caribbean people are beholden.18 The novel pays its dues to Naipaul, acknowledging him as the godfather of Indo-Caribbean literature. But in a nod to the postindependence goal of racialized national unity, it is in Afro-Caribbean literature that Viveka sees a way out of the stultifying calciications of Indo-Caribbean culture: “The writings of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, and Earl Lovelace provoked her to want to experience a Caribbean-ness, and a Trinidadian-ness more speciically, that was antithetical to her mother’s tie to all things Indian and Hindu” (Mootoo 2010: 100 – 101). These writers’ works are her biomythographies of being Caribbean: they illustrate for Viveka her regional identity and indirectly suggest a nonracialized way to conceptualize Caribbean queerness. Viveka is meant to escape the destiny of the “bound coolie” who reindentured or remained on the sugar estate even after the initial indentureship contract had expired. Realizing that she has no future with her married female lover in Trinidad, as the woman refuses to leave her husband and societal and familial condemnation is too much to bear at a young age, Viveka goes about her freedom Published by Duke University Press 273 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 274 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES in the same practical way as does Crichlow: she looks north to Canada. Her father, Valmiki, has found a way to live in Trinidad and have a clandestine male lover. But he is able to do this because he is a man, and a well-off doctor, and neither his wife nor society questions him when he goes off on his own to meet his male lover in secret. Indo-Caribbean women’s traditional relegation to the domestic sphere simply does not permit such freedom of movement and visibility for a woman or a lesbian. The novel suggests that now it is the Indo-Caribbean woman who must take up the mantle of the Caribbean jahaji, the voyager who is not, however, a permanent exile. As such, Viveka agrees to marry a man who will take her to Toronto. Her future husband knows of her sexual past and is accepting. She does not rule out the possibility of returning to Trinidad; she is concerned with now. This is a realistic ending for a novel set in the rather more than less homophobic contemporary Anglophone Caribbean, mired as it is in a stew of Victorian sexual mores and hypocrisies, colonial law and US expansionism, neoliberal and neocolonial foreign economic exploitation, evangelical religious fervor, and the foundational uncertainty and, to many, shame of unknown ancestors, lost languages, and hybrid identities. In this milieu, queerness is a liminal area. What will preserve your life and sanity is what you should irst do.19 We are left with the understanding that Viveka lives her life only as she chooses when she says, in the novel’s inal line, “You’d be surprised at my courage right now” (Mootoo 2010: 395). Marrying a man is less capitulation than clever strategic planning. Like Mohangoo and Baksh and even Abdul Rhyme, the peon of Hindostan, she operates on the principle of pleasure: her own. This affective temporal relation, pleasure across time, is a lateral kinship that eludes and elides the desire for the ancestral homosexual in the archive who will legitimate and save the queer Caribbean. Viveka refuses to be a queer Indo-Trinidadian victim of society and circumstance, hybridized into a collection of cultural and personal fragments characterized by loss. She holds in reserve the daunting (to area studies) option of leading a truly transnational life with the equally tendentious (to queer studies) possibility of location-dependent queer code switching. In this traditionally protean yet multiply localized biomythography of the Caribbean, there is no geographic or temporal need for Viveka or any Caribbean queer to invest in a one-way ticket for the ship sailing into exile. Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. The father-in-law and close companion of the Prophet Muhammad, Abu Bakr became the irst caliph and leader of the Muslims after the Prophet’s death. Stabroek News is one of Guyana’s major daily newspapers. The Indo- Caribbean population is about 10 percent Sunni Muslim, with the rest mostly Hindu. Unlike Guyana, Trinidad has a sizable Indian Christian (mostly Presbyterian) population, dating from nineteenth-century Canadian missionary activities that were sanctioned by the British as a way to reduce crime, drunkenness, and “coolie wife murders” on the sugar estate. Conversion was attractive to migrants because missionaries also offered education — Bible in one hand and Children’s Primer in the other — to the formerly indentured, and Christianity became the major IndoTrinidadian road to the middle class. By contrast, the rise of the Indian middle class in British Guiana is associated with former indentured laborers growing rice as a cash crop, that is, with the former indentured becoming small-scale farmers in their own right. Between 1838 and 1917, Indian indentured contract laborers departed from either the port of Calcutta in the north or the port of Madras in the south, bound for the Caribbean islands, the Guianas in South America, Belize in Central America, Mauritius, Fiji, and South and East Africa. Altogether, the Anglophone Caribbean, including Guyana, received 543,700 indentured laborers, about half a million people to replace emancipated African slaves on British sugar plantations (Ramdin 2000). The term jahaji bahin, with variant spellings, has been used by scholars of the IndoCaribbean including Peggy Mohan (2007), Niranjana Tejaswini (2006), and Mariam Pirbhai (2010: 39) but is newer to popular usage, having been recently embraced by the Indo-Caribbean feminist organization Jahajee Sisters, founded in New York City in 2007 to address domestic violence and other social issues affecting women in the large diaspora community. According to its founders, Suzanne Persard and Simone Devi Jhingoor, “During the period of Indian indentureship (1838 – 1917), Jahajee Bhai and Jahajee Bahen (ship brother and ship sister) were terms used by our ancestors to unify and support each other in the midst of the tumultuous voyage by sea from India to the Caribbean. Despite adversity, our ancestors who arrived in the Caribbean were able to forge bonds, survive, and thrive. In this spirit, Jahajee Sisters seeks to build community and power to address critical issues challenging IndoCaribbean women. Crossing the Kala Pani from India and coming to the Caribbean was a deeply traumatic experience for Indo-Caribbean people. Yet, the fact that we were able to survive the Indian middle passage and the harsh system of indentureship, which attempted to strip us of our identity and culture, is an example of how resilient our people are. It especially shows the strength of our women, who played an integral role in preserving and carrying on the culture in the Caribbean and again in the US. Published by Duke University Press 275 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 276 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES Reclaiming the word ‘Jahajee’ in our name and in our work is the way we have chosen to honor our history and live into our resiliency” (quoted in Outar 2012: 2 – 3). 5. For a detailed assessment of Mehta’s and Kanhai’s writings on matikor and its queer potentialities, see Pragg 2012. 6. To my knowledge there are no speciically Indo-Caribbean queer groups or organizations in the Caribbean itself. There is one in the United States: Sangam, which is based in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York, and was founded in February 2012 by Indo-Caribbean activists earlier afiliated with SALGA, the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association of New York City, established in 1991. This origin is particularly salient, as it shows that Indo-Caribbean community organizers felt more kinship with the diasporic Indian queer community than they did with the queer Afro-Caribbean diaspora. The shared queer Indian kinship is largely a result of shared Hindu and Muslim religious upbringings, and common irst- and second-generation immigrant Indian family mores. Sangam has not faced much open prejudice in the extremely large Indo-Caribbean community in New York but has suffered from a lack of inancial community support and reluctance on the part of queer community members who seek out organizational counseling and support services but refuse to be visible or “out” (Sooklall 2014). Rampant suicide has a long history in the Indo-Caribbean. Along with addiction to rum and narcotics, “for numerous indentured men and women, the ultimate escape from the drabness and brutality of estate life was through suicide. Some hung themselves because they were unable or unwilling to submit to the degrading or severe manual labour expected of them. The vulnerability of women placed many tensions on indentured families and were another cause of suicides much discussed by oficials” (Carter and Torabully 2002: 100). 7. The titular short story of Mootoo’s collection Out on Main Street (1993) does feature an Indo-Trinidadian- Canadian lesbian protagonist faced with the intersections of racial, gender, sexual, and immigration issues. Mootoo’s irst novel, Cereus Blooms at Midnight (1996), features two minor lesbian characters and one, more important, trans* character, but the main characters are heterosexual in deed and by implication. 8. The Mersey incident is mentioned briely by Bahadur (2014), who discovered the story in the archives during her Coolie Woman research. 9. For the particulars of the Mersey’s rigging, tonnage, and (indenture)ship role, see Richardson 1901. 10. The original colonial inspection report is archived at “Indian Immigrants for ‘Mersey’: Report of Arrival and Inspection 31 Oct.,” December 7, 1898, File No. 25575, CO 111/506, Colonial Office Correspondence, Public Record Office, The National Archives of the UK, Kew. 11. Sirdar: in colonial India this term was originally a title of nobility, then a night watchman or the Indian man in charge of keeping order among the indentured. 12. Holy stone is an archaic naval term meaning to scrub the decks with sandstone. Published by Duke University Press GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies VOYAGES ACROSS INDENTURE: FROM SHIP SISTER TO MANNISH WOMAN 13. The names of the two indentured men were more accurately transliterated as “Nabi Baksh” and “Mohangoo” on their indentureship passes (Sendall 1898: 38 – 39). 14. In his study of contact between aboriginal Andamanese and convicted Indian men imprisoned on the Andaman Islands during British colonialism, Satadru Sen (2010: 179) also raises the specter of jealousy in British descriptions of same-sex sexual contact between “natives,” in this case Andamanese and Indians: “Who would the aborigine choose: the sahib or the convict? The sexualized savage in the clearing thus emerged as a feminized and juvenilized victim of civilized lust, but also as a trap that lured Indians out from the clarity of the colony into a shadow world of quarrels and intimacies that Britons could not penetrate.” If two indentured Indian men on the Mersey chose each other, they were not choosing Dr. Harrison or any other white man on board. 15. Bahadur notes that the colonial record includes one other case of “unnatural crime” that occurred between indentured men aboard the ship Brenda. This case was brought to the British Guiana High Court in 1892. Other information is derived from anecdotes by European visitors horriied by the “uncleanliness and Sodomy” allegedly rife among male-majority Indian and Chinese indentured laborers (Bahadur 2014: 88). 16. For extensive and thorough auto-ethnographic documentation of Indo-Guyanese gender relations on the plantation, see Bahadur 2014. 17. The British orientalist Charles Kingsley infamously wrote of the contrast in the Caribbean colonies between the masculine, “superabundant animal vigour and the perfect independence of the younger [African] women” and “the young Indian woman ‘hung all over with bangles, in a white muslin petticoat . . . and gauze green veil; a clever, smiling, delicate little woman, who is quite aware of the brightness of her own eyes.’ ” See Tejaswini 2006: 82. 18. Walcott and Naipaul, the two living Caribbean Nobel laureates in literature, have had a long-standing literary, philosophical, and rather personal rivalry. Insight into their disagreements may be gleaned from Walcott 1974. 19. In the sociopolitical context of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic, says Tinsley (2008: 209), “I am compelled by [Judith] Butler’s growing insistence, from the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble to the engaging Undoing Gender, that gender theory should address more material concerns — issues of survival for the transgendered and others whose ‘unintelligible’ bodies threaten their very lives.” References Alexander, M. Jacqui. 1994. “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.” Feminist Review 48: 5-23. Published by Duke University Press 277 GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 278 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES Arondekar, Anjali. 2009. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. 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