Writers of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora New Delhi, Creative Books, 2007, pp.289 ISBN 81-8043-047-2
Krishna Sarbadhikary is a former university teacher who now works as an independent researcher and scholar. Surviving the Fracture, Writers of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is not only a full-length study of Indo-Caribbean writing, but a rather specialized one that deals only with Indo-Caribbean writing in Canada. Coming from India, the author’s use of the term “Fracture” in her title suggests she sees Indo-Caribbean writing or culture more as a fragment of Indian culture rather than as an independent unit with Indian origins. This, indeed, is a central issue in her book. Ms. Sarbadhikary opens her treatise with a well-researched Introduction, twenty-five pages long, which fills in essential details of the settlement of people from India in the Caribbean. These Indian immigrants came largely as agricultural workers, under a system of indenture, between 1838 and 1917, and settled mainly in Guyana and Trinidad, so far as English-speaking Caribbean territories are concerned. The author then devotes one chapter of critical analysis to each of eight Indo-Caribbean writers now living in Canada, except for Guyanese Sasenarine Persaud, who lived briefly in Canada in the 1980s and 90s before re-migrating to the US.
The first chapter of Surviving the Fracture, on Cyril Dabydeen from Guyana, is entitled “I Come to you with Crossings in my Mind” a quotation from one of Dabydeen’s poems that recalls not only the restless crossings of Indians, firstly from India to the Caribbean, then from the Caribbean to Canada, but also the anxiety and trauma involved. As the author of nearly twenty volumes of fiction and poetry, Dabydeen is the most prolific of all Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writers, his first Canadian work having been published as long ago as 1977. But, as Ms. Sarbadhikary reveals, despite dealing with subjects involving anxiety, trauma or pain: “Dabydeen’s protagonists have learnt that the way to survive cultural uprooting a second time is to find a dual voice.” (p.64) In other words, Dabydeen’s approach is non-confrontational: he seeks accommodation rather than redress.
This is not at all the case with the next writer Arnold Itwaru, another Guyanese, whose chapter title “The Anguish of Otherness” betrays anger and an altogether darker vision. An academic, Itwaru, like Dabydeen, writes fiction and poetry that consider themes such as twisted education under a colonial system, problems of identity and insecurity, and the perennial problem facing Indo-Caribbeans: that of finding a place that they can truly call “home”.
The next chapter “In Pursuit of Ancestral Inheritance” considers the fiction and poetry of Sasenarine Persaud who exhibits an obsessive preoccupation with his Indianness or Hinduness, and strong interest in Indian aesthetics. In Ms. Sarbadhikary’s words, Persaud’s Indian Hindu identity helps him to “resist the reality of fracture [from India, and to] re-instate the elusive dream of an unbroken continuity with the Hindu past.” (p.124) No wonder that Persaud regards his writing as “Indic” rather than Caribbean or South Asian. The clear contrast between Dabydeen’s non-confrontation and Itwaru’s polemics matches the difference between Persaud, who asserts his cultural continuity with India, and both Dabydeen and Itwaru who acknowledge some degree of disconnection from India.
Similarly, Neil Bissoondath, the first Trinidadian considered in Surviving the Fracture, has little sympathy with Persaud if the title of his chapter “Denying the Ancestral” is anything to go by. In the end, whether these writers totally accept or deny their cultural continuity with India, their writing confirms the intensity of Indo-Caribbean agonizing over the issue. Although Neil Bissoondath’s two volumes of stories, five novels and non-fiction writing scarcely match the productivity of Cyril Dabydeen, Ms. Sarbadhikary observes that Bissoondath’s work has attracted more attention from the white Canadian mainstream than that of any other Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writer. Bissoondath’s themes of colonialism, displacement, immigration and the quest for identity coincide with those of other Indo-Caribbean writers, except that, in Ms. Sarbadhikary’s words, he dispenses with “notions of ethnic identity, the ancestral past and his Trinidadian [Caribbean] connections. “ (p.162)
As the author of three novels and three volumes of short stories, Rabindranath Maharaj, another Trinidadian, has made a name for himself in Canada. His blend of tragic-comic humour invites comparison with V.S. Naipaul, Harold Sonny Ladoo and Samuel Selvon according to Ms. Sarbadhikary, while his treatment of the journey motif or the displacement of self and place is recognizably Indo-Caribbean.
The final three writers considered in the volume are all Trinidadian and female, beginning with Ramabai Espinet who is both an academic and the author of fiction, poetry, essays and editor of an anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry. Her chapter “Contesting Identities: Claiming spaces” announces both her Indo-Caribbean credentials and, like Arnold Itwaru, the somewhat polemical tone of her writing. In Ms. Sarbadhikary’s view, Espinet presents new myths that “foreground the working classes, incorporating a warrior-woman, an angry, avenging Kali, or a cutlass-wielding cane-cutting woman, capable of warding off a white overseer or a drunken abusive husband.” (P.209) Stirring stuff!
Ms. Sarbadhikary’s chapter “Imaginary Landscape: Permeable Borders” introduces her seventh writer Shani Mootoo and the idea of crossing borders not only of geography but gender: “trying to define self in flux”. As a painter and writer Mootoo also crosses borders of genre. And, because she is from India, it is interesting for Ms. Sarbadhikary to acknowledge Mootoo’s “ironic look at the linguistic and cultural superiority displayed by Indians vis`a vis Indo-Caribbeans.” (p.243)
While most Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writers are based in Toronto Mootoo lives in Vancouver, Bissoondath in Quebec city, and the final (eighth) writer Madeleine Coopsammy in Winnipeg. Coopsammy stands out as the only Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writer who did her University studies in India before coming to Canada. Her stories consider typical Indo-Caribbean issues of race, color, rootlessness and the ancestral past, all of which are superbly analyzed in Ms. Sarbadhikary’s informed and balanced study of the Indo- Caribbean-Canadian search for new identity, and their continuing struggle both to cope with their Indian inheritance, and discover strategies for surviving exile in new lands such as Canada.
Reprinted from Trinidad and Tobago Review website
