A Vindication for Indo-Caribbean Feminism
Patricia Mohammed
Is there an acknowledged Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology and ontology that has surfaced in the Caribbean and its diaspora over the last century? Has the material of history and culture produced different consciousness or imperatives to action? How might a more inclusive knowledge of this trail of Caribbean development influence the philosophies and future arc of Caribbean feminism? Tonya Haynes probes the creation of feminist knowledge in the Caribbean since 1975 and the intersections of power, knowledge, and gender. Haynes argues, “gender consciousness involves the production of knowledge about and in the name of ‘gender’ from multiple positionings ... gender-conscious knowledge competes with feminist knowledge within a knowledge economy of gender” (Haynes 2011).1 Theory and practice expands on the fertile ground of how knowledge is taken up and interrogated, even dismissed.2 Indo-Caribbean feminist writing is visibly absent from the knowledge economy of gender that has dominated the discourse of feminism in and about the region for the last three or four decades. Thus far, writing by and about Indo-Caribbean feminism has suffered from a lack of cross-cultural interrogation both within the region and beyond.
P. Mohammed (H)
School for Graduate Studies and Research, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago
© The Author(s) 2016
G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1_2
In the wider Caribbean, Indians are still perceived as minor demographic pockets of difference with those involved in gender scholarship or feminist activism viewed as practicing a minority feminist politics. Yet there has now been a sustained history of Indian participation in the politics of nation and society and in the expansion of Caribbean diaspora for nearly two centuries. How are the ideas that have been surfacing from a range of scholars like Gabrielle Hosein, Halima Kassim, Shaheeda Hosein, Rosanne Kanhai, Rawwida Baksh, Aisha Khan, Nesha Haniff, Lisa Outar, and Brinda Mehta; literary figures like Mahadai Das, Shani Mootoo, Ramabai Espinet, and Joy Mahabir; and activists like Indrani Rampersad, Sheila Rampersad, Indira Rampersad, Rose Mohammed, Gaietry Pargass, Brenda Gopeesingh, and the Jahajee Sisters in New York examined within the realm of Caribbean feminist thought?3 A recent exception to the limited attention to this work is Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman (2013), a partly journalistic enquiry published in a recognized northern press. The author’s excellent writing and promotional efforts have gained this book a fairly wide circulation. But its positioning of the trope of “coolie” without establishing its genealogy in literary and feminist scholarship sustains the notion that there are no critical intellectual legacies on which it builds. What does this genealogy look like beyond the real or mythicized migrant “coolie” female character of low morals and fierce independence that has occupied the Western mind as the blueprint for Indo-Caribbean femininity?
The inclusion of Indo-Caribbean history of struggle, feminist and otherwise, produces a more complex and striated artery within the dominant discourse of feminism in the region. The nod to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in the title is deliberate, an homage to the polemical style in which Wollstonecraft lays out her arguments to convince both men and women. I use the word vindication as assertion however, rather than proof or justification. It is a conversation, not a quarrel, with a suspicion that naming another branch of feminism in the Caribbean will lead to a splintering and weakening of this social movement. Globally, feminism is not a homogeneous enterprise today although all feminisms share ideas that unite the branches. At the time she was writing in 1792, Wollstonecraft would have considered the category “woman” as homogeneous, undifferentiated by race or gender. Her charting of a rights-based ideology of gender equality nonetheless provided ammunition for feminism to take root and grow from strength to strength with each century that followed. She took issue with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s portrayal of women’s ideal character in the eighteenth century4: “... that woman ought to be weak and passive, because she has less bodily strength than man; ... that she was formed to please and to be subject to him; and that it is her duty to render herself agreeable to her master—this being the grand end of her existence” (Wollstonecraft 1792).5 The manageability and chastity of girls and women depended on the limits that were set on female access to education and experience. Wollstonecraft argued, in the era of Western Enlightenment, that to espouse equality with men bravely and unapologetically, women needed access to a sound education that would outfit them with the intellectual tools required for such challenges.
Wollstonecraft’s ideas resonate over the centuries with the conditions in which women of Indian descent in the Caribbean region still found themselves by the late nineteenth century. Like the eighteenth-century Victorian ideal of womanhood that Wollstonecraft decried, Indian women in the Caribbean were perceived both within their cultural environments, and by others outside, as childlike and controllable. Such ideas of femininity had traveled with the teachings and practices of Hinduism and Islam in its transition to the Caribbean. Beginning with limited primary education of women urged by Presbyterian mission efforts and continuing into secondary and tertiary education by the twentieth century, access to education was an important factor in the growth of an Indian feminist consciousness, politicization, and activism.
To enter into the pages of history through access to education has been the tried and tested path of many. In The Bluest Eye, first published in 1970, Nobel laureate and scholar Toni Morrison empathizes with a young black girl who longed to have blue eyes, for only then could her protagonist imagine herself as beautiful. Morrison wrote this book between 1962 and 1965, in the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. She set out to write a distinctively black literature, “a race free yet race specific prose,”6 and she wrote for those in her community, women and men whose existential crises she understood, whose histories she had shared.
Morrison’s literary stride in affirming a black feminism is matched by Angela Davis for her activism and outspokenness against anti-black racism in the 1960s in the USA (1981). Soon, other writers of fiction and non-fiction, among them bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, Alice Walker, and Patricia Hill Collins, named and defined the space of “black” feminism as a counterpoint to a dominant Western discourse, a theoretical and political position that has become not only accepted but was acknowledged as a dialectical progression of a constantly unfolding feminism. Predating these writers and activists who were US citizens, we can add Claudia Jones. Born in Trinidad in 1915, Jones was moved to Harlem, New York, in 1922 with her family. She chose to work among and reflect the lived experience of black working-class women in New York. A child of the Caribbean diaspora, her impact must be equally counted as an early black feminist activist and thinker (Boyce Davies 2007). Collectively, these highly educated, politicized, and articulate women underscored the way in which “difference” among and between women as a result of ethnicity, race, or class is ideologically and politically maintained, countering years of a dominant white Western feminist stance. In their legacies, we see the emergence of a consciousness of racial struggle in the USA that is underpinned by gender, the marriage between their personal experience and politics of race and nation, and the integral value of education in giving them a voice.
In “Towards Indigenous Feminist Theorizing in the Caribbean” (1998), I attempted to grapple with the range of differences—territorial, language, and linguistic and ethnic variations—that represented the peculiarities of the Caribbean feminist landscape, concluding that feminist struggles to establish identity among groups, including different sexual identities, were themselves varied expressions of a desire to belong and that all territorial groups were in some way involved in staking their claims to possession. But feminism is not a movement or politics that should develop self-r ighteousness and should not create the mistakes of other social movements that have imploded for this reason. “We are negotiating willingly with the enemy as we marry feminism to critical theory,” writes philosopher Gayatri Spivak (Spivak 1989). Such an alliance with critical theory requires us to look at the structure of the subject that produces theory. The subject here is the different historical origins and cultural variations of Indo-Caribbean populations. This group, long removed from an imaginary parent body in India, is culturally shaped by Indian traditions, just as other groups seek to retain foundational ties. Comprising more than half the population of Trinidad and Tobago and well over a third of the population of Guyana and Suriname, found in pockets throughout the Caribbean region, and l iberally populating the diasporic Caribbean populations of North America, it is important to consider what the specific cultural configurations of race and gender relations meant for the Indo-Caribbean population and for the evolution of a differently timed or varied feminist consciousness within this group.
Consciousness is not fixed or homogeneous. It is transformed through ideas, reactions to prevailing ideologies, moments of great trauma, or even of abundant joy and shaped by the material conditions of the time in which we live. The history of social movements and struggles are by and large studies of shifting consciousness and with that consciousness comes the desire for expression. Feminist consciousness as it evolved among Indian women cannot be disassociated from ethnic or class consciousness. Thus, as Indian women fought for workers’ rights or worked full days in the cane-fields and still brought up large families, they were fully aware of the sacrifices they were making for their menfolk and children. V.S. Naipaul in the classic A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) created strong female characters who were neither cowed or subdued in shaping family fortunes. Nesha Haniff has recorded the biographies of several Indo-Caribbean activist women in Blaze of Fire (1992). A Silent Life, Ryhaan Shah’s (2005) novel, tells the tale of a grandmother cheated of a role as a well-read revolutionary female leader who lives vicariously through the possibilities available to her granddaughter two decades later who had choices of education and a scholarship abroad.
Indo-Caribbean women’s history and cultural sensibilities have also undergone different cross-examinations. Rhoda Reddock (1985) viewed the early female Indian migrants as balking against the strictures of freedom. Rosanne Kanhai in Matikor (1999) established metaphors and tropes that communicated Indian femininity and female culture as did Lakshmi Persaud in Butterfly in the Wind (1990). This collective history of rejections, self-denials, and generational triumphs remains an ongoing project for Caribbean feminist writers, not just for Indian women, but for the everyday heroines of all ethnic groups to provide the material evidence of a fleshed-out Caribbean feminist past.7
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