Abstract
Chapter 6 extends the exploration of the poetics of kinship from Chap. 5, considering how such an approach can be used to recognize and move beyond the hierarchies of empire. It examines the cyclical nature of trauma as depicted in two novels by contemporary women writers, Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting and Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin. While Monkey Hunting focuses on Chinese indenture in Cuba and Jahajin explores Indian indenture in Trinidad, both novels weave together narrative strands from different time periods in order to demonstrate the ongoing impact of indenture on generations of a single family and the dangers of a nostalgic approach to the past. Additionally, both novels draw parallels between family dynamics, such as unhappy marriages and parents abandoning their children, and national upheavals, such as revolutions and uprisings. This chapter argues that García and Mohan use these parallels to advocate an active engagement with the past in order to break cycles of trauma on both an individual and a national level. While García depicts the dangers of erasing the past, Mohan primarily warns against romanticizing the past in the form of nostalgia.
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Notes
- 1.
Contemporary indenture narratives by male authors, such as Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and Sharlow’s The Promise, tend to employ straightforward chronology.
- 2.
The word “nostalgia” was first coined in seventeenth-century Switzerland by the physician Johannes Hofer. He used the term to identify the extreme homesickness felt by Swiss mercenaries, and classified it as a (treatable) medical condition. By the nineteenth century, nostalgia had ceased to be viewed as a disease, and was seen instead as an emotion, a longing for a particular time, rather than a particular place. Today, theorists focus on the cultural, as well as the individual experience of nostalgia. For instance, psychologist Janelle Wilson writes, “While [nostalgia] began—conceptually and experientially—as solely a private phenomenon centered on one’s longing for home, it has become…a more public experience” (Wilson 2005, 30).
- 3.
Similarly, historian Svetlana Boym argues that “for many displaced people from all over the world, creative rethinking of nostalgia was…a strategy of survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming” (Boym 2001, xvii).
- 4.
Monkeys play a key role in both Jahajin and Monkey Hunting, which is not unusual in Indian indenture narratives. Hanuman, the monkey god in the Hindu pantheon, is a key part of the Ramayana, a Hindu epic that tells the story of Rama, a prince who is exiled from his homeland, and Sita, his devoted and chaste wife. It was often used as a source of inspiration and comfort by the laborers, particularly males, because of the many parallels with their own story. Novels by contemporary Indo-Caribbean women often subvert the Ramayana, as in Ryhaan Shah’s A Silent Life.
- 5.
Mohan indicates that the women she interviewed hardly ever spoke about the British: “They really didn’t see anybody who wasn’t relevant to them. And as far as they were concerned, the entire life on the estate was Indians…they talked of [the British] the way you would talk of maybe seeing Haley’s Comet or something. Something that passed by” (Mohan 2014).
- 6.
Peggy Mohan makes this argument in more depth in her article “Indians Under a Caribbean Sky” (2001).
- 7.
Turban.
- 8.
A practice among Muslims and some Hindus of secluding women.
- 9.
A long scarf or veil that Indian women wore to cover their hair and the upper part of their body.
- 10.
Rodolphe Solbiac notes that when Joshua, Mona’s great-grandfather, destroys pages that contain the rands’ songs, “the act is a patriarchal erasure of the memory of Indian independent female migration. This act is perpetrated in order to preserve the male mythical discourse that presents Indian migration to Trinidad as a family process exclusively” (Solbiac 2012, 238).
- 11.
Even Gaiutra Bahadur’s nonfiction book, Coolie Woman (2013), could be included in this category. This book moves back and forth between Bahadur’s own experiences of migration, racism, and sexism, and the information she has uncovered about her great-grandmother.
- 12.
The Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century was part of a broader Chinese migration throughout the globe. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of turmoil for China, as the Qing Dynasty was losing power in the face of Western imperialism and widespread social unrest. Roughly two-and-a-half million Chinese workers left China in the nineteenth century for overseas destinations, including Australia and California, during the gold rush.
- 13.
Monkey Hunting’s focus on a male laborer and his descendants separates it from the female-centered Jahajin. Because so few Chinese women indentured, we only see female Chinese characters in the scenes that take place in China. For Chen Pan, Chinese women exist primarily in wisps of memory—his mother, the dancing girl in Amoy who takes all of his money, and the women of the old imperial court whom he dreams about, women best admired from afar.
- 14.
García sees this as part of a pattern of America’s imperial incursions into Cuba. In 2007, she stated that the Spanish-American War had been a period “of enormous upheaval, and the changes came on the very edge of a big empire—the United States—that was increasingly placing its weight around the world” (García 2007, 177).
- 15.
Chen Pan’s voyage further emphasizes the links between imperialism and capitalism. Though he is traveling to Cuba, a Spanish colony, he does so on a British boat. As Mark Tumbridge notes, British boats were allowed to carry laborers for rival empires in the interest of making a profit (Tumbridge 2012, 244).
- 16.
Mark Tumbridge points out that Chen Pan’s escape, success, and long life, like the success of Phularjee and Munshi Rahman Khan, are not the norm: “His eventual success is a departure from the everyday fight for survival of the majority of Chinese indentured labourers in Cuba” (Tumbridge 2012, 245). Lisa Yun notes that in the 1899 Census, only 13% of Chinese Cubans were listed as merchants, “while 73% remained day laborers and servants” (Yun 2008, 218).
- 17.
The Count de Santovenia was a real nobleman in Cuba, a planter named Nicolás Martínz de Campos, who bought the title of count in 1824 for somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 (Thomas 1998, 142).
- 18.
When the story is passed on, these events change shape: Chen Pan’s granddaughter, Chen Fang, is told that Chen Pan “became rich after saving a Spanish lady’s honor, although he never succeeded in marrying her” (García 2003, 91), pointing to the quixotic nature of memory and the ways that history is shaped by what we want to remember.
- 19.
Chen Pan makes his wealth by buying the furniture and goods of the Spaniards who have fallen upon hard times or who are fleeing Cuba, then selling those goods to other foreign clients. He thus supports the Cuban independence movement with money earned from the very people the rebels fight against. This, then, is another example of his pragmatic idealism—Chen Pan burns to aid the nationalist revolution but has the business acumen to take advantage of his opponents’ weakness.
- 20.
Chen Fang’s story shares many similarities with that of Lowe in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda, discussed in Chap. 4. The similarities between Powell and García’s novels demonstrate a growing interest in challenging the view of gender as biological and drawing attention to the low status of women in nineteenth-century China.
- 21.
After two months, the Cuban army, bolstered by American marines sent to protect North American property, violently put down the rebellion, killing between 2000 and 6000 Afro-Cubans. Official Cuban sources put the number at 2000, but other sources estimate somewhere between 5000 and 6000. See Aline Helg’s Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912, p. 225 (1995).
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Klein, A. (2018). At the End of Their Tether: Women Writing about Indenture. In: Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99055-2_6
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