We aim to create a MANIFESTO for COOLITUDE.
Please contact us to add your ideas ……

We are starting off with the following phrases kindly suggested by Rajiv Mohabir:

 

We are interested in the intersections of community identities

Any artist who identifies with the term “coolie” is part of Coolitude poetics.

We are creative by nature of the ability to excavate our histories for our poetics.

We stand for transnationalism, anti-heteropatriarchy, and anti-racism

We are coolie: a chutney of ethnicities

We are a movement that centers our materiality: our history of trauma from passage across the kalapani to the plantations, not religion or racist ideologies.

“We believe “coolie” to locate a migrant worker, a name derived from Tamil that refers to an identity based on socio-economic class.

We refuse to accept ascribed labels to locate our intricacies.

We are not Indian as defined by the political borders of postcolonial India. The India we were once from is no longer the center of our travail, rather, what we center now is our dynamism, our movement, our multiple belongings.

There are no schizophrenic ideological poles or axes on which our world spins. Creolization is our sibling—we now look toward Asia as well. No longer does fixity of identity categories serve; we approach national inclusion, wherever we are.

We are complicit in the colonization of others including the indigenous people of the places we now live.

We understand that the “Coolie,” the “Buck,” the “Chink,” the “Nigger,” and the “White” are constructed by Empire to keep us apart—to keep us with drawn daggers at one another’s throats.

Our ancestors cut cane. We are their instinct for survival and creative impulse. We are stories. We are stories from our grandparents. We are whispers in the dark, we are songs.

We come from the sea. Crossing the sea is the land we know intimately. We can change our minds whenever we need to in order to build alliances with the oppressed in our various spaces and communities. We are never static. How can the sea be unchanging?