Revoicing the Coolie

The forging of a new identity in exile took the migrant far from the confines of official platitudes and historical appraisals. The experiences of the coolie are on a par with migrants of whatever hue, across a range of climes and times. And yet the coolie imbued his or her places of settlement with a defiant, distinctive Indianness. Coolitude confronts the experience of Indians beyond the seas, and traces the elaboration of the awareness of the Indian who has accepted exile, and acquired new forms of expression, to become part of the history of the spaces and places left behind and those newly settled.

Coolitude seeks to rediscover the coolie, through an exploration of the stereotypes which evolved about the Indian labour migrant in official documents and early literature, and through an assessment of the fictional and historical sources which have subsequently explored Indian identities in diaspora. The purpose of this quest is to redefine and reappropriate the concept of the coolie. Through coolitude, an articulation and an evocation of the Indian labour diaspora, the coolie can effectively be revoiced.

Contemporary texts which described – and often distorted – our image of the coolie, whether travellers’ observations or accounts of colonists and residents of the territories to which Indians migrated, have been characterized by exoticism. Succeeding generations of writers have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to capture the essence of the migrant experience and to define their place in the societies where they have settled. This has given rise to what Nelson has identified as ‘customary grand narratives of displacement, nostalgia and loss’.¹

Coolitude has emerged from the rich francophone tradition of writings about Creole societies. Creole poetry and prose has been characterised by twin preoccupations: the appropriation and subversion of the French language, and the quest for an identity.² Principally linked to French Caribbean writers, Raphael Confiant has nevertheless reserved his highest accolade for an Indian Ocean poet: ‘de l’Ile Maurice, nous vient… la première poésie de la Créolité’:

La Négritude sut assumer le mot ‘nègre’, insulte jetée par l’Occident à la face des fils de mère-Afrique. La Coolitude cherche a son tour a assumer le mot ‘coolie’… la Coolitude vient, aux côtés de la Négritude … apporter son indispensable pierre a l’édifice que nous sommes tous en train de construire depuis des siècles: la créolité. ³

As Khal Torabully has explained, coolitude should be considered as a reflection of a twin process: firstly the rediscovery of the coolie memory where appropriate, such as in the Caribbean, and secondly, where the aesthetics of loss is less prevalent, the necessity of a complex attitude to culture. In the latter case, the construction of identity has much in common with creolization – traversing phases imposed by social, historical and political realities without losing sight of the philosophy of linking with otherness and rejecting a sectarian identity: “La Coolitude n’a rien d’un cri ethnique. Elle prolonge la créolité en Inde insulaire. Elle est acclimation de la culture de l’Inde en terre plurielle.”⁴

Creolization texts have sought to reclaim the history of forced migrations and the metissage which resulted. Creolization has permitted the class of ‘sous-hommes’ which resulted from the involuntary diasporas to ‘devenir des hommes, des hommes vrais – c’est-a-dire des Créoles – et c’est cette force secrete-la que chante si bellement la poesie de Khal Torabully”.⁵

It may not be considered so surprising that it is Mauritius, rather than the Caribbean, which has provided the inspiration for this poetry of créolité and for the birth of coolitude. Francoise Lionnet sees Mauritius as a ‘true site of metissage and creolization’, while Turcotte and Brabant have argued that as a microcosm of world cultures, Mauritius is well placed to provide future human bridges: ‘hommes-ponts’ who may become the real interpreters of the North-South dialogue and precursors of world understanding.⁶ In the ‘post-ethnic society’ of Mauritius where the ‘impact of modernity’ has rubbed away at competing ancestral cultures, Khal Torabully has emerged to become a ‘homme-pont’, or human bridge. ⁷

 

*          *          *          *

 

References

1. E.S. Nelson, Writers of the Indian Diaspora, USA, 1993, p. xvii. An example of this is the novel by D. Beeharry, That Others Might Live, which sought to recreate indenture conditions.

2. G. Fanchin, ‘La littérature francophone de 1945 a nos jours’, in Littérature Mauricienne, Notre Librairie, no. 114, 1993, p. 52.

3. R. Confiant, Preface to Chair Corail Fragments Coolies, Guadeloupe, 1999, pp. 7–9.

4. Khal Torabully, ‘Coolitude’, Notre Librairie, April 1997, p. 71.

5. R. Confiant, op. cit., p. 9.

6. F. Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, p. 6; P. Turcotte & C. Brabant, ‘Ile Maurice: Nuvo Sime’, Peuples Noirs/Peuples Africains, 31, 1983, p. 106.

7. For a further discussion of these issues in the Mauritian context see T.H. Eriksen, Us and them in modern societies, Oslo, 1993, p. 91, and V. Hookoomsing, ‘Preserving pluralism in the context of development and modernization: the case of Mauritius with particular reference to the Indo-Mauritians’, Conference Paper, 1994, pp. 12–16.