My Mother’s Baby: Wrecking Work After Indentureship

Andil Gosine

One day, I dug up my Baby album to research an art project. I soon began to see the album not merely as documentation of the childhood I spent in Trinidad but as a rare text of my mother’s creation. My mother, Sharmattie Jasomath Maharaj Gosine, does not write. She has never kept a journal and does not write personal letters. She speaks her opinion all the time, but I cannot ask her questions about our family’s past: We do not speak in this way. My mother is an excellent painter, but where she once spent hours sketching from a gallery patio that overlooked sugarcane fields, and later water bison, in rural George Village, she has refused to pick up a pencil or brush since leaving Trinidad. Instead, she fills her suburban Canadian bungalow with a variety of knickknacks and landscape “art” found at garage sales.

Like anyone, my mother is a complicated person, and especially because of my close and engaged proximity to her, I could not hope to provide a fair analysis of her person or politics. But the Baby album presented the possibility of examining the details of a particular set of strategies she enacted at a significant moment in her life and in the social and political

A. Gosine (H)

G.J. Hosein, L. Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, New Caribbean Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55937-1_4

history of the place she inhabited. In this chapter, I argue that Baby may be read as a complex, negotiated response to the social forces of patriarchy, ethnocentrism, caste and creolization that have historically structured life in Trinidad, among other places. I characterize her response as “wrecking work” that is both the heritage of indentureship and a major impulse of Indo-Caribbean feminism. Referencing parts of Baby, I highlight three areas to which its “wrecking” impulse is directed: birthright privileges of names conferred by caste, normative or stable constructions of gender, and time and space. I further argue that “wrecking work” is a radical gesture toward the ever-elusive, necessarily feminist goal of postcolonial subjects in Trinidad and elsewhere: reclamation of their/our complex humanity.