Doubly Diasporic Jahaji-bhain
Among the many Indian bodies seen at Carnival, the visual difference between local and transnational Indo-Caribbean women is negligible. Similar to Afro-Caribbean women abroad, many Indo-Caribbean women of the diaspora find in Carnival and its music the ultimate expression of their Caribbean identities vis-a-vis their metropolitan homes. Rekha is one of these transnational Indo-Caribbean revelers, and her Carnival experiences are very different from Candace’s. Equipped with an excess of cash and a handful of fete tickets bought in the USA, Indo-Guyanese Rekha stays close to her group of New York friends while in Trinidad, and she interacts more with other foreign-based feters of various races and backgrounds than with the local Indian community. Rekha had come to Trinidad in 2015 for her second Carnival (the first was in Miami) and travelled in a group of three New York-based Indo-Guyanese girlfriends. She was giddy and proud to be at her first Carnival in Trinidad, which she described as conferring status and respect within her social circle back home in Queens, NY. As a group, Rekha and her friends were attractive, single, and regularly encountered and socialized with other Indo- Caribbean men and women that they knew from New York. All of them had come to Trinidad for Carnival, and were following a tight schedule of attending two to three fetes a day, playing mas’ with the most exclusive bands, and even taking part in multiple Jouvay experiences.
These women, relative newbies to Carnival with strong guidance from friends who had become veterans of this annual trip, had followed strict diets and exercised vigorously in order to look sexy in their shiny and tiny costumes and fete outfits. They drank heavily and were conspicuous and rowdy in contrast to others around them. At one event, they unabashedly started dancing in the middle of the venue before anyone else at the fete—more self-conscious or attentive to local social cues—had yet started to party. In many ways, they seemed united in a shared American insouciance more than in their shared Indianness: as travelers with an acute sense of their American privilege, they intended to enjoy themselves in the most bacchanalian ways; this was the meaning of Carnival for them. They were not concerned with local norms, whether national or ethno-racial. It perhaps helped that, without local relatives to recognize and censor them, they felt freer than an Indo-Trinidadian New Yorker might—perhaps, more than was visible, they were “thiefing their chance” to be read simultaneously within their diasporic cultural identity in New York (as Caribbean) and their social and economic aspirations in Trinidad (as modern, North American, and wealthy). Rekha and her friends, identifying as heterosexual cisgender women, did not pursue relationships or casual encounters with men during this trip; they took most pleasure in each other’s company, a sign of solidarity and also of their delinking of social status with conventional gender roles defined in relation to men.8 All three women were very outgoing and showed no competition or jealousy toward each other or other women at fetes, including black and white women from different countries, all of whom they saw as kindred Carnival revelers. Rekha and her friends certainly fit (and embraced) the most visible and mainstream Carnival more than Candace; at first glance, they are awkward figures for examining the desires and needs specific to an Indo-Caribbean specificity in Carnival. Yet, in important ways, their behavior is still translatable into a jahaji-bhain feminism.
An interrogation of the diversity of feminist and identity categories being navigated by Rekha, Candace, and others is appropriate here, but the framework of minimal incommensurability reminds us that difference must not be reduced and measured. Focusing less on the uniformity between Indo-Caribbean subjects, this analysis translates the history of jahaji-bhain solidarity to the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in New York City, the site of an even more layered ethno-racial identity than Candace’s. While Rekha and her friends paid no noticeable attention to race in their excited encounters with other feters, everyone in their core group, as well as their extended social network of New York feters who met up at Trinidad Carnival, was Indo-Caribbean. When I asked them what their families thought about their trip, Rekha suggested that now, in their thirties, they had already earned their mothers’ trust and respect and fielded no sustained protests for their trip. They were careful which pictures they posted to Facebook, agreeing that risque dancing or drinking pictures were not to be displayed, but that beautiful portraits in their revealing costumes were a source of pride for both their family and friends back in New York City. Indeed, not unlike Candace, the pleasures and even decadence sought by these transatlantic revelers is coherent with maintaining social standing, respecting social codes, and by doing both, achieving an independence that may have been unavailable or even taboo to their mothers. Yet their unquestioned loyalty to their community did not foreclose connections with non-Indian women with whom these transnational revelers felt they shared more, both in class and culture, than with local Indo-Caribbean women during Carnival time.
Like Candace, Rekha found Carnival attendance to be a sure path to respect and admiration—not among local Indo-Trinidadians, whose social frameworks did not intersect with hers, but among those of her diasporic Indo-Caribbean social group in New York City. As Philip Scher demonstrates in Carnival and the Formation of a Caribbean Transnation, transnational Trinidadians find, in Carnival, the locus of their Caribbean cultural identity vis-a-vis the adopted metropolitan home (Scher 2004). Other Indo-Caribbeans, it turns out, as with those from Guyana, share a similar need for reaffirming that Caribbean home, even if they had never lived there. For many young Indo-Caribbeans, their places of social encounter and cohesion are the dance clubs that play primarily soca music, where they can meet others who share their cultural and ethnic background and enjoy the fruits of this culture without sacrificing the privileges of American citizenship. However, within that group, many distinguished themselves by being able to pay for a ten-day trip to Trinidad and Tobago at its most expensive time of year, for playing mas’ in the most exclusive bands, and by attending the priciest fetes.
Experiencing Carnival in Trinidad gave Caribbean authenticity to participants, regardless of if they were themselves of Trinidadian descent. As an Indo-Guyanese woman, Rekha still found that her music, her people, and her kind of party had their origin and greatest fulfillment in this place at this time, even if that definition of Caribbeanness echoed tourist brochures’ more cliched representations of the Caribbean as an exotic leisure destination, insensitive to nation, history, and cultural complexity. For Rekha, posting pictures of herself and her friends—perfectly trim in their bikini costumes and made up professionally for the road—was her complex way of being Caribbean even while being of New York City: glamorous, ethnic, and apparently incommensurable with the strict Indo-Caribbean life that her parents had come from or had enforced when she was younger. As Prentice points out, being an “enterprising subject” is a core explanation of personal choices, and so are “embodied desires.” I quote her again: “neoliberalism is as much constituted through the ways in which people engage and invest in it as by state policies” (Prentice 2015, Introduction). The myriad configurations through which women seek pleasure, safety, status, independence, and community are not all reducible to conscious and collective resistance against the disperse sites of power that at turns disempower them and offer one-off opportunities for them to “thief a chance” at a more individual liberation. For women like Rekha, an improvement in economic status brought the possibility also of embodied pleasures associated with fetes, music, and drinking, pleasures made particularly desirable within her ethno-racial community because of shared experiences of invisibility as Caribbean subjects in New York City.
Rekha and friends are culturally distinct from Candace and hers. However, the financial and cultural independence that the American woman has achieved and associates with her Caribbeanness can be read as another situated and complex version of the financial independence the Trinidad-based Candace seeks through work and education, as well as fete attendance—it is also, as Prentice shows, not entirely economic. It implies also independence from cultural limits or stereotypes, from patriarchal control and supervision, and from the historical taint of poverty or stereotypical frugality. This is not to say, of course, that the economic is irrelevant. Carla Freeman (2014) focuses on this intersection of class mobility and the affective desires of Caribbean women in her analysis of their entrepreneurship:
Entrepreneurialism denotes action and imagination, an ongoing process of envisioning and becoming, as opposed to a given position, status, or state of being that is achieved and established through economic means alone.
In this dynamic sense, entrepreneurial self-making is always work in formation—akin to the processual work of class, gender, race, and culture—and inextricably bound up with these dimensions of identity. (Freeman 2014, 2)
In this becoming is the beginning of an explanation of the shifting definitions of Caribbean middle-class women—it is very much, within the logic of reputation, about “becoming” rather than fixed being, that aspirational quality that leads many to take out loans, that has Candace only recently investing in these pleasures, and has Rekha shelling out excessive amounts of money for it.
The jahaji-bhain concept also requires translation between Candace and Rekha. Rekha has a distinct experience of the jahaji sisterhood: having undertaken a second journey across the water to a doubly dia- sporic home, she and her friends share a solidarity that is transnationally Caribbean, Indian, and American. They keep closest to each other, in implicit agreement about what they seek and how they will achieve it in this pleasurable but also socially important event. Less visible is how they also exercise a certain restraint in their Carnival activities: not seeking sexual encounters and keeping closest to other women whose solidarity reflects a common desire to control the narratives that name them, while privileging and protecting the Indo-Caribbean ties tracing back to New York City. Like their indentured ancestors, a shared diasporic experience defined by shifted community solidarities, loss of identity, and necessary acculturation offers common ground upon which they build their own trust and security amidst the alienation, delegitimation, or misrecognition they likely know well in New York. What we see in the case of Rekha is the potential for women’s jahaji-bhain practices to be delinked from ethnicity defined in a fixed way, and to instead carry with it the kind of gendered and ethnic identity that is (re)invented collectively in common experiences of migration and adaptation.
