Reflection: Dougla Poetics and Feminism
Like the feminist scholarship of Puri, Kanhai and Rampersad, my own M.Phil. thesis on Indo-Trinidadian girlhood (2004) shows this discursive colonization of Dougla poetics and feminism by Indian women’s cultural productions and gender negotiations. The word “Dougla” has long been in use in the Caribbean and dates back to the entry of Indians to Guyana as indentured laborers from 1938. Referring to the offspring of Indian and African unions in the Caribbean, not simply any kind of biological mix, the meanings of the word have not been static. For example, in India, it referred to the children of inter-caste or inter-varna unions (Reddock 1999). In the Caribbean, it has referred to the children born out of wedlock and later of inter-ethnic unions (Allsopp 2003). Dougla gained meaning in pre-Independence Trinidad as part of a system of “racial accounting” (Segal 1993, 82), which positions all “races” as pure prior to entry to Trinidad and Tobago, only becoming mixed here. While it has historically been wielded pejoratively, with shame, stigma, stereotype and insult typically associated with the term in the context of Indo-Caribbean ethnic nostalgia and myths of purity as well as in Afro-Trinidadian stereotypes, those valuations are shifting. This has been part of a changing discourse, not only of creolization, but of douglarization, particularly in Trinidadian national life, along with the spectrum of class, gender, sexual and political significances which douglarization bears.3
In an attempt to celebrate blurring of Indian-African boundaries against the grain of ethnic antagonism, Indo-Caribbean feminist scholarship conceptually mobilized “Dougla” to name Indian women’s transgressive identities and politics. Such scholarly use enabled Indian women to be understood as culturally mixed while at the same time it offered an alternative to the theory of creolization which centered Europeans and Africans, and marginalized Indian experience of mixing in the Caribbean4 as well as described Indian assimilation (Puri 2004, 193). The ambitious intention of these writings was to think about Indian women’s cultural, sexual and political mixing in ways that affirmed disavowed biological ambiguities and disrupted racial stereotypes and conservative Indian notions of purity.
This trajectory also aimed to theorize a Caribbean feminist discourse that allowed for the mixing of multiple interpretive possibilities and crossrace, working-class women’s solidarities. For example, Rosanne Kanhai (1999a) outlined the qualities of Dougla feminism as “a validation of ‘the Afro- and Indo-centric’ that requires Caribbean feminists to look into their grassroots cultures for inspiration and role models; the beginnings of a political vision that calls for Indian and African women to learn from each other and to take on each other’s issues as if they were their own; a refusal to support male dominated racial politics, either openly or tacitly, in the Caribbean region and to make space for gender issues; and a denunciation of sexist behavior from male members of all ethnic communities” (Rampersad 2000, 65). This meant valuing each other’s historical and cultural struggles against oppressions and sharing their strengths and strategies in feminist theorizing and activism.
What was far-reaching about this literature was that it didn’t explore culturally and biologically Dougla figures, and processes of douglariza- tion, as pathologized, stigmatized, invisible, unlivable or threatening, but boldly mobilized them against both a social and scholarly status quo, with women and girls’ voices at the center of their project. Yet, this chapter shows how Douglas’ experiences and expressions are completely absented from the Dougla poetics and feminisms literature, except as background for such theorizing. Reflecting on these writings as an Indian mother and scholar, I suggest in this chapter that embodiment cannot be so easily ignored. As much as a Dougla poetics is useful “for locating and interpreting hybrid cultural productions as well as public, quotidian interactions between Africans and Indians,” as Kaneesha Parsard points out, it has also obscured “the dougla figure by deploying it for cooperative, dialogic purposes” (Parsard 2011, 8).
Although my daughter was born in 2010, it took five years to consciously identify these critiques, to rethink my analyses from 2004 and to question my concern in these last years to investigate a specifically Indo-Caribbean feminism. Have I been “racial” or sought to reproduce Indo-centric nationalism in this ongoing emphasis on an Indo-Caribbean feminism? Sheila Rampersad, in her PhD dissertation advocating for Dougla feminism, cautions against Indian women’s collusion with “the separate-but-equal claims of Indian conservatism” and their replication in feminist discourse (2000, 164). Wary that “examinations of Indian women’s circumstances and modified Caribbean feminist ideologies” are seen as “an end in themselves” instead of “with a view to understanding the wider social and political circumstances of Trinidad society which are overdetermined by race,” Rampersad argues that Dougla feminism “concentrates instead on how an interracial space that pays equal attention to both groups, can be forged” (Rampersad 2000, 164).
Yet, Puri, Rampersad, Kanhai and I polemically approached Dougla poetics and feminism in a way itself overdetermined by consideration of Indian-African relations. For example, Shalini Puri argues that singer Drupatee Ramgoonai’s “Lick Down Me Nani”5 hybridizes African and Indian musical traditions and cultural spaces and articulates a “de-legiti- mized or disallowed Indian or woman’s identity” (Puri 2004, 205). She interprets Ramabai Espinet’s short story (1991a) “Barred: Trinidad 1987” “as an attempt to renegotiate constructions of Indianness by articulating that which is ‘barred’ from dominant representations of race and sexuality” (Puri 2004, 205). Yet, it is not clear why renegotiating Indianness across various kinds of containment, using variously syncretized cultural forms, isn’t understood as the hybridity, mixing and transgression definitive of an Indo-Caribbean feminist poetics. This poetics refers to more than mixing with Africanness in its representation of Indo-Caribbean gendered subalternity. Such re-reading would more closely fit Rosanne Kanhai’s theorization of what can be seen as “Bhowjee feminism.” As Kanhai outlines,
These Bhowjees6 have been able to take what is valuable to them from the calypso/carnival culture and infuse it into their own ethnic-based expression .... Collectively, they are demanding the right to celebrate their female bodies in a way that denies neither their Indian heritage nor their claim to elements of Afro-centric cultural expression available to them. They reject the call to Hindu purity that is being made, seeing its repressive intent ____They willingly reach for elements of Afro-Caribbean culture ...
and for the resources of the metropolitan societies to which they migrate.
Their demand is that they take their Indianness and femaleness with them.
(Kanhai 1999b, 227-234)
Where Puri sees Espinet’s narrative as “marked by an ambiguous vocabulary, ambiguous grammar, and an ambiguous voice with ambiguous agency” with greater certainty meaning a return “to the claustrophobic space of the stereotype” (2004, 208), another reading could see this as precisely a negotiation with stereotypes of Indianness that break new ground by not abandoning their claim to both Indianness and femaleness. Espinet’s narrator herself says, “I am an Indian, plain and simple, not East nor West, just an Indian” (Puri 1997, 81; in Puri 2004, 207). Puri recognizes this when she notes that “One goal of the story is thus to articulate a different Indian identity, one which makes room for Indian women” and which engages in “the struggle within the Indian community over how Indianness will be defined and by whom” (Puri 2004, 215), challenging how class and gender inequalities delegitimize many identities and cultural possibilities as “un-Indian” (Puri 2004, 215).
With regard to “Lick Down Me Nani,” Puri similarly recognizes that “[t]he song’s insistence on the embodied-ness of the Nani, then, participates in another kind of reversal as well - a reversal of dominant Indian cultural nationalist discourse’s erasure of the sexuality of Indian women” (Puri 2004, 202). Thus, there are two problems with reading this as a Dougla poetics. The first is the service to which the Dougla is being deployed without Dougla embodiment, and Douglas’ own gender and sexual negotiations, being considered. Indeed, just as “Indianness” and “Africanness” allowed thinking about particular sociological particularities in the Caribbean, gendered Dougla embodiment also compels its own politics and epistemologies. The second problem is that none of Puri’s analysis points to a Dougla poetics as much as it does to Drupatee’s and Espinet’s articulation of an Indo-Caribbean feminist one.
Similarly, Sheila Rampersad surveys a panorama of Caribbean cultural texts by African, Indian and Dougla calypsonians, poets, writers and feminist academics to “elaborate the critical link between Indian women’s gendered resistance and their resistance to ethnic polarity” (Rampersad 2000, 166). She observes that the Indian women writers she considers “appear to be constructing a relationality with Africans and Africanness that is decidedly and deliberately different from the relationality crafted in post-indentureship Indian conservatism (Mohammed 1998, 398) that identified Indian women as an ethnic border and Africanness as a potent cultural and racial threat” (Rampersad 2000, 203). The writers and works examined by Rampersad include the novels Butterfly in the Wind (1990), Sastra (1993) and For the Love of My Name (2000) by Lakshmi Persaud; Rosanne Kanhai’s short story, “MaCommere” (1995); Ramabai Espinet’s collection of poetry, “Nuclear Seasons” (1991b); “Picture the Diablesse” (1983) by Niala Rambachan; and “When the Hindu Woman Sings Calypso” (1997) by Rajandaye Ramkissoon-Chen.
With regard to the last poem, for example, Rampersad argues that “Contrary to Drupatee’s critics who argued that calypso was alien to Indian women, this poem suggests that singing calypso is consistent with Indian women’s history ... At the same time, Drupatee’s movement into calypso, into an African cultural space, is imaged as a movement away from oppressive elements of Indian tradition so that the Indian woman’s traditional purdah is now strings of rhinestone on Drupatee’s forehead, the calypso- nian’s hair is ‘frizzled/to a buss up shot’ and ‘the long tresses of/a long tradition/seared in the electricity/of the mike’s cord length’” (Rampersad 2000, 205). My view is that while this may describe an “emancipatory relationship between Indian female identity and Africanness” (Rampersad 2000, 206), it is not clear why rejection of oppression is misread as a loss of ethnicity, of belonging ambiguously elsewhere, rather than as a lucid and unapologetically Indian feminist poetics, which, as Rampersad recommends for the women’s movement and Indo-Caribbean feminist scholars, positively draws on Afro-centricity in terms of trust, intimacy and solidarity.7 No less, in Rajandaye Ramkissoon-Chen’s poem, “Coolie Girl Lives for Her Bastard Dougla Child” (Ramkissoon-Chen 1997, 31-34), the coolie girl escapes community shame, but takes her orhni or headscarf (wrapped around her Dougla child) with her. There isn’t ambiguity regarding or abandonment of Indianness and/or femaleness in these writings.
Puri and Rampersad may have been echoing Indian women’s articulations at the time when a focus on Indo-Trinidadian women’s challenges to and negotiations with patriarchy, and yet their desire to retain and claim community dominated the feminist literature and writings by Indo-Trinidadian women (Baksh-Soodeen 1998; Kanhai-Winter 1999; I. Rampersad 1999). For example, following Espinet (1992), Sherene Razack argued that “for women, the price of community means acquiescing to the violence. If I question it, I risk being both ungendered and without community” (Razack 1999, 168). Among Indo-Caribbean fem?inist scholars, this anxiety stimulated discussion about creolized female identities, crises of representation and competing religious and nationalist sentiments. Disparate pulls of individual fulfillment and duty to community were often presented as interlocked with Indo-Trinidadian women’s “Indianness” (Haniff 1999). In this vein, Kanhai identified young women’s “schizophrenia” (Kanhai 1999b, 219) from socialization both to westernized, multiracial models of womanhood and to the loyalties expected of them at home because of a “personally nurturing culture which is limited in theorizing and transforming female oppression within its own space” (Kanhai 1999b, 223).
Thus, Puri and Rampersad’s analyses may be generational, that is, perhaps different for Indo-Caribbean girls and women then than now when Drupatee’s transgressions are more normalized, mundane and widely rewarded. As Kanhai observed in 2011, “Matikor marked the selfconscious coming into voice of the first generation of Indo-Caribbean women researchers and artists as they publicly articulated their experiences and thoughts ... and explored their gender and ethnic marginalization as places of empowerment and creativity” (Kanhai 2011, 4) but “Indo- Caribbean women no longer need a private space in which to find their voices” (Kanhai 2011, 4) which are “neither absorbed by dominant cultural influences nor confined by the demands of ethnic loyalty” (Kanhai 2011, 7).
My own M.Phil. thesis aimed to theorize young Indo-Trinidadian womanhood at the turn of this century and attempted to think about Indian girls’ gendered negotiations and navigations in ways that maneuvered around creolization, androcentrism and Indianness as formulated by “bourgeois-nationalist economic interests, orthodox Hinduism, and conservative or reactionary cultural politics” (Puri 2004, 261). Building on Puri and Kanhai led me to identify these young Indian women from the East-West Corridor as “Indo-Douglas,” helping to shape Dougla feminism through mixing biological and cultural subjectivities. I argued that Indo-Caribbean feminist theorists (whom I called “Dougla feminists”) would not use the term “Indo-creole” to understand Indian femininities as culturally hybridized (Kanhai 2002) because it re-centered the European- African cultural nexus in the Caribbean.
My use of the term Dougla was based on a few premises. I saw (and still see) creole discourse as both Afrocentric and enhancing male power. Rather than being “peripheralized,” “Indianness” seemed to be embedded within the Dougla, and so, Dougla could place the IndoAfro-Trinidadian nexus at the center of processes of national becoming. I argued, from a Dougla feminist perspective, that a Dougla discourse enables Indo-Trinidadian women to claim their cultural hybridity and place in “national” space without sacrificing their sense of ethnic identity, nor making peace with marginality in feminism and society. Concerned with the gender relations between Indians and Africans, as well as young Indo-Trinidadian women’s negotiations with patriarchal ideals of purity, my own use of Dougla symbolically occupied an already peopled category without accounting for the implications for Dougla women, whether affirming or negating.
What would have been different had we considered, rather than Indian-African relations, Indian-Dougla relations, which I now prioritize in this chapter because of my daughter? What if it were Dougla women and girls we were thinking of? How might “cultural nationalist negotiations over the figure of the Indo-Trinidadian woman” and her resistance to “simultaneous deployment and erasure” (Puri 1999, 240) have been differently theorized? If I said to my daughter that I’m Indo-Dougla, would she look back at me and say, “No, you are not a Dougla”? And if I responded that I’m culturally Dougla, using the term as a “vocabulary for disallowed, delegitimized racial identities” (Puri 2004, 220), what would be the relationship between my claiming and her experience of embodiment and between her negotiations with racialized categories such as “Indian” and my embodied privilege? What if she didn’t want to be “a symbolic resource in [my] reconfiguration of racial and gender identities” (Puri 2004, 221)? What if she said, “You are an Indian. Change Indianness to include both you and me.”
Without realizing it, I became Indian at that moment of becoming a mother of a Dougla daughter in 2010. No matter how little I felt I fit traditional or stereotypical expectations of Indianness in the Caribbean, as a Dougla, my daughter Ziya was so much more disavowed, her belonging to Indianness so much more complicated because of her mixed curly hair, her African features and her lack of cultural and biological belonging to either fully Indian or African identities. Yet, it took time to recognize our different experiences and embodiments of Indianness as she grew and began to negotiate race and gender for herself and, specifically, in relation to me.
In comparison to her, I was not only Indian, I was a privileged representation. For example, by four years old, she especially noticed and desired my hair, which was long and straight. Through her gaze, I came to see how I would always be read as an Indian woman, even if not the approved kind. Would she ever be accepted as negotiating and articulating her own experience of Indian womanhood in the Caribbean? Like many Douglas, would she end up identifying only as mixed or African, not also as Indian, disconnecting from part of herself and all of me? What did my privileged access to Indianness mean for my politics, and my commitment to cross-race and cross-class solidarities, particularly among women? I suddenly understood why it became necessary to understand and define for myself what it meant to be Indian, feminist and Caribbean.
Making sure that my daughter Ziya grew up knowing that she could claim Indianness as much as me, on terms not set by religion, tradition, myths of racial purity, ethnic competition or male authority, became so much more important as a transgressive Indo-Caribbean feminist praxis. In this conceptualization, Indo-Caribbean is understood to be a non-pure ontology, which positions biological and cultural mixing with Africanness, or douglarization, within the heterogeneous experience of being Indian in the Caribbean. Among other potential subjectivities, for the interrogations being explored in this chapter, Douglas are considered an experience of Indianness, not a negation of it nor is negation of Indianness part of identification with other subjectivities. This guards against “Indo-centric cultural nationalism ... while confronting Indian/African antagonisms” (Rampersad 2000, 7), masculinist power, “wider societal marginalization of Indian women” within African creole nationalism and Caribbean feminist theorizing and organizing and “questions of ethnic difference” (Rampersad 2000, 10). Through my Dougla girl, I understood much more the implications of the woman’s body I live through, and therefore, my feminist epistemological and political responsibilities.
Concomitantly, I understood that Dougla poetics and feminism could not simply be symbolic and political even if it made sense for them to be deployed to describe “intellectual continuities between Indian and African women” (Rampersad 2000, 7). Dougla praxis could not be defined through “Indian women’s considerations of their gendered and ethnic identity” in songs, writings or politics (Rampersad 2000, 7, emphasis mine). As Kaneesha Parsard has observed, “In this way, the dougla is carrying out representative work for Caribbean phenomena, rather being taken up as worthy of its own inquiry” (Parsard 2011, 8).
Embodiment matters. More specifically, Dougla embodiment matters in relation to (in my case) Indian embodiment, as do Dougla poetics and feminism as experienced and expressed in relation to Indian and other
Caribbean poetics and feminisms. Dougla poetics should not be burdened with the weight of representing potentially progressive cultural projects delegitimized by both the Afro-Creole dominant culture and the Indian “Mother Culture” (Puri 2004, 221) or “a vocabulary for a political identity, not a primarily biological one” (Puri 2004, 221). Indeed, why shouldn’t embodiment, its experience and effects, be part of Dougla articulations of a historically and culturally situated specific modality of hybrid- ity (Rampersad 2000, 77)?
Dougla poetics and feminism have offered the most significant framing of cross-race subjectivities, sexualities and solidarities while also challenging the marginality of Indo-Caribbean theorizing in Caribbean epistemologies. Yet, a second crucial displacement compels their reconceptualization. Reading Indian women’s cultural texts as Dougla ironically mimicked conservative rejection of Indian women’s transgressions, ambivalences and cross-race intimacies and politics as not properly Indian. In rejecting Indianness as a conceptual frame, explicit Indian feminist negotiations in the texts studied, and their possibilities for theorizing feminist praxis, were denied. Thus, the final section of this chapter concludes by proposing further theorization of the intellectual potential of Indo-Caribbean poetics and feminisms which are heterogeneous and founded in a feminist praxis of justice and solidarity across ethnicities, classes, nations, genders and sexualities. Such feminisms are also inclusive of as well as positively and visibly in intimacy with Dougla subjectivities and bodies—as an experience of Indo-Caribbeanness which does not bear biological or cultural burdens of proof—and are grounded in both creative engagement with and productive critique of Afro-Caribbean and other intellectual hegemonies. Allowing the “Dougla figure” to be visibly Dougla and positioning it also as a legitimate representation of Indianness twice counters “an erasure that symptomizes the dougla’s vexed position with respect to various processes of Indian cultural reconstruction and affirmation” (Puri 2004, 191).
In Matikor., Kamala Kempadoo, a “Dogla” wrote,
Is then the claiming of a specific ‘Dogla’ identity and experience crucial to our existence? Will Caribbean ‘Doglas’ find it necessary to claim a specific identity and humanity? In view of the lack of mobilization around the construct, we may continue to find expression within existing lifestyles, cultures and paradigms, such as that of Indian womanhood. Or we may choose the course, like the ‘new mestizas’ of questioning the importance of a racialized category in our increasingly mixed world. That Indo-Caribbean women have created a space in this anthology for the expression of cultural difference suggests to me that at this point we do not have to overemphasize a politics of separate identity, but rather can continue with the broader project of dismantling colonial and racist legacies. (Kempadoo 1999, 112)
Almost twenty years later, though not writing reflexively herself as a Dougla, Kaneesha Parsard’s different hope is for a Dougla poetics that centers “douglas as nascent knowledge producers in the continuing discourse on Trinibagonian, and Caribbean, hybridities, rather than as lifeless metaphors for uncomplicated proximity and hybridity” (Parsard 2011, 29).
In a sense, this chapter returns to Puri’s original aim to attend to the specificities of Caribbean elaborations of hybridity (Puri 2004, 3), for “entrenchment of racialized political discourse in Trinidad is such that simple disidentification with it does not seem a strategically sound option. Instead, negotiating and reconfiguring racial discourse seems necessary” (Puri 2004, 218). In other words, “specifying Caribbean elaborations of hybridity” (Puri 2004, 3) doesn’t simply mean reducing vocabulary to terms such as mestizaje, Dougla, creole and Spanish (Khan 1993). Bringing the ontological, epistemological and political to a “refusal of racist purisms” (Puri 2004, 3) can also mean taking on terms like “Indian” as elaborations of hybridity, both biological and cultural, and historiciz- ing how this can be so. This is central to unlocking race from hierarchy and elaborating greater equality within and across different forms of mixedness.
