The Cutlass as Art Object
When the blade of the cutlass gleams, it is not always a harbinger of violence. It can also be beautiful, like Andil Gosine’s “Cutlass” (2011). This object is one part of his mixed-media series WARDROBES (2011-2013), in which he produced four art objects that evoke gender, sexuality, and violence in the history and legacies of Indian indentureship: “Orhni,” “Scrubs,” “Rum and Roti,” and “Cutlass.” Gosine originally made “Cutlass,” my focus in this section, in an edition of 20 in silver and 20 in white gold. Later, for the “Cutlass” event hosted in Toronto in 2012, he produced a larger edition. Silver and gold harken to early modern exchange in the Indian Ocean world, to the desires that drove modernity in the Americas, and to the wealth that slavery and indentureship produced. In the generations that followed indentureship, as Gosine writes of the tool, women like his grandmother used the cutlass to cut cane and coconut and, by extension, to care for their families (Gosine 2012a, b, 1-3).
While I earlier examined the cutlass as tool, I now examine this object at a different point in the commodity chain—as metal object and as adorn?ment. As an art object, “Cutlass” follows the interventions into form that feminist and queer art in the Caribbean and in North America have made.10 These artists have largely focused on the domestic sphere, and Gosine makes the domestic transnational by including the cutlass in this category.11 However, because the cutlass can be used in the field and in the home to violent or tender ends, it also undoes the very separation between public and private space.
The cutlass has long been understood to be a masculine tool. A long, pointed tool and weapon, it resembles the phallus. However, Gosine’s grandmother wields the cutlass herself. This is an important revision of the indentureship narrative, which we have seen in Coolie Woman, in which Indian men always hold the cutlass and chop Indian women with it. During slavery and Indian indentureship in the Caribbean, women as well as men worked on sugar estates and Indian women contributed to the industry through at least the 1970s.12 In addition to cutting cane, Indian women performed other tasks: weeding, spreading fertilizer, “stripping cane,” and carrying manure and cane stalks on their heads (Rajack-Talley 1999, 184-185). Today, women use the cutlass for domestic work and in a contemporary global economy.
As an art object, the cutlass is no longer masculine and no longer capable of controlling Indian women’s sexualities. Instead, its aesthetics highlight women’s domestic work, style, and love. And, the cutlass is genealogical, bearing the colonial and contemporary history of the tool and Gosine’s own family history. However, Gosine’s cutlass does not suggest an unbroken line between the indentureship period and the present. Instead, it indicates that Indian women’s physical, emotional, and sexual work must be understood in conversation with the post-emancipation period. Additionally, we should not romanticize the domestic work of Indian women, which risks fixing them as “culture bearers,” but rather inquire into how women transform the cutlass (Munasinghe 1997) (Fig. 15.1).
“Cutlass” defies gravity. The handle has a hole and curves on the underside where fingers would close to grip it. The blade begins, the same height as the handle. The entire silver brooch balances at an angle, where the blade curves to a point. How does the brooch balance on the cane? Were it not for the silver handle, it might be mistaken for an old tool on museum display. But the edges of the metal object are soft and curved, rather than sharp and thin. Under the blade is a stalk of raw green sugarcane, scraped and occasionally red-brown in long bands. This is the only other object in the photograph, and it provides a reference for the small
Fig. 15.1 “Cutlass” and Cane, Andil Gosine
size of the brooch. While the brooch evokes the shape and therefore the function of the tool it represents, the brooch lacks the cutlass’ power. Still, the brooch assumes a familiar position. Had a cane-cutter swung his cutlass, letting the point enter the stalk with the grain, this is where his tool might fall. Here, its blade touches the stalk, but fails to cut. The lens is focused on “Cutlass,” which is centered in the frame and two sections of the cane stalk, divided by a joint. The stalk extends beyond both vertical frames. Because of its shape and visible joint, the stalk resembles a limb. This “limb” is much larger than the cutlass and can withstand its cut. “Cutlass” both stages the function of the tool and evokes the purpose of the brooch as a clothing accessory.
When the cutlass is an art object instead of a tool, it creates a different relation between the object and Indian women. This relation is one of tender rather than violent intimacy. Gosine’s art object—drawing on his grandmother’s domestic work and love—expresses how objects transform in the hands of women to bring family together around a meal or to manicure the land around the house. Further, the brooch is normally worn over the breast or to hold a garment closed. This “impotent” cutlass, then, is no longer able to cut. Rather, in this form, the brooch joins—domestic work to plantation space and African labor histories to those of Indians in the Caribbean.
Indeed, through exhibition and performance, the events for the WARDROBES objects expressed the shared histories of Indians and Africans in the Caribbean (Nazywalskyj 2012). On August 29, 2012, Gosine premiered “Cutlass” at the Only One Gallery in Toronto. The event was a performance and exhibition in collaboration with Melissa Laveaux, a Paris-based musical artist of Haitian descent (Nazywalskyj 2012). On display in the gallery was the cutlass brooch, one in white gold and 90 in silver—the number of silver brooches meant to honor Gosine’s grandmother’s birthday. If the attendees looked up, they would be privy to a simulated Caribbean bed: “High Chase” featured a cutlass under a pillow that was placed on transparent plexiglass.
As attendees entered the gallery, the music of Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor played. To mark the beginning of the event, a scream pierced the music and an audio recording began in place of the music. The voice was Gosine’s, meditating on the cutlass in his memories. As a child in Trinidad, while arranging his family’s shoes in his childhood home, Gosine had seen a snake. He and his mother waited for his uncle to arrive and kill the snake with a cutlass. While this was his first encounter with the tool, it would not be the last. His grandmother used the cutlass to cut coconuts and to shave the skin from the sugarcane. Others (his family members and neighbors) stored cutlasses under their pillows or under their beds for protection from intruders and nightmares. Still, what “used to frighten [Gosine] the most was seeing an angry man with a cutlass” (Gosine 2012a). Eventually, Gosine began to associate this figure, the angry man, with violence against women. His family members and neighbors would report, “‘he chop she’” (Gosine 2012a). Gosine learned to dread that news. The scream, with which the recording began, evokes the death of Gosine’s great-grandmother, Maharajhin, by chopping.
After the recording concluded, Gosine himself came to the stage and began a memorial. He lit five candles and placed flowers into five vases, acting out the title of this aspect of the performance, “Flowers for Five Generations of Maharajins.” Then, Laveaux performed an elegy, a 30-minute musical set. For her opening number, “My Boat,” she was accompanied by the Indian organ. Just as indentured Indian laborers joined with strangers to become jahaji bhai or jahaji bhain, ship brothers or sisters, so Laveaux sounded a connection between the labor systems of slavery and indentureship. This connection is at the heart of Gosine and Laveaux’s collaborations, including and beyond “Cutlass.” Closing the set, Laveaux performed Tina Turner’s 1984 single, “Private Dancer,” which is both the first song whose lyrics Gosine memorized as a child and a gesture to the “role of sex work in [Indian] indentureship” (Gosine 2015). As an Indo- Caribbean artist, Andil Gosine inherits not singular but multiple genealogies: work in the cane fields and sex work, black cultural production, and Indo-Caribbean cultural practice.
Why did Gosine stage a performance around the cutlass, and to what end? First, the performance puts the cutlass into motion, extending the tool’s history into contemporary transnational routes. The cutlass is normally associated with the former plantations of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean and with the rural communities around these fields. However, it emerges not as artifact but as a living object in this event in Toronto, home to descendants of enslaved Africans throughout the Americas and indentured Indians. The performance is a contemporary counter-narrative to the historical and ongoing violence that men have committed with the cutlass—similar to Bahadur’s attention at the end of Coolie Woman to intimate partner violence in present-day Guyana. Laveaux’s voice, instrumentation, and presence write over a familiar figure, “an angry man with a cutlass” (Gosine 2012a).
The cutlass expresses what Gosine calls “the simultaneity of pleasure and violence.” Links between pleasure and violence, and between African slavery and Indian indentureship, are the basis of Gosine and Laveaux’s longstanding collaboration (Gosine 2015). How might Indian women’s desires—not just choices—enter this conversation on “wife murders” and representation? When a man injures or kills a woman with whom he is in a relationship, he seeks to curb his partner’s pleasure. This pleasure is that which flourishes inside and outside sanctioned monogamous relationships with Indian men, and in community with family and friends.
Scaled down and dulled so it can no longer cut, Gosine’s cutlass embeds the wealth of the plantation economy. The art object is ambivalent. It recalls production, even as it is not directly connected to this process. And, while the physical brooch is too small to mimic harvest, its form evokes slavery and indentureship throughout the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. It simultaneously conceals and highlights the material history of the cutlass and the work that Africans and indentured Indians performed with it. Andil Gosine transforms the cutlass from a tool into an art object, stripping it of its ability to injure and regulate. The brooch is a kind of feminist adornment that does not aestheticize violence. Rather, women’s work around the home and the estate are always aesthetic—its beauty is a counterpoint to colonial violence against female bodies.
