Nuancing the Narrative

In a recent blog, Gabrielle Hosein reported on her search for narratives and analyses that track an alternative story about Indo-Caribbean men, and on her identification of an emancipatory tradition in Indian communities and families, and in Indian men’s ways of articulating masculinity (Hosein 2015a). She suggests that there is cause to revisit a stereotyping narrative noting subtle changes in conceptions of Indian male roles in family life, e.g., those evident in her Indo-Trinidadian female students’ essays based on interviews with their fathers. She discerns a shift to reports on “father’s care, nurturing, participation in housework, commitments to be different from earlier generations of men, support for daughters’ independence and empowerment and a more equitable co-operation with mothers” (Hosein 2015a). While such changes would be true for some men generally in the region and internationally as a result of the work of the women’s movement, it does begin to challenge the alterity inherent in many long-held assumptions about Indo-Caribbean men as inherently patriarchal.

In that essay, Hosein also points to some specific counter-narratives in Trinidad and Tobago history that interrupt the dominant narrative of Indo-Caribbean masculinities. In this regard, I am reminded of my own work, as well as that of Halima Kassim on Moulvi Ameer Ali, a Muslim reformer of the early twentieth century in Trinidad and Tobago who in many ways fit Kumari Jayawardena’s description of the “male reformers” who campaigned for women’s emancipation in the Middle East and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Reddock 2015; Kassim 2002; Jayawardena 1986, 14). His reclamation is particularly important in the context of today’s fundamentalisms. According to women’s advocate Feroza “Rose” Mohammed:

Moulvi Ameer Ali respected mothers and daughters and he truly felt that there was equality between men and women. He encouraged women to attend mosque for the first time and ensured that there was never a barrier placed between the two sexes. There was never purdah in our mosque. Men and women have always mixed freely, laughing, talking and working together and with our women’s faces uncovered (like at Hajj in Mecca). (Feroza Rose Mohammed, Interview 2006, cited in Reddock 2015)

Much of Caribbean masculinities research has emerged from a context of victimhood and pathology and efforts to reclaim an honored past or repair perceived historic wrongs must continue. It is time however for a scholarship that seeks to document, dissect, analyze, and present new understandings of the complexities and contemporary realities of Indo- Caribbean men’s lives. Much of this work has to be undertaken by Indo- Caribbean men themselves, open to critically reflecting on their own situation, and that of their peers. It is especially important to understand historical antecedents and new trends within the diverse constellations of men, constituted and intersected by age, class, locational (rural-urban), religious, sex/gender identity, or other differences. It would also be important to track their interface with contemporary Indo-Caribbean women and men, and women and men generally, as they contest and negotiate hegemonic notions of manhood in the context of a globalized and often sexist media and popular culture (including Bollywood culture) and fundamentalisms of all kinds.