Masculinity, the Feminization of Labor, and the Indo-Martinican Literary Field
studies of masculinities in the Caribbean came to prominence in the 1980s. However, there already existed an important body of work from earlier decades that had explored questions of masculine identity and behavior. Family studies from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Edith Clarke’s My Mother Who Fathered Me (1957) and R. T. Smith’s The Negro Family in British Guiana (1956), as well as influential anthropological texts such as Peter J. Wilson’s Crab Antics (1973), had broached issues such as male marginalization and the quest for “reputation” (Reddock 2004, xvii). But as Rhoda Reddock has shown, with the publication in 1986 of Errol Miller’s The Marginalization ofthe Black Male, as well as contemporaneous work by Barry Chevannes, there emerged a new literature on masculinity in the region (Reddock 2004, xvii). This literature seemed to strike a chord with men in the Caribbean “who had grown concerned over what they perceived as the unacceptable transformations in the discourse on gender relations, the challenge to male leadership and authority, and the new visibility of women and feminist politics in public life” (Reddock 2004, xiv).
Contributing to this renewed focus on masculinity were the pressures exerted by developments in the labor market following the emergence of the neoliberal regime of accumulation in the 1970s. The reorganization of gender relations, including the increased exploitation of cheap female wage-labor, has been a component part of the restructuring of human and extra-human natures through which capital has sought to counter rising costs by securing what Moore calls the “four cheaps”: cheap food, energy, raw materials, and labor power (Moore 2012, 225). This restructuring has exacted a “huge toll on traditional conceptions of masculinity” (Nurse 2004, 26). Discussing the increasing feminization of labor, Keith Nurse emphasizes how these “shifts in global production structures have had a dramatic impact on the economic situation in the Caribbean region. There have been increasing levels of structural and technological unemployment in male-oriented jobs” (Nurse 2004, 26). The consequences of this are then sketched by Nurse in broad terms: “Masculine identity is very bound up with work. [...] The role of the breadwinner is an important source of authority for men within the context of patriarchy. A decline in this role, for example through unemployment, has been manifested to result in the loss of self-esteem and problems like domestic violence and reduced sexual potency” (Nurse 2004, 25). Similarly, Linden Lewis highlights “the exploding of the myth of the male breadwinner, the persistence of unemployment and the feminization of some aspects of manufacturing and of certain jobs in the region” as being at the “core” of the “considerable gender trouble engulfing the contemporary Caribbean” (Lewis 2004, 254). “Unemployment,” he argues, “coupled with bleak prospects of future work, dwindling chances of realizing the goal of home ownership, for example, and a growing recognition of one’s powerlessness to control one’s own social reproduction, among other things, have tended to dislocate familiar gender roles for men, leaving them groping for ways to negotiate this new territory” (Lewis 2004, 251-252).
With respect to the transformation specifically of Indo-Caribbean masculinities in this period, there exists relatively little scholarship on the topic (one important exception is Niels Sampath’s essay, “An Evaluation of the ‘Creolization’ of Trinidad East Indian Adolescent Masculinity” [1993]). In light of this gap, Reddock highlights Caribbean literature and popular culture as a crucial source of information on Indo-Caribbean masculinities (see Reddock, this volume). With this in mind, I want to read Ponnamah’s Derive de Josaphat with an eye to what it tells us about the pressures placed on Indo-Caribbean masculinity by the decline of the sugar industry in Martinique. A few words are in order first on the development of Indo- Caribbean writing in the French Caribbean. Although many historical and sociological accounts of Indians in the French Antilles have been produced, Francophone Indo-Caribbean authors have been less visible in the Caribbean literary field than their Anglophone counterparts. To some extent this can be attributed to the minority status of the Indian communities in Martinique and Guadeloupe (2-3% and 7-15% of the population, respectively) and a corresponding relative lack of political visibility (Singaravelou 1994, 87). The first novel by a Francophone Indo-Caribbean writer did not appear until 1972. Maurice Virassamy’s Le Petit Coolie noir, based on the author’s childhood in Martinique, detailed the hostility experienced by Indians on the island, its bitter tone reflecting what Chamoiseau and Confiant describe as Virassamy’s “distaste for Martinican society” (Chamoiseau and Confiant 1991, 47). Subsequent writers, however, have sought not only to celebrate their Indian inheritance, but to do so as part of an affirmation of Caribbean-ness. The Guadeloupean novelist Ernest Moutoussamy, for instance, argues that: “When today the young speak of a pilgrimage to the source, it is not a question of a return to the country of the ancestors, but of drawing from there the elements indispensable to the understanding and consolidation of an Antillean Indianite.” Hence, he adds, it is “a matter of resuscitating the past, of maintaining the collective memory, of enabling the appropriation of aesthetic values in order to authenticate an Antillean identity” (Moutoussamy 1989, 72).2 What interests me here are the frequently masculinist literary modalities through which the effort to inscribe an Indian heritage into the Antillean present has been pursued in Francophone fiction.
Moutoussamy’s own work is an interesting case in point. Take, for example, his 1987 novel Aurore. Set in India and the Caribbean, it tells the story of Rama, a young Brahmin expelled from his family home and brought to Guadeloupe on board the Aurelie in 1885 as an indentured laborer. The narrative details the brutality of plantation life and the methods by which control is exerted over the indentured, including the suppression of the Tamil language and the promotion of Christianity over Hinduism. Against this, Rama seeks to revitalize Indian culture. This revitalization, however, is also intended to enable the community to begin to assert itself in Guadeloupean society: “With their Tamil spoken at night, which, in order to banish, the tyrants had in times gone by cut out the tongues of those refusing capitulation and betrayal, they revived India, fought against the forgetting, inspired the young while turning them resolutely towards Guadeloupe. [...] They thus fertilized the future, searching for a solution to their integration into this hostile world” (Moutoussamy 1987, 118-119).3 This struggle to articulate an Indian identity that is simultaneously Caribbean finds symbolic expression in the romantic plots that infuse the novel. Rama’s initial plan for forging an alliance with the Black community involves cultivating a relationship with Maya, the black mistress of the plantation manager. Later, he determines to propose to her, wishing to start a family on the island. By so doing, he muses, “Guadeloupe would truly become his homeland. This union would put a definitive end to the temptation to return, would transform exile into sanctuary, and would increase further the prospect of integration into the local society” (Moutoussamy 1987, 145).4 But this symbolically freighted coupling fails to materialize. Rama, however, does get married at the end of the book—to Aurore, his bride-to-be back in India prior to the break with his family. Aurore, it transpires, had followed Rama to Guadeloupe 20 years earlier but had been unable to find him. Rama locates his former lover, who has been forced to serve as the mistress of a planter, and flees with her and her child. The subsequent betrothal of the pair becomes emblematic of Rama’s (India’s) definitive implantation in the Caribbean.
The reconciliation of Indian and Caribbean identities is thereby mediated through the masculinist form of the novel’s romance paradigm, the affirmation of an Antillean Indianite manifesting itself in the affirmation of the patriarchal family. Indeed, the symbolic weight with which the marriage plot is invested not only inscribes the narrative’s nationalist sentiments within the patriarchal discourse of the nation-as-family; it also makes submission to the model of the patriarchal family something like the condition of entry into Antillean society. Early in the novel, Rama’s quest to reconcile his Indian heritage with the realities of Martinique is focused primarily on forging a class-based united front with the Black community against exploitation by the plantation owners. Towards the end of the narrative, however, this directly political plot recedes (Rama’s efforts having been thwarted by an outbreak of ethnic violence in response to a strike by Black workers) and the Rama/Aurore romantic plotline comes very much to the fore. The result is that the grounds on which Rama’s integration into Antillean society is enabled now seem to be that of a potential reconciliation not between two exploited groups, but between competing (African and Indian) patriarchies.
In view of Moutoussamy’s novel, an instructive comparison can now be drawn with the way in which Ponnamah’s text treats the theme of Indianite and its relationship to Antillanite. Like Aurore, Derive de Josaphatpresents the plantation as a kind of womb of identity, a matrix of creolization in which the cultural specificity of the Indian community is gradually modified and incorporated within a new architecture of cultures:
In the world of the plantation, one discovered that the other was not a threat,
an enemy, but a human being, a soil in which one could plant the humanity
one carries in oneself and which can only flourish if it is rooted in a relationship with others. Just like the approach by sea to the island, to approach the other appeared difficult, off-putting. However, one could, in navigating it carefully, discover a cove tucked away somewhere, but one that hospitably opened up on to the trails of the deep country. (Ponnamah 1991, 74)5
There is, for sure, a certain nostalgic air to Ponnamah’s depiction of plantation society (in this he recalls Confiant, whose own fiction has been criticized on this score [Price and Price 1999]). But the romantic register that we find in Aurore is absent, and the differences between the novels’ central protagonists are striking. Rama is portrayed as a heroic male savior, a virile and energetic young leader whose standing among the other indentured workers is tied to his strength as an estate laborer and his ability to find ways within the system to institute new modes of subsistence (such as his establishment of a system of barter with the Afro-Caribbean laborer Vitalien). Josaphat, by contrast, is aged and unemployed, his meandering journey across the abandoned plantation symptomatic of the way he has been cut adrift by the loss of his job. His body, moreover, is failing him: he spends the novel fatigued and wracked by pain. Significantly, this pain is most intense at moments when he recollects some aspect of plantation life, such as when, for example, he detects the odor of cut cane and is “suddenly overcome with a feeling of faintness, a tiredness that spread throughout his body and made him yawn. He swayed. The air was charged with the noise of straw being trampled on, the hiss of leaves from coconut palms, and snatches of voices. Josaphat reopened his eyes. His heartbeat had accelerated. His chest vibrated” (Ponnamah 1991, 10-11).6 Later, when similarly tormented by his memories, he emits “an odour of putrefaction that seemed to spread over his entire body” [“une odeur de putrefaction qui semblaient gagner tout son corps”] (Ponnamah 1991, 49). The novel thus appears to suggest that Josaphat is effectively disintegrating under the weight of a history he has yet to fully come to terms with, something underscored by the images of liquefaction that attend his descents into memory. He appears increasingly swamped by the past: after being overcome by one recollection, for instance, the narrative describes how he “shook his head as if freeing himself from immersion” [“secoua la tete comme s’il se degageait d’une immersion”] (Ponnamah 1991, 39). Seeming almost to dissolve in the stream of his memories, Josaphat at times enters a state of near delirium, unable to distinguish reminiscence from reality.
Josaphat’s decrepitude—the wasting away of his body—underscores his position as something like a waste product of the plantation. Fed into the machinery of production, he has been used up and spat back out like so much bagasse, his body crushed and drained and now rendered redundant by deindustrialization. In this sense too, his decaying body is emblematic of the pressures placed on traditional masculine identities by the restructuring of the global economy since the 1970s. Lacking not only energy and virility but also direction and purpose as he wanders across the decaying estate lands, Josaphat seems to manifest the symptoms—loss of selfesteem, reduced sexual potency, and so forth—commonly associated with the dislocation of hitherto hegemonic masculine behaviors and, in particular, the explosion of the myth of the male breadwinner.
Certainly an interesting comparison can be drawn between Josaphat’s lassitude in the era of deindustrialization and the various references in the novel to potent sexual activity during the heyday of the plantation. Indeed, the novel draws out the way in which an explicit connection is established between the sugar manufacturing process and the codification of sexual relations:
[Josaphat] had a smile on seeing the embarrassment of men and women to use certain words such as cut, put, take, jump, sleep with, do, as if the sexual charge these words carried altered any other sense they might have, just as it imprinted itself on the symbolism of flowers, fruits, and vegetables such as [...] mimosas, [...] banana horns, and sugarcane—this last image being developed in relation to the factory where the sirop-batterie served to express sexual pleasure, the ineffable character of which was rendered through the hyperbolic image of a bag of sugar melting in a spoonful of water. (Ponnamah 1991, 34-35)7
Later, Josaphat makes reference to a man known on the plantation for having “cut” many a woman with the “cutlass he carried between his legs” (Ponnamah 1991, 59), an image that neatly captures the imbrication of patriarchal sexual relations with the brutal, alienated labor of the sugar estate and its corollary, an alienated and objectifying relationship to extrahuman nature. Such descriptions reflect the masculinist erotics of plantation society. But the text seems frequently in danger, at least on the level of content, of affirming such masculinism, rather than offering it up for critique. This ambivalence is perhaps most notable (and most problematic) when Josaphat muses on the historic rape of black female workers by white planters and attempts to make of this violence a potential gateway to rebirth: “As to the raped women [...], Josaphat would readily have transformed them into lovers, from the moment that the desire of the white man had managed to revive in them sensations and emotions that the whip or poker had annihilated” (Ponnamah 1991, 75).8 Of course, the novel is not necessarily endorsing Josaphat’s view, and there is a clear sense in which the character is trying to find some way to process a history so horrific he finds it hard to contemplate. And yet given the narrative emphasis on the plantation as a matrix of creolization in which cultures were combined and reborn in new configurations, it is hard—as with the novel’s presentation of plantation life more generally—not to detect a certain troubling nostalgia in its depiction of sexual activity on the estate. Thus, when at the end of the novel the ailing Josaphat is knocked over by a van, his plight dismissed by one onlooker who comments “‘An Cooli?” [“‘It was only a Coolie?’”] (Ponnamah 1991, 109), this apparently pessimistic conclusion on the status of Indo- Martinicans in Martinique might be viewed as also mourning the decline of a certain kind of patriarchal order or of signaling the failure or breakdown of that reconciliation of competing patriarchies on which Aurore seemed implicitly to end. However, there is an alternative way of reading the novel’s presentation of Josaphat’s wasted body in terms of its relationship to the organization of gender relations under capitalist patriarchy; and it is to this that I turn in conclusion.
