Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labor Diaspora. London: Anthem Press, 2002, pp. 243.
Reviewed for H-ASIA by Paget Henry, Brown University.
Coolitude, Openness and Poststructuralism
Introduction
Khal Torabully, one of the great poets of the island nation of Mauritius, is also the author of the founding texts of the discourse of coolitude. I first encountered the innovative work of Torabully three years ago at a conference at the University of Aachen in Germany. However, all of the references to his work were in French. This was a problem for me as I was not a reader of this language. Consequently, it is with great delight that I offer this review of Coolitude which provides the English-speaking world with an excellent introduction to Torabully's thought and poetry. This work is a joint effort, in which Torabully teams up with the distinguished historian of Mauritius, Marina Carter. The result is a very effective combination of history and poetry that succeeds in bringing more sharply into focus the Indian diasporic experience.
The Text
Using historical documents, poetry and fiction from the major sites of the Indian diaspora, Coolitude attempts to give us a comprehensive overview of the lived experiences that transformed Indian immigrants to societies such as Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mauritius, Reunion, Fiji, and South Africa into coolies. Even more important, it attempts to outline a framework for the cultural integration and intermixing of coolies in the formation of new postcolonial identities in these societies.
The text begins with the decision to migrate and with the institutional arrangements (indenture) that were put in place to facilitate this decision. The search for more remunerative work as the primary motive behind the decision to migrate as well as the trickery and corruption of the recruiters are vividly brought to life through interviews migrants left behind and through Torabully's poetry.
Once on board the ships, Carter and Torabully take us through the sea voyage over the 'kala pani' that brought them to their new host countries. This was a horrible voyage, marked by cramped spaces, hunger, thirst, sickness, and death. Not surprisingly, in poetry the 'kala pani' it is often compared to the infamous middle passage of African slaves.
In these various host societies work on plantations producing staples such as sugar for European markets awaited the immigrants. Settled on these plantations as indentured laborers, Carter and Torabully then take their readers through the coolietizing of the identities of these Indian workers. Again using both poetry and historical documents, this identity transformation is examined in terms of the images of the migrants that had taken shape in the minds of British Indian officials, planter and officials in the various colonies, European travelers and finally in the literature of the Indian diasporic community.
In the next two chapters, Carter and Torabully take up the resistance of Indians to both indenture and coolietization, examining in particular the ambivalent attitudes towards the latter. In the final chapter, the authors lay out the theoretical premises of coolitude in the form of an extensive interview of Torabully by Marina Carter.
The Discourse of Coolitude
Diasporic Indians have adapted several discursive strategies in their efforts to thematize their experience of indenture and coolietization. They have employed neo-Hindu and neo-Islamic discourses, Christian discourses, Afro-Caribbean discourses of Negritude and créolité, and the Indian diasporic discourses of Indianité and Indienocéanisme. Coolitude builds on many of these discourses, particularly those of negritude, créolité and Indianité. The basic concept and the larger discourse around it were worked out in two earlier books, Cale d'Etoiles-Coolitude (1992) and Chair Corail, Fragments Coolies (1999). The latter was written after a very lively meeting in 1997 with Aimé Césaire, the founder of Negritude. However, in Coolitude, Torabully is very clear regarding his differences with Césaire and also with the founders of the créolité movement.
Both negritude and créolité are too centered for Torabully. So also is Indianité. Although centered in different places, they all share a “fixist attitude”* (p. 146). Negritude is too centered in Africa, Créolité in the French Caribbean, and Indianité in India. Thus at the end of their meeting when Cesaire says to Torabully, “you will do for India what I did for Africa” (p. 147), the latter recognized his difference with the former. Torabully's discomfort came from the fact that Cesaire was making India an “Ultimate Referent” (p. 147) for him. Similarly, in relation to Indianité, Torabully writes that “coolitude does redefine the concept of Indianité when it is a fixist set of Indian values” (p. 150).
Coolitude, though sharing the theme of cultural recovery with Negritude and Indianité, and of cultural mixing or métissage with créolité, differs from all three in its greater degree of de-centeredness and hence opennessto other cultures and identities. Coolitude models itself on the semiotic structure of language and other sign systems rather than the logical systems of philosophical reason. The latter lead to a closed system as opposed to a de-centered structure, “being a construction with the idea of a totality, a centre” (p. 155). Coolitude “implies an approach in which the notion of a guiding culture, of a centre, of a logos becomes defunct” (p. 155). In other words, coolitude is a discourse that takes the theme of the postcolonial recovery of centered cultures from Negritude and Indianité along with theme of métissage from créolité and reinscribes them in a structural (semiotic) framework rather than a logical, national, ethnic or geographical one. The breaks with geography and nation are signalled by “making the crossing central” (p. 15). The ships and the ocean remind us that “the centre, the land of ‘origins' is not the ultimate referent” (p. 159).
Toward a Critique
Torabully's discourse of coolitude is a powerful construction that makes a very valuable contribution to Indian diasporic literature. However, I am not convinced that it has solved the problem of greater openness as it claims. First, the strategies used to secure this increased openness are basically the same as those of the créolité movement, where according to Carter and Torabully, they did not deliver.
The strategies are basically three: (1) the employment of the semio-linguistic analogy of poststructuralism; (2) putting the emphasis on relations rather than content; and (3) giving crucial importance to the symbols of the sea and the ships. However, as Carter and Torabully recognize, the semio-linguistic analogy grounds the work of both Edouard Glissant and the founders of the creolite movements. Thus, they quote the latter's definition of 'creoleness as "the annihilation of fake universality, of monoligualism and purity"' (p. 153). The shifting of emphasis away from content and to the semiotic relations between cultures in plural societies has probably been best theorized by Glissant. But here to it has not produced the desired levels of de-centuring and up-rooting of fixist positions. In the case of the shift to the ships on the ocean as opposed to the land of origins, we need only think of Paul Gilroy's, The Black Atlantic, where a similar displacement did not result in the desired outcome.
Thus the crucial issue becomes whether or not Torabully will succeed where these have failed, because he combines all there. In other words, will the combination of these strategies be powerful enough to counter the centered ties to “atavistic cultures,” nations and geographies. Coolitude assumes rather demonstrates that they can, particularly in relation to the various Indianité heritages. Demonstrating that coolitude can be as decentered in its relation to these heritages as it is to the African, European or Chinese heritages of Indian diasporic societies is crucial for Torabully's argument. Hence the need to demonstrate it rather than assume it. At the imaginary level, we inherit the cultural symbols of nation, georgraphy and identity in centered and atavistic modes. Rejecting them at the discursive level has seldom been able to overcome these imaginary inscriptions. This is where I see a major limitation on the epistemic claims and projects of coolitude. To be more specific, let us look a little closer at the use of the semio-linguistic analogy borrowed from post-structuralism.
Using the semio-linguistic analogy, post-structuralism has introduced some distinct styles of deconstrucive critique that have problematized the founding or centering concepts of discourses. Because of this there is a tendency to assume that post-structuralism avoids centers and cannot be appropriated in a centered way. The case of the créolité movement shows that these assumptions are very problematic at best. Further, when post-structural shifts from a critical to an explanatory mode it centers itself without really acknowledging it. It centers itself by hardening the semio-linguistic analogy into foundational analytic concepts, and thus slips into neo-structuralism. As the latter, postructuralism not only has a center but also an often unacknowledged ultimate referent: the free floating signifier, whose semiotic play becomes the new model for openness, freedom and politics. As such, this unique signifer takes the place of the logos or other ultimate referents.
Torabully's use of poststructuralism, as well as Glissant's, remains caught in this dilemma. It assumes and strives for, but never interrogates the nature of the power or the mode of production of the normative freedom and oppenness of the free floating signifier. Only when we do so can we really estimate its power to challenge the atavistic constructions of nation, geography and primary culture. It is my view that without a more explicit and supplementary mobilizing of the psycho-existential and politico-economic foundations of atavistic cultures, the three strategies of coolitude will not be sufficient to solve the integrative and inter-cultural problems of the plural post-colonial societies that Indian migration, indenture and coolietization have helped to found.
*All quotes are from the text.
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