196 Books: Guyana

 Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur 

Here's Guyana:

Here's the summary:

In 1903, a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guiana as a ‘coolie’ – the British name for indentured labourers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and travelling alone, this woman, like so many of the indentured, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on complex lives. Many were widows, runaways or outcasts who migrated alone in epic sea voyages – traumatic ‘middle passages’ – only to face a life of hard labour, dismal living conditions and sexual exploitation. As Bahadur documents, however, it was precisely their sexuality that gave coolie women a degree of leverage. In new worlds where they were the scarcer sex, they could have their pick of Indian partners. This often incited fatal retaliations by the men who were spurned. Meanwhile, intimacy with white overseers sometimes conferred privileges. It also provoked plantation uprisings, as a struggle between Indian men and their women intersected with one between coolies and their overlords. The women’s shortage gave them sway but also made them victims, caught in a shifting borderland between freedom and slavery. Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a
double diaspora – from India to the West Indies in one century, and from Guyana to the United States in the next – that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.

I originally thought this was going to be more of a narrative of the author's great-grandmother, but it was kind of a study on the whole indenture society. It was interesting, and of course sad. Even though slavery was technically over, the indentured people were treated much the same as slaves had been. Bahadur also focused largely on women's stories in this situation; and of course women got the short end of the stick. It seems that it was normal for husbands to beat their wives, there were sexual assaults, and so many murders caused by suspected infidelity. 

The only point I want to touch on that doesn't include women: "...the CIA, paranoid at the thought of yet another Caribbean Marxist right in Castro's geopolitical neighborhood, pushed him out and paved the way for Linden Forbes Burnham, the dictator who banned flour." 1. Can the US just get off of everyone's ass at this time? For God's sake. Leave people alone. 2. The guy...banned...flour? (Alright I just looked it up and the story is not interesting. He banned imports, which included flour. Mostly just a dick move.) 

Alright, on to the women. 

"The 1891 census of the United Provinces reported that 90 percent of girls between ten and fourteen were already married." That's just...disgusting. Why are there so many countries that allow child marriages, and why are men so gross? Leave those children alone!

"After their husbands died, they were supposed to negate themselves in mourning, forever. For the rest of their lives, they could wear no long tresses, no colorful saris, no vermilion in their hair, no rouge on their lips, no kohl decorating their eyes, no bangles tinkling on their wrists. Enshrouded in white, almost erased, they were viewed as inauspicious and shunned by many. They could not remarry, especially if upper-caste. They could not inherit property. If they had no sons to support them, they were subject to hunger and poverty. And they could be forced to sit on their husbands' funeral pyre, a practice known as sati." Ok so you're telling me you can have this baby, at 10 years old, become a widow and her life is basically just over? WTF is that? And if you didn't pick up on it, sati basically means she kills herself because her husband died. I wonder if there are similar customs for a widower? Doubt it. 

Back to indenture. The difficulty for women started on the voyage over-sailors would exploit or assault them. "On Holman's mutinous vessel, the first mate charged that the women, 'very often...very cheerful themselves,' would 'meddle' with him on deck, and the captain testified that they 'would take liberties and laugh and joke with the men.'" There are a lot of men right now saying that the whole Me Too movement is scary because now they don't know how to act around women. Women have been dealing with this for all of our existence; these women were making accusations of assault and the men are like "yeah well, she talked to me." 

"The newspaper editorialized: 'We protest the barbarous and flagitous system of bringing into a strange country hundreds of men without an adequate proportion of women.'" Ooooh, this is getting me all riled up! Once again the women's purpose is to be used by men. Fuck that. And this shit is still happening. "From behind the rust-red walls of the New Amsterdam Prison, a cane-cutter who stabbed his common-law wife to death on 23 July 2010 told me the old indenture-era story, a tired plot about provocation and punishment, set in motion once a woman leaves." I had first glossed over the date, then got really startled when the detail was added that the guy smashed his wife's cell phone. I mean get it together, guys. 

Bahadur talked about Indians trying to go back home, sometimes to a place they'd never been or hadn't seen in decades. That they could get home and be disowned, seen as dirty. It was sad; in some cases they had to fight to be able to go. Indenture took everything from them. 

The only thing that kind of annoyed me about this book is the author would muse with a whole bunch of questions and it got tiresome. I think she meant to be thoughtful about what life was like, but I just found it useless. Other than that, it was really interesting learning about how, once again, colonialism sucked.