Our Holy Waters and Mine: The Art of Andil Gosine
By Nalini Mohabir
A woman on a mission, I promised my Pua (aunty) in Berbice that I would bring the Ganges to her. In Varanasi, I stood by the sacred river. A childhood version of myself, a girl with long hair in two braids, waded in to scoop up the water. With ritual significance, we exchanged rupees for a green pop bottle of holy water. She risked the polluted waters daily, for the benefit of the diaspora who desire a personal blessing from far-away long-ago India, contained and transported into the present.
I cannot help but recall this memory when viewing the work of Andil Gosine. From George Village in the south of Trinidad, Gosine migrated to Canada with his parents as a child, and now resides between the pull of Toronto and New York. Like his life, his work is in motion, between spaces of desire, given meaning through the histories in which he walks his way in the world — as an Indo-Caribbean diasporic man.
Gosine’s most recent piece, hosted by the Queens Museum in New York city, puts his work in conversation alongside other notable Indo-Caribbean artists, including filmmaker Ian Harnarine, writer Gaiutra Bahadur, and poet Rajiv Mohabir, together in “Coolitude: An Afternoon of Indo-Caribbean Art and Literature” (March 29, 2014). The borough of Queens has been a haven for newcomers of which Guyanese make up the second largest group. For the audience that spilled out beyond available chairs, there must have been a deep satisfaction and pride of place. The name of the event, “Coolitude,” honors the bittersweet poetics of reclaiming in-between spaces of crossing, as found in Khal Torabully’s philosophy of the same name.
“It is impossible to understand the essence of coolitude without charting the coolies’ voyage across the seas. The decisive experience, that coolie odyssey; left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude.”
— Khal Torabully, 1996
This was a unique coming-together of talent in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, in search of new imaginings that respond to the complications of history. In conversation, Gosine pointed out that it is only in recent years Caribbean artists could pursue artistic practice professionally. In the past, even for popular Calypsonians, it was often a secondary career. Echoing the sentiment of another Indo-Caribbean artist, Bernadette Persaud, he says: “In the Caribbean, Indian art is seen as folk art, as if the community does not have the potential for high art.” This is part of what he views as the psychic legacy of indentureship, a system of involuntary labor in which Indians from the sub-continent were shipped to plantation colonies around the world: “You have to prove yourself in labor, and we are still trying to prove our humanity in a basic way.”
