Ernest Moutoussamy and the Cultural Memorialization of Indenture in Guadeloupe
by Sandrine Soukaï
After the 1848 abolition of slavery, the French colonists needed a new workforce to replace the former slaves and revitalize the sugarcane plantation economy. The Indian subjects of the British Crown appeared as ideal replacements. From 1854 to 1889, 44,553 indentured labourers left India for Guadeloupe on board ninety-three convoys, but only an estimated 42,873 reached the island. The first convoy travelled onboard the ship L’ Aurelie. Some Indians left seduced by false promises of prosperity, some were drugged and kidnapped. Legal indenture was officially abolished in 1885, but convoys heading back to India continued to sail until the first quarter of the 20th century. Indentured labourers were all given a starting work contract of five years that could be renewed up to three times. They were originally promised a free passage back to India if they wished to return home at the end of their contract, but this measure was soon abolished. Returning home became more complex given the financial burden of the return fare. For some indentured labourers, returning home also meant going back to dire straits and not being able to support their family anymore. Consequently, some chose to stay and settled in the colony willingly; others were forced to stay for lack of financial means; and several died during the journey back home.
Though the commemoration of the abolition of slavery has long been part of the history of Guadeloupe, indenture was long forgotten. The 1970s marked the beginning of scholarly interest in Indo-Guadeloupean cultural heritage, with the publication of Singaravelou’s Les Indiens de la Guadeloupe, the first significant research on the Indo-Guadeloupean immigration (expanded by the historian Christian Schnakenbourg in his 2005 PhD thesis and later published works). Since the 1970s, cultural associations and a few historians have drawn attention to both the traumatic past of indenture and the cultural heritage born from it. The first historical sites (monuments, steles, busts) memorializing indenture emerged in the early 1980s when Guadeloupe’s capital, Basse-Terre, was twinned with Pondicherry and the card for Persons of Indian Origin (fused in 2005 with the Overseas Citizen of India card) was created to facilitate the flows of people and capital between India and its diasporas.
The year 2015 witnessed the opening of the Memorial ACTe, the world’s most ambitious museum devoted to slavery and the slave trade, in the city of Pointe-à-Pitre, the main economic, commercial and administrative centre of Guadeloupe. Yet, the Memorial ACTe contains only a few pictures of indentured Indian workers. One of the most important institutions on indenture in the world is the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site in Port Louis, Mauritius. In addition to managing the site, the Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund conducts research on the indenture experience and has launched a project to locate, classify and preserve the indenture sites of memory implanted in the various islands and countries with an Indian diaspora. It also supervises the UNESCO International Indentured Labour Route Project, an initiative that Guadeloupe has yet to actively join, in further proof of the ongoing marginalization of the history of indenture in the country. In light of the many challenges faced by Guadeloupeans to build sites of memory that could ensure the safekeeping and the transmission of the history of indenture and the cultural heritage born from it, whether Guadeloupe can really hope to build a ‘multidirectional’, multi-ethnic and inclusive memory of both slavery and indenture remains an open question.
Using the concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ developed in the field of memory studies by Holocaust researcher Michael Rothberg, I want to address here the burning issue of competitive memory that has been at stake in Guadeloupe since the 1970s, when the memorialization of Indian indenture started to emerge alongside the memory of another major traumatic past, slavery, which had been occupying centre stage for a long time. How do memories of these two traumatic histories intertwine? How can today’s Guadeloupeans and the generations to come confront the histories of these pasts, while also preserving and enriching the cultures born from them?
Historical research and the retrieval of public as well as family archives provide answers to such questions. Yet, such an enterprise is fraught with challenges, as many such archives have disappeared and there are few remaining elders who possess, through transgenerational oral histories, memories of their indentured ancestors. As such, the collection of oral testimonies and accounts is of vital importance, as the unique experience of interviewing one the oldest living memories of the Indian cultural heritage in Guadeloupe (a Hindu vatialou, singer and performer of Tamil nadrons) has taught me. More specifically, I believe that the literature devoted to indenture forms an integral part of the ‘postmemory’ of this traumatic experience. For Holocaust specialist Marianne Hirsch, ‘postmemory’ is the process whereby a generation who has not directly experienced a traumatic history remembers and appropriates this past through the stories passed on to them by previous generations.
Several Guadeloupean cultural associations (The Friends of India; The Guadeloupean Global Organization of People of Indian Origin; the Guadeloupean Council for the Promotion of Indian Languages; etc.) and the Guadeloupean Departmental Council are currently the main promoters of the Indian cultural heritage in Guadeloupe. They help spread the teaching of Indian dances, languages, food, and medicinal practices to the multi-ethnic creolized communities of Guadeloupe, and they also try to encourage exchanges with India (notably Pondicherry). Cultural events and festivals are organized yearly, and several memorials have been erected in remembrance of indenture — notably the 2004 Pointe-à-Pitre First Day Memorial, the 2016 Capesterre Memorial to Indian Indentured Workers, and the 2018 Petit-Canal Centre for Indian Culture). But such work is sometimes constrained by political and economic stakes and its international impact remains limited by the primary reliance on the French language. Moreover, despite the growing concern for Indo-Guadeloupean culture, no attempt has been made so far to provide a systematic and in-depth study of the literature, poetry and fiction written by Indo-Guadeloupeans. As a literary scholar, I aim to retrieve a literary memory of indenture by focusing on the work of Indo-Guadeloupean writers, among whom the prolific Ernest Moutoussamy.
Ernest Moutoussamy, former mayor of Saint-François and Member of the French Parliament, is a very prolific novelist and poet who has written around thirty books, including a dozen anthologies of poetry inspired by his life experience. He has also greatly contributed the development of the movement of Indianité in the 1990s. Both his fiction and non-fiction bear traces of his longing for a lost Indian motherland while also testifying to his filial attachment to his beloved Guadeloupean island. Through their nature, soil and cultures, both lands and their multiple histories nurture Moutoussamy’s poetic imagination. Below I briefly discuss the poem ‘Libellule en sari’ from the anthology Métisse Fille (Ibis Rouge Editions, 2001). As Moutoussamy’s works have not yet been translated from French, translations are mine.
‘Libellule en sari’: from uprootedness and nostalgia to creative exile
Written in free verse, the anthology reads as an ode to the breath-taking landscapes of Guadeloupe and the diversity of its cultures and histories. The female figure of the title refers as much to the island as to the women who marked the poet’s life, especially Moutoussamy’s indentured ancestor to whom the collection pays homage. In the poem, she is identified through the number given by the colonial administration, which was part of Moutoussamy’s family archive. The poem “Libellule en sari” (Dragonfly in sari) thus merges historical archive with poetic imagination to retrace the uprootedness the poet’s female ancestor experienced when leaving India and the challenges faced to adapt in Guadeloupe:
Des cales de l’Aurélie tu jaillis en sari
Toi fille de Pondichéry débarquée aux Caraïbes
Pour sauver le sucre, le rhum et le profit
Te voici Latchman Sounder N°24931
Pirogue de l’Inde dans les eaux d’un nouveau monde
Avec ta cargaison de rêves et de projets
Roche à massalè, mandja, palpou, potou
Prière en tamoul à Man Maliémin
Semblanni pour les défunts que tu avais quittés
Te voici sur cette terre qui t’accueille avec le mépris
Malaba, kouli, zandoli…
Attachée à l’habitation pour ligoter les gerbes de canne à sucre
Interdite d’école, interdite de Shiva
Te voici orpheline de ton pays
Toute nue au coeur des Amériques,
Au pied de l’échafaud dressé pour décapiter l’Inde
L’Inde des Védas, l’Inde du Mahabharata
L’Inde de Çakyamuni, l’Inde de Ganesh
Te voici seule et cachée sous ta chevelure
Sans Dieu, sans frère, sans soeur, sans époux,
Sans père, sans mère, sans patrie
Avec ta misère, ta solitude, tes sanglots
Avec les chansons laissées là-bas sous le figuier
Avec une île dont tu ne connais même pas le nom.
Te voici plantée dans un décor de squelettes
Où le damné sommé de se dépouiller
Regarde le temps se briser sur le lointain horizon
Avant de rejoindre la terre sans laisser de courrier.
Toi, femme du colombo et du rotti
Femme des mudras et de l’encens
Tu supplias le ciel de te donner une chance de vie
Pour arroser les morts du lait de la gratitude.
Te voici en marche vers les cimes exilées
Dans cette nuit de déracinement et de hurlement
Ils t’ont arraché le sari
Ils t’ont coupé les longues nattes
Ils ont brûlé tes images
Mais tu ne cessas jamais de chanter
Sur ton lit de mort tu laissas simplement tomber ces mots:
“Je ne veux pas aller au ciel
Je veux retourner à Pondichéry”.
English translation:
From the holds of the Aurelie you spring out in a sari
You daughter of Pondicherry disembarked in the Caribbean
To save the sugar, the rum and profits
Here you are Latchman Sounder N°24931
Canoe of India in the water of a new world
With your cargo of dreams and projects
Rock of massalè, mandja, palpou and pottu
Prayer in Tamil to Man (creole for Mother) Maliémin
Semblanni for the deceased that you had left
Here you are on this land that welcomes you with disdain
Malaba, kouli, zandoli… (creole slurs for Indian indentured labour)
Tied up to the plantation house to bind the sheaves of sugarcane
Banned from school, banned from Shiva
Here you are orphaned of your country
Entirely naked in the heart of the Americas,
At the foot of the scaffolding erected to behead India
The India of the Vedas, the India of the Mahabharata
The India of Çakyamuni, the India of Ganesh
Here you are alone and hidden under your hair
Without God, without brother, without sister, without husband,
Without father, without mother, without homeland
With your misery, your loneliness, your tears
With the songs left over there under the fig tree
With an island whose name you do not even know.
Here you are planted in a landscape of skeletons
Where the damned ordered to strip
Watches time break on the distant horizon
Before joining the earth without leaving any letter.
You, woman of the colombo and of the roti
Woman of the mudras and of the incense
You begged the skies to give you another chance to live
To shower the dead with the milk of gratitude.
Here you are marching towards the exiled peaks
In this night of uprooting and howling
They have torn off your sari
They have cut your long braids
They have burnt your effigies
But you never stopped singing
On your deathbed you only let out these words:
‘‘I do not want to go to heaven
I want to return to Pondicherry.’’
The poem is a eulogy ominously placed under the sign of death. It is a lament over an unfulfilled longing for a lost India and the struggles to survive a destructive, profit-oriented colonial plantation system bent on obliterating the culture of indentured migrants. Dispossession is emphasized through anaphoras and contrasts as negative clauses are followed by affirmative ones (with/without). The violence of uprootedness and dislocation, highlighted through a series of carefully chosen verbs (‘behead’; ‘ban’; ‘torn off’; ‘cut’; and ‘burnt’) is further echoed in the powerful image of a woman stripped off her sari, which reverberates throughout the poem. Though inspired by family history, the poem is a song of exile about the financial misery, the many privations and the daily insults endured by thousands of Indian indentured labourers and their descendants.
Nonetheless, this is also a poem about resilience, as the physically unreachable India is resurrected through abundant references to Indian food, plants, deities, epics, and dress. The exilic experience, though undoubtedly painful, when inherited and memorialized through poetry becomes a creative force. Exile can never be considered as a positive experience, but as Edward Said powerfully argued in his famous essay “Reflections on Exile”, the exiled writer’s creativity stems from his simultaneous experience of several cultures, histories and places. This poem seems to focus primarily on death and exile, but when read alongside other poems of the anthology, it clearly also appears as a celebration of the Indian cultural heritage which the creolized populations of Guadeloupe have now all inherited. Moutoussamy’s poetry illustrates how literary creation shapes a postmemory of the trauma of indenture which, while taking stock of the horrors and tragedies of this past and their impacts on the present, also celebrates the rich and diverse cultural heritage born from it. Such a (re)birth is well illustrated by the lines of the poem “Métisse Fille” (from which the anthology is named):
Tu as préféré nourrir la terre de ton sang
Pour que tous les sangs renaissent en toi (…)
Tu as dompté tous les continents
En toi la sève de l’homme a donné toutes les racines (…)
Toutes les races ont fait souche sur ton tronc
Et te voilà arbre du monde
Avec dans tes branches la poésie de la fraternité.
English translation:
You preferred to feed the land with your blood
So that all the bloods would be reborn in you (…)
You have tamed all the continents
In you the sap of man has given all the roots (…)
All the races have become stumps on your trunk (…)
And now you are the tree of the world
With amongst your branches, the poetry of brotherhood
Sandrine Soukaï is Assistant Professor in Postcolonial Literatures at Gustave Eiffel University (Paris). Her research areas include South Asian literatures, Caribbean literatures, postcolonial, memory and trauma studies. She has published essays on Partition literature and is working on a book on Anglophone Partition novels for Sorbonne Université Presses.
Email: sandrine.soukai@univ-eiffel.fr
Version updated on 05.04.2022
