| dc.description.abstract |
Caribbean poet Christian Campbell’s (2010) account of his Indian great-grandmother Nita’s rejection of markers of her culture and religion for a life with his great-grandfather, a so-called “rootless negro”, reminds us of the complex relations between communities of Indian and African origins in diasporic space, as well as of the Indian woman’s body being used for the maintenance of inter-community boundaries. Indeed, for every Nita who breached those boundaries, there were other Indian women who accepted them and their role as preservers and transmitters of “Indianness”. Yet how intact, really, were those boundaries? Did the movements of calypso and the melody of Krishna’s flute never mingle? How does Indo-Caribbean feminism deal with the issues of tradition, pleasure, enjoyment and transgression that this poem signals through “calypso” and “Krishna’s flute”? |
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