Engendering History: A Poetics of the Kala Pani in Ramabai Espinet's The Swinging Bridge

Ramabai Espinet is a prominent Indo-Trinidadian author who has made critical contributions to the field of Indo-Caribbean literature through a multiplicity of genres that include poetry, short stories, literary criticism, performance, and most recently, the novel. By focusing on the dispossessed and marginalized Indo-Caribbean experience, Espinet’s work gives voice to the outsider represented by female immigrants, widows, girls, sex workers, and indentured laborers via the exploration of themes such as immigration, indenture, gender marginality, social invisibility, domestic abuse, and patriarchal inviolability in Indo-Caribbean communities. Her writings inscribe the negotiations of Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity and exilic identity within a tradition of postcolonial writing in North America and Trinidad to establish an important feminist poetics of literary and cultural representation in Caribbean literature.

Espinet’s debut novel, The Swinging Bridge, consolidates these preoccupations with the political and historical agency of Indo-Caribbean women in a compelling narrative that moves the reader back and forth between India, Trinidad, Toronto, and Montreal. The novel is narrated by Mona Singh, a scholarship-winning student at the University of Montreal and researcher for Films Canadiana, an independent company specializing in films on Canadian immigration. Mona’s family moves to Canada in the 1960s after Trinidad’s independence and the growing discrimination against Indians under the leadership of Dr. Hector James (de Doctah). The hardships experienced by the narrator’s family as Indo-Caribbean immigrants in Canada seem to mirror their disempowerment as rural Indians in Trinidad, obliging Mona to develop a protective armor of self-preservation in her personal relationships. However, she is completely unprepared in the 1990s for the devastating news of her beloved brother Kello’s imminent death from AIDS, which provokes a family crisis of heart-wrenching proportions.

Kello’s tragedy had begun at earlier when he was obliged to leave Trinidad at a young age to escape his father’s daily onslaughts of violence against him, a violence that was a symptom of the older man’s social disenfranchisement and frustrated dreams. “The Big Row” of December 1958, a confrontation between father and son, becomes a catalyst for the family’s economic dispersal when the grandfather’s land has to be mortgaged to pay the father’s crushing debts in Trinidad, a situation that later provokes their social dispersal in Canada as a result of immigration and the inability to successfully assimilate to a foreign lifestyle.

Grief motivates a flood of personal memories, as Mona begins to remember intimate details of family life that had been repressed under the cover of migration. These recollections are further intensified when Kello makes a dying wish asking his sister to journey to Trinidad to buy back the ancestral land. Thoughts about the impending trip back “home” and the actual trip itself take Mona further back in time to connect spiritually with Gainder, her ancestral foremother, in Mona’s attempt to establish a sense of historicity. The ancestor’s own life had been impacted by a series of dislocations when she was forced to escape an unwanted marriage to an old man, and subsequent early widowhood. The narrator’s journeys of memory weave a complicated narrative quilt as Mona attempts to piece together the lost fragments of her family heritage, while reconciling the multiple pasts of her Indo-Caribbean identity.

The Swinging Bridge thereby chronicles the multiple exiles that are a part of the Indian experience in the Caribbean and North America through the “exilic trajectories” of the ancestral great-grandmother Gainder and the protagonist Mona. The novel commemorates the maternal roots and routes of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows and young girls from India who crossed the kala pani (the black waters of the Atlantic) in search of new beginnings in Trinidad, and the immigrant great-granddaughter who engages in an existential quest for selfhood in Canada. Impacted by the multiple displacements of race, class, gender, identity, tradition, and nationhood, the narrator unravels the representational liminality of Indo-Caribbeanness in Trinidad and Canada through the scope of memory to “confront not only her own...