Connective Tissue: Memory's Weave and the Entanglements of Diasporic Ethnicity

Memory's Fabric

October 2014. Durban, South Africa. The scene is the living room of my parent's beachside apartment, where, since the end of apartheid, they have spent four months of the year in the midst of a vast web of family, reconnecting heartstrings stretched far and wide by their many migrations. I am dressed for one of the festivities in the week leading up to my cousin's wedding. The sari I wear was bought by my father for my mother in 1976, on his first trip back to India since he had spent two years in the southern city of Bangalore as a young boy. A white pattern on bright fuchsia, the color of the kum kum powder that married women dot their heads with, my mother's lifelong favorite color. But nearly forty years later it is I who tie the sari for the first time, the pleats falling with the luscious heft of fine old silk, its wearing a recompense for its long languishing. I remember the never-wornness of so many other saris, the ones my mother carried in her steel trousseau trunk from South Africa to Australia to Canada to the United States, the ones I would unfold and admire as a young girl in the afternoon quiet preceding a teatime without visitors, the ones that, in her diasporic loneliness, my mother slowly gave away. The day I wore that sari we had also gone, my parents and I, to a local sari shop where my father, a man who has breathed gifts his whole life, bought me three saris and my mother two, the doublings and repetitions falling thick on me as I remember. We drove home through the crowded streets of Durban, past the informal settlements dotting the hills and the beachfront skyscrapers beckoning, through the stoplights where young Africans hawk their plastic goods and bunches of lychees ("not good," said my father, en route to the stand he patronizes and whose owner, Mohammed, he has christened "Fruit Uncle"). Sensing my pleasure in the moment and my recollection of many drives like this, my father said with satisfaction, "You were born here. You're like me, you have Africa in your blood."

Blood thicker than water. This is also the story of the approximately 152,000 Indians who arrived in Natal between 1860 and 1911, my great-great-grandparents among them, to work the sugarcane fields of the British colony of South Africa. Drops in a bucket, a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million Indians who crossed the kala pani, or Black Water, to some nineteen British colonies over the hundred years following the abolition of slavery. To imagine Africa in my blood is to consider connection across the violent differentiation of the colonial and apartheid policies that kept South Africa's population in separate spheres and distinct identity categories: African, Colored, Indian, White. It is not the fact of my Indian South African blood alone that put Africa in it, but the cumulative density of the memories of lives lived there, including those who are not of my blood. The migrants who crossed the kala pani were made shipkin, or jahajibhai, breaking lines of community and caste as they shared meals, space, and social interactions. Women constituted a distinctive class, subjected to sexual violence on board and patriarchal surveillance on the plantations, but also given opportunities to counter those norms and strictures through greater degrees of choice in partnering and marrying and the selective renegotiation of traditional ideals of femininity.¹

My paternal great-grandfather came from a Telegu-speaking family of hereditary landowners and village chieftains in Vaniampettai, Tamil Nadu. On his arrival as a paying passenger in Natal, he married the daughter of a Tamil speaker, an agricultural laborer, who had emigrated under a girmit or indentured labor contract from Seerghazi, Tamil Nadu. That daughter, my great-grandmother, was known as Café-Amma, in recognition of the corner shop she ran for decades with ferocious tenacity and a keen eye for numbers. Names tell other stories too...