English

Abstract

In her debut novel The Swinging Bridge, the Indo-Trinidadian writer Ramabai Espinet commemorates the maternal routes/ roots of Indo-Caribbean history by establishing the subjectivity of widows and adolescent girls from India who crossed the 'kala pani‘ or black waters of the Atlantic in search of new beginnings. Impacted by the multiple displacements of race, class, gender, identity, tradition and nationhood, the narrator unravels the marginalized presence of Indo-Caribbeans in Trinidad and Canada through the trope of a memoralized 'kala pani‘ poetics. This study asserts that the poetics of the 'kala pani‘ accomplishes two important objectives. It coverts the pariah status of widowhood in India into the transnational mobility of migration, while providing the protagonist with the necessary coming of age script to uncover the fragmented and dispersed genealogy of a maternal history. The novel problematizes the feminist scope of Indo-Caribbean history located in the interstitial spaces between colonialism, Indo-Caribbean/Afro-Caribbean nationalism, and postmodern transnationalism through a woman-centered 'kala pani‘ poetics as the site of historical preservation, cultural meditation, and feminist contestation.