This is the spoken word I said yesterday: (meant to be said in a Caribbean Accent) I am not South Asian This is my abrasion, You simply want an evasion, But this is my occasion, To give you some persuasion, Lets stop the invasion, Of this mislead equation, I do not know my indigenous tongue but need a translation, My place of origin, an unknown location, Yet I hold my motherland with admiration, I do not need your condemnation, Don’t make this a confrontation, I just wish to give you a demonstration, I know my origins have a slight complication, But I have a declaration, I hope you see the correlation, I am South Asian, Yet my fellow South Asians have only given me deprivation, Only leads to frustration and irritation, Here is my explanation. South Asians were taken from India by the British, Their torment just began, it would never finish, In the Caribbean, Trinidad and Guyana they landed, Their language was beaten out of them, it was commanded, They were left stranded, Their culture was taken away underhanded, Yet their love for the motherland just expanded, Working hard to preserve their culture single-handed, It is only respect we demanded, Yet our fellow South Asians have already branded. Creating a hierarchy of authenticity, Passing judgments without objectivity, Because I can’t name my ethnicity, Where is your sensibility, Claiming the Caribbean has no suitability, I feel sorry for your passivity, I choose positivity. The same who oppressed me oppressed you, The British are the culprits, its true, I wish you would just get a clue, To realize what my people have been through. The Caribbean is not just reggae, roti and rum, Bollywood movies is where our chutney music comes from, From chappati, dhalphurie is what it has become, Languages lost, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Bhojpuri, Tamil, I wish I still knew some, Yet you judge because our curry tastes different than your one, That’s the reason why you shun, Yet when we left India, you cut our connection to the motherland, undone, Although we lost some of our culture, we hold on to every crumb, Look what my people had to overcome, In case you didn’t know my skin is brown, If Canadian new diaspora authenticity was questioned you won’t take that from anyone, Yet you do it to me, what’s the difference between the old diaspora and the new one, Is it because my people have the wrong accent, We must jump through hoops for your consent, I am 100 percent, South Asian, I know what I represent, I do not mean to vent, That is not my intent, It is simply for your knowledge to augment, So next time you wish to pass judgment on me, think twice, I attempted to be precise, I hope I was concise, Take my advice, To say Caribbean’s are not South Asians is a vice, United we stand, divided we fall, Don’t push my back against the wall, Together as one we stand tall, This is what I want for all. In order for you to fully grasp the theme of my spoken word I will give a brief background to contextualize an issue I’ve been grappling with my whole life which has been the prejudice I receive from the mainland South Asian community. When I say mainland South Asians I am generally referring to those whose background is from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is based on the fact that due to my Caribbean (Trinidadian/ Guyanese) background I am generally not accepted within these spaces. A hierarchy of authenticity is created where those who are from mainland South Asian or left this region most recently are deemed more authentic to the title of being South Asian. Within the diaspora, such as in Canada, those whose parents are from mainland South Asia are considered apart of the New Diaspora and those whose parents are from the Caribbean, Africa or Fiji or Mauritius as a few examples are considered apart of the Old Diaspora. These South Asians apart of the New Diaspora still render themselves as more authentic than the South Asians who are descendants of those within the Old Diaspora. Therefore, mainland South Asians assume a hegemonic dominance over a specific type of South Asian identity rendering South Asians of the Old Diaspora in a subjugated and marginalized position on the periphery of South Asian identity. These misunderstandings are created due to overarching generalizations towards the Old Diaspora. Caribbean South Asians are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of authenticity as being the least South Asian and are seen as holding the least amount of South Asian culture/ knowledge in comparison to other Old Diasporas since this community was the first of the Old Diasporas to leave India and thus are seen as being the least authentic. The Caribbean South Asians arrived in the Caribbean as indentured servants since 1838 and are predominantly from the northern areas of India, with 85% of them derived from the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar regions where Bhojpuri was the predominant dialect, with small minorities from present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Bengal and other northern Indian regions and 15 % were taken from southern India (Khanam and Chickrie 205). This is historical proof that they are South Asian. Dr. Gaiutra Bahadur stated in her book Coolie Woman, that when the last ship from Guyana, The Resurgent docked in India in 1955, carrying indentured servants who wished to return to India, the Prime Minister “Nehru announced its arrival. Back in Guiana, people listening to All India Radio heard him say: The stubborn people have come” (Bahadur 169). “Hundreds of Guyanese South Asians reported that they could not touch the village well, or share in smoking a hookah, or consider marrying their sons and daughters to anyone without the specter of pollution being raised. Their time overseas had turned them into a people apart, branded as islanders. It had transformed them into a social problem” (Bahadur 169). “In 1926, writing in the newspaper The Young India, Gandhi described them as “social lepers, not even knowing the language of the people.” Those born and raised in India were lost in Calcutta, where Bengali was spoken, rather than their own dialects – primarily Bhojpuri and Awadhi. And their overseas-born children, although conversant in what Gandhi called “kitchen Hindustani”, were far from fluent in any of the subcontinent’s languages. Its customs and taboos were even more indecipherable to them” (Bahadur 169-170). Therefore this prejudice against Caribbean South Asians was present in mainland South Asia even when the last ship returned in 1955. Caribbean South Asians cannot name the exact village that their ancestors came from since British archival records of ship migrants were managed poorly or missing. They cannot speak their indigenous South Asian languages since the British had such gruesome proselytization methods that even went to the length of literally beating the South Asian heritage out of these individualize till they bleed and rubbed salt in their wounds. Our ancestors went through copious amounts of torture just to preserve the South Asian culture we practice today. Yet we are not seen as authentic since we cannot name our ancestral village or speak in our indigenous tongues, but is it our fault? Is it fair to judge us on this basis? Of course not, yet many South Asians poke fun at our chutney music or Caribbean South Asian dishes since they taste different like our currys and roti. But after suffering at the hands of the British who were simultaneously the oppressors for South Asian Caribbean’s and those in mainland South Asia, we were able to preserve and hold with great esteem the culture that our ancestors could pass on to us. We have the same oppressor, instead of our brothers and sisters in mainland South Asia and their descendants accepting us, they are ashamed of us. Many assume we do not know basic aspects of South Asian culture. Look at South Asian Heritage Month here in Toronto, this was an event pioneered by Trinidadian and Guyanese South Asians who were celebrating Indian Arrival Day in Canada for when indentured servants arrived in the Caribbean and as a celebration of their South Asian Heritage. That was then taken over by mainland South Asians and very few people know of its Indo-Caribbean origins. This prejudice has even reached South Asian centers that help those with aids and a Guyanese man was refused help since he was not considered South Asian enough to get help. These assumptions are even present at York, where during multicultural week when the Guyanese Socialclub performed an individual yelled “leave some songs for India”, thus stating that as Guyanese they were not South Asian enough to even try to claim or dance to a Hindi Bollywood song. Yet within Guyana and the Caribbean, Bollywood movies are an integral part of our South Asian heritage and have been viewed for decades within the region. These misunderstanding must be rectified and I hope I was able to at least shed some light on this issue. I will as well like to say this is not a prejudice that all South Asians engage in, but it is a pressing issue within the community that needs to be acknowledged. I will end with Dr. Laura Ann Stoler’s quotation, where she compares a marginalized community to the analogy of a watermark, where this aspect of history cannot be “scraped off nor removed without destroying the paper” (Stoler 8). This is the perfect analogy to characterize the Caribbean South Asians juxtaposed to the mainland South Asians. Caribbean South Asians can not be “scraped off nor removed without destroying the paper” or fabric of the South Asian community, Caribbean South Asians are an integral part of this community and the fabric of South Asian culture will not be whole without the colors and patters of Caribbean South Asian contributions, even if we are not always given acknowledgement (Stoler 8).
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:09:18 +0000