The ‘kala pani,’ the black water they were forced to cross and which erased behind them all traces, broke all ties, engulfed their memory so definitively that exile has become their homeland, not this land, not this island, no, exile. Who can understand now that we are in the third or fourth generation? Who wants to understand such an existence in absence, the lack of belonging?
(Ananda Devi, Le Voile de Draupadi) 1
Andil Gosine’s Cane Portraiture emerges from a set of conditions that aestheticizes the social history of indentured labourers in the Caribbean through participant-driven performances. The selection of sugar cane for the backdrop in these performances functions as an indexical reference to the cultural memory of the Caribbean diaspora. It also emphasizes sugar’s problematic relationship to the history of indenture. During preparatory research for the work, Gosine mulled over his family’s photo albums that feature him and his family inside Trinidadian photo studios from the 1960s and 70s. In the photos are backdrops displaying iconic architecture such as Paris’s Eiffel Tower and London’s Big Ben clock tower, in addition to other European monuments. The existence of this vernacular imagery throughout the colonized Caribbean demonstrates a sense of longing, feelings of nostalgia, or idealization for Europe.
In Cane Portraiture, Gosine deconstructs such images of Europe by replacing them with signifiers of his birthplace Trinidad and the sugar cane plantations that grow there. For Stuart Hall, the hegemonic presence of Europe, what he calls ‘Présence Européenne’, in regimes of visual representation dominate the social identity of colonial subjects. 2 By inviting participants – many of whom happen to be the descendents of indentured labourers – to have their portraits taken opposite a sugar cane backdrop, Gosine engineers a set of connections between the descendants of indentured labourers, the Caribbean, South Asia and the artist himself. That being said, Cane Portraiture is not ethno-specific – by representing both non-European and European individuals amongst the sugar cane, the artist implicates all participants in the history of colonialism. Doing so emphasizes that colonial states of the Global North were built upon the exploitation of labour from the Global South. This complicated and unsettled relationship with Europe remains today.
Gosine’s Cane Portraiture performances expand the field of relations surrounding ‘coolitude’ – the dissemination of Indian labour during the 19th century – by redressing one of its most indispensible discourses, the ‘coolie odyssey’. Gosine’s attempt to locate ‘home’ within this odyssey takes on new and unresolved forms. His work suggests that the pathos of displacement ebbs through generations like the ocean they once crossed, yet the odyssey that historically defines ‘coolies’ 3 and their descendants is shifting and unstable; it is, as Neil Bissoondath proposes, a state of being that neither gives up the past nor accepts the fate of the present. 4 Gosine’s aesthetics of indentureship offer a critique of the relational aesthetics model proposed by Nicholas Bourriaud, pointing towards the ways that indenture systems affect senses of displacement and cultural loss. The historical narratives presented in the work are personal and collective, individual and communal; as such, the sugar cane photograph draws upon the question of home by attempting to locate its in/visibility in the field of representation. 5 By creating a migratory, travelling performative space with no fixed address, Cane Portraiture imitates the physical movement of women, men and children during passages from India to the Caribbean under the indenture system of labour. In doing so, this gesture provokes a questioning of the perception of ‘home’ as an interminable negotiation between the absent past and the tangible present.
Aesthetics of Indenture
At first, Gosine’s Cane Portraiture appears to fit neatly inside the relational aesthetics model theorized by Bourriaud, which characterizes the rise of participatory frameworks in visual art practice during the mid-1990s. For Bourriaud, relational aesthetics manufacture an interhuman sphere of rhizomatic connections; these unpredictable, transactive exchanges between participants and the artist support his notion of relational aesthetics as ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’. 6 The trouble with Bourriaud’s conceptualization begins in its ethical dimensions; in the propensity of writers and critics to deduce what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about an artwork’s collaborative dimensions. Claire Bishop maintains that the ethical turn towards ‘social art’ criticism is fuelled by a lack of rigor; that failures of critical analysis occur most when one becomes preoccupied with an artwork’s ‘good intentions’. 7 It follows that artworks utilizing a participatory framework tend to be evaluated on their potential to strengthen the social bonds instead of their aesthetic merit.
Cane Portraiture approximates the conceptual framework of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics model by facilitating active participation from audiences; however, the work implicates participants in a personal and/or collective politic. As a mnemonic apparatus, the sugar cane backdrop symbolizes the migration of hundreds of thousands of South Asian labourers – who were guaranteed free passage, gainful employment and safe passage home (under false pretenses, and if they managed to survive) – to European colonies throughout the Caribbean. 8 In addition to documented cases of sexual assault and rape committed by ship doctors during passage, coupled with unhygienic living conditions, those who crossed the kali pani, or ‘Black Waters’ of the Indian Ocean, often took up residence in former slave quarters. They were regularly subjected to malnutrition, chronic illness and overwork, leaving them seeking medical assistance that would subsequently be docked from their pay. 9 Gosine’s performance of Cane Portraiture shreds the ‘social fabric’ by insinuating how exploitative systems of labour such as slavery and indenture undercut relations between the Global North and South; 10 it is a proposition grounded in political antagonism, 11 where evidence of European colonialism arouses tension by quite literally hanging in the background – here the photograph of sugar cane is, above all, a coded signifier of suffering.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes ruminates on the inference of photography as a sensorial record of experience, yet stresses that the photograph is never representative of memory proper but fills ‘the sight by force’. 12 For Barthes, photographs are not easy recollections of the past; instead, they trace events, things and sensorial experiences cut from the flesh of lived reality and preserved for posterity. 13 Using the aesthetics of indenture, Gosine seeks to re-establish connections to the land, its people, and the meaning of home. The sugar cane photograph is significant because it presents a counter-ideology to European regimes of visual representation in the Caribbean since colonialism. By replacing conventional studio backdrops of European landmarks like the Eiffel Tower with Caribbean iconography such as sugar cane, he delegitimizes idealization for Europe while transforming sugar cane into a monument comparable to the Eiffel Tower itself. Symbolically, this gesture relocates ‘home’ away from Europe and back to Trinidad, where Gosine grew up before he and his family emigrated to Oshawa, Ontario. To this end it encourages a type of fluid and discontinuous remembering that introduces personal experience into wider constituencies of memory 14 – the sugar cane photograph is at once an act of mourning and a source of strength. It is a reminder of what home once was and could be.
Making ‘Home’
Cane Portraiture is activated during interactions with Gosine, fellow participants, the photo camera, and the take-home analog 10.00 × 15.25 cm photograph. By offering participants a take-home snapshot of their likeness, Gosine replicates the service of conventional portrait studios (though his images are free). Yet, he also expands the intersubjective categories of relational aesthetics by extending the performance’s life outside the gallery or museum where it can take on a life of its own.
Of the most recognized artists to utilize take-home aesthetics is the Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose seductive installations composed of stacks of paper and heaps of wrapped sugar candies tantalize viewers to remove them – the works are then replenished by gallery attendants according to dimensions stipulated by the artist. In works such as Untitled (Loverboys) (1993), the scale and weight of the installation emulates the actual body mass of the artist and his late partner Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991, and represents a type of unconventional double portrait. 15 Speaking on the integration of his dying partner into the work, Gonzalez-Torres confesses:
I was losing the most important thing in my life – Ross, with whom I had the first real home, ever. So why not punish myself even more so that, in a way, the pain would be less? This is how I started letting the work go. Letting it just disappear’. 16
The catastrophic loss of what once constituted home for Gonzalez-Torres is visualized in works such as Untitled (Loverboys) as an allegorical representation, where mnemonic objects of personal memory are gifted to the viewer. As it happens, giving pieces of oneself (and one’s lover) away, allegorically speaking, is essentially imitating the process of entropy itself, albeit most beautifully.
Though its circumstances are noticeably different, Cane Portraiture also emerges in the midst of heartbreak – the sudden and unexpected end of Gosine’s long-term relationship with his partner. The performance, coupled with several other works in Gosine’s WARDROBES series, negotiate his ancestral migration from Trinidad, the complex history surrounding indentureship, and, much like Gonzalez-Torres, the understanding that love can exist as a surrogate for ‘home.’ For Gosine:
There was this kind of recognition of how much that relationship I lost filled the place of ‘home’ for me, and how much I was still mourning and contending with displacement from Trinidad to Canada […] I was forced to think more about what it means to see oneself as a service to labour, and […] I began to recognize an argument about trauma, desire, labour, and migration. 17
Gosine’s personal and collective histories converge in Cane Portraiture, and the subject of ‘home’, finds embodiment in Gosine`s former partner. Both artists negotiate the trauma of loss by conceptualizing it as a physical and allegorical exchange of paper, candy and photographs with the viewer. In this gesture of gifting, the artists evoke what Lauzon identifies as an aesthetic strategy that renders ‘invisibility visible by invoking the troubled ghosts of absent bodies’. 18 Such attempts to visualize absence may reveal that ‘home’ for Gosine remains an enigmatic and geographical amalgam of bodies, experiences and geographical locations: his former partner, India, the kali pani, the Caribbean and Canada. Caught in a taxonomy of inclusion and exclusion, Gosine, like many other descendents of indenture, stays ‘broadly connected to that experience of simultaneously not belonging anywhere and potentially belonging everywhere’. 19 An ontology of existence among liminal spaces requires an expanded field of theorization that reconceptualizes the syntagmatic connotations of home-less-ness as a destabilized and uncentered site predicated on subjectivities of loss, longing, and desire. 20
Indenture and Wounding
In Cane Portraiture, subjectivities of loss, longing and desire speak to the presence of trauma among indentured labourers and their descendants. Dominick LaCapra describes historical trauma as limited in scope and scale while emphasizing that ‘not everyone is subject to it or entitled to the subject position associated with it’. 21 However, the categories of ‘everyday’ trauma slip into ‘historical trauma’ when they express a ‘cumulative wounding across generations’. 22 Causal studies into the presence of intergenerational trauma are not new and have been theorized by scholars including Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart since the 1980s. Brave Heart’s research into the historical and intergenerational trauma of the Lakota help to elucidate the presence of PTSD, survivor’s guilt, identification with ancestral pain, unresolved grief, and other forms of psychological suffering that affect Indigenous communities since Contact. 23 In her essay, ‘Wakiksuyapi: Carrying the Historical Trauma of the Lakota’, she locates three principle categories that those suffering from historical trauma share:
(a) transposition 24 where one lives simultaneously in the past and the present with the ancestral suffering as the main organizing principle in one’s life, (b) identification with the dead so that one feels psychically (emotionally and psychologically) dead 25 and feels unworthy of living, and (c) maintaining loyalty to and identification with the suffering of deceased ancestors, re-enacting affliction within one’s own life. 26
What is remarkable about Brave Heart’s conclusions is how closely they apply to Gosine’s own experiences. For Gosine, colonization of the Caribbean and its resulting historical trauma is inscribed within the bodies and desires of descendants of indentured labourers:
I’m arguing that our desires are not simple and pure, but complicated; that they are socialized not just in our lifetimes, but through preceding generations; and that they will be rendered through the traumatic and multifaceted experience of indentureship, and the way in which [indentureship] commodified our bodies and marked our purpose as labour in service of others. The names we are called in Trinidad and Guyana – ‘coolies,’ ‘East Indians’ – are the ultimate reminder of all this. 27
Historically, in the eyes of colonial perpetrators, dehumanization of individuals and groups has been a way to justify and sustain horrendous actions such as physical segregation, cultural destruction, and assimilationist policies. Treatment towards ‘coolies’ is certainly no different.
Faced with improper living conditions, malnutrition, disease, physical and verbal abuse, overwork, among many other sufferings, indentured labour legally replaced the system of slavery without improving upon its exploitative working and social conditions. In Gosine’s words, those directly affected by indentured labour continue to be objectified as an apparatus of industry and valued as capital. The burden of categorizing descendents of indenture as Other – as a category of pure labour – reflects a critical disavowal of agency experienced by many, if not all, colonial subjects. Historical trauma is but one of its aftereffects. For participants affected by indentureship and the ‘coolie odyssey’, the cane sugar photograph renders the possibility of discovering, reflecting upon, and working through personal and/or collective narratives that converge upon historical trauma. The aesthetic strategies proposed by Gosine aid in the construction of memory, foster a sense of community, and help keep cultural memory alive. 28
Gosine’s Cane Portraiture reconceptualizes ‘home’ as a perpetually-negotiated absent present which unfolds in a vector of relational encounters. By deconstructing historical narratives and representations surrounding Caribbean indenture, Gosine has developed an oppositional critique to present-day interactions with European colonialism. The consequences of ancestral and personal migrations from India to the Caribbean to Canada are here inscribed as a category of transgenerational trauma that speaks to the violence of physical displacement, dehumanization and cultural loss. The photograph of sugar cane in the backdrop of his performance is a code that enacts a strategy of remembrance and collective mourning. The image works to implicate participants in the personal and collective histories of colonialism. And it is ultimately successful because it constructs a poetic gesture of interpersonal dialogue and exchange while enacting political resistance. By staging an indexical trace of the Caribbean, which operates as both a wellspring of suffering and a source of strength, Gosine invokes cultural memory as a mode of self-discovery. Gosine’s work is not meant to be a cure but rather to bear the wound of this history, which exists at both a personal and collective precipice throughout the Caribbean diaspora.
Be it sugar cane or sugar candy, for Gosine and Gonzalez-Torres, home is not merely a concept but an embodiment of a person or place that is shared with others.
This article was originally published in issue 36.3 (2019) of BlackFlash Magazine.