In Indian Caribbean folklore, a churile is the spirit of a woman who has died while pregnant or during childbirth. In Caribbean terms, she is a ‘jumbie’ in limbo between the natural and supernatural realms. In grief over being separated from her child, the churile haunts pregnant women, foetuses and babies. Churile spirits are often blamed for stillbirths, miscarriages, infant deaths and other traumas befalling pregnant women and their newborns. She also may haunt family members and is a particular threat to men, especially ex-lovers who wronged her in life. The churile is today largely regarded as nothing more than superstition. Yet the churile’s transgressiveness remains a potent aspect of Indian Caribbean cultural memory. Her inclination to cross ethereal boundaries to materialize as an embodiment of rage and revenge starkly contrasts with the traditionally restrictive gender expectations placed on Indian Caribbean women and girls.
In this article, I examine works by four artists that reframe the churile as an embodiment of contemporary Indian Caribbean femininity. I first describe the South Asian churel, the pre-indenture blueprint for the Indian Caribbean churile. I then focus on the churile’s relevance in Indian Caribbean culture by highlighting ways in which her horrifying and transgressive symbolism has been productively evoked in performance art, music, literature and drag performance. I begin by describing artist Vanessa Godden’s performance film Churile (2016) and related works that negotiate the artist’s dual traumas of racism and sexual violence. I then analyze the song ‘Choorile’ (2020) by singer/songwriter Sabiyha Rasheed who unapologetically reclaims and celebrates her own churile-ness, especially in reference to her bodily appearance and comport, all while integrating references to the churile’s screams and breathlessness into the very sound and structure of the music. Next, I discuss ‘Maiden of the Mud’ (2016), a short story by Kevin Jared Hosein who reimagines the churile as a murder victim whose body is dumped in the brackish mud near the Temple in the Sea, an iconic Hindu landmark in central Trinidad adjacent to a historical cremation site. Finally, I consider the place of the churile in Ryan Persadie’s drag performance as Tifa Wine, the central character in his ongoing Coolieween project. These works collectively highlight how the churile emerges as a powerful symbol for addressing the multivalent legacies of indenture. They reimagine the churile as a way of not only confronting historical and personal wounds but also expressing resilience and reclaiming agency, underscoring the enduring relevance of corporeal and embodied experiences in shaping and understanding complex identities.
The churel in South Asia
Ah, go not near the Peepul trees,
That shiver in the evening breeze,
A young Churel might hide in these!
‘Lalla Radha and the Churel’ (1903), Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (Hope 1903) 1
There are numerous accounts of supernatural beings in the writings of Indian colonials who approached what they considered grotesque folklore with equal parts curiosity and repulsion. None approached the topic with such tragic romanticism as Adela Florence Cory Nicolson. Born in England in 1865, after finishing school she joined her parents in India and published her first book of poetry in 1901. Her poems loosely trace Indian themes, very much reflecting the orientalist aesthetics of the day. In 1903, she published a second book of poetry, Stars of the Desert, including ‘Lalla Radha and the Churel’, a narrative poem featuring three main characters: a ‘priest’ who plays the part of a cautionary elder; Lalla Radha, a lonely seventeen-year-old; and a churel, 2 a sirenic female spirit who lures Lalla Radha with her beauty only to slowly suck the life out of him until he lay dead beneath the trees. The fifth stanza has Lalla Radha question the priest about the nature of the churel:
Lalla Radha: But who and what is this Churel,
Who loves in Peepul trees to dwell,
The Peepul, where the Koel sings
In frenzied songs, of amorous things?
Priest: When, with her child unborn, a woman dies,
Her spirit takes the form of a Churel,
A maiden’s form, with soft, alluring eyes,
Where promises of future rapture dwell.
Yet is her loveliness, though passing sweet,
Marred by the backward-turning of her feet.
She sits in branches of the Peepul trees,
Until beneath, a passing youth she sees.
Should she desire him, swift, she will alight,
Entreating softly ‘Stay with me to-night!’
No safety then for him; unless he flies,
Soon, in the furnace of her love, he dies!
Of course, the young man could not resist the churel’s advances, even welcoming them, as he meets a rather gruesome fate:
Till lost in dreams, his fainting breath
Shed on her lips in one last sigh,
He neither knew nor noticed death.
This is the loveliest way to die!
Nicolson cleverly shapes churel folklore toward a simultaneously horrifying and tragically romantic conclusion. The churel’s charms make Lalla Radha so love-drunk that he does not notice death. Such is the power of desire, a power expertly wielded by the churel.
Despite being coloured by her colonialist perspective, Nicolson’s account synthesizes the main points of churel folklore. Though there are a variety of beliefs regarding the nature of the churel, she is generally regarded as a malevolent shapeshifting witch-like character. While some suggest she is the manifestation of the spirit of a woman who died with some sort of unfulfilled desire, particularly sexual desire (Chowdhry 1998), more commonly the churel is described as the vengeful spirit of a woman who has died while pregnant or while giving birth (Crooke 1894; Gill 2023). She appears as a beautiful young woman, though her true countenance is that of a grotesque hag with long black hair, dressed in white, with feet turned backwards. She primarily haunts young men, captivating them with her beauty and then draining the life out of them, as in the case of Lalla Radha. In the South Asian context, the churel may also haunt family members she knew in life and, in contrast to the Indian Caribbean churile, is only secondarily blamed for harming pregnant women and babies.
In India today, the churel remains a well-known folkloric figure but has also become an element of pop culture, being a particularly iconic trope in numerous horror films. In this context, the churel is usually over-sexualized and decidedly androcidal, leaving a wake of male corpses in her path. Though there are more nuanced figurations — for instance in the 2020 Anvita Dutt film Bulbbul — on the whole depictions of the churel are mostly one-dimensional; the churel may have been a woman once, but now she is a murderous monster and nothing more. Conspicuously absent are references to her motherhood and tragic death. In this way, the churel narrative in Indian pop culture largely echoes Nicolson’s perspective more than a century ago.
In the sections that follow, I trace the transformation of the churel to the churile as she was transplanted from South Asia to the Caribbean. While the fundamental aspects of the churel remain intact, the Caribbean churile takes a somewhat divergent trajectory, shaped by the distinct circumstances and legacies of indenture. In this regard, I highlight how the notion of the churile becomes a robust metaphor for transgressive femininity, illustrating its enduring relevance and transformative potential within contemporary post-indenture narratives.
From churel to churile
Churel folklore was part of the cultural transplantation from South Asia to the Caribbean during the period of indentureship. In Guyana and Trinidad especially, various accounts of the churel were over time consolidated into the comparatively more homogenous narrative of the churile. Unlike its South Asian counterpart, Caribbean churile folklore downplays supernatural shapeshifting abilities, and, instead of preying almost exclusively on young men, the churile primarily torments pregnant women and babies. Just as with the churel, the churile is thought to be the malevolent spirit of a woman who died while pregnant or during childbirth. She is depicted with long black dishevelled hair and dressed in white. In some accounts, she carries her dead baby in her arms, mournfully wailing at the loss of the child who also incessantly cries for milk (Mahabir 2010: 10). Some say churile spirits do not know they are dead and roam around searching for their lost children. In this state, they often mistakenly or vengefully take other women’s babies, both foetuses and newborns. In this way, churile spirits are blamed for a range of problems including stillbirths, newborn deaths and various ailments that afflict pregnant women. Secondarily, churile spirits also haunt men, usually family members or ex-lovers who may have wronged them in life.
Supernatural folklore remains an integral part of Caribbean culture, with spirits at play both in everyday life and in popular conceptions and misconceptions of the region and its people (Nevins 2019). While African Caribbean ghost stories have received more worldwide attention (for example, the proliferation of zombies in pop culture), the Indian Caribbean community has also cultivated their own set of South Asian-derived apparitions that remain in regional cultural memory (Mahabir 2010). In areas like Trinidad and Guyana where African, Asian, European and Indigenous cultures remain subject to the ongoing processes of creolization, the result is a diverse pantheon of jumbies that continue to be relevant in popular discourse. Though such supernatural beings are mostly relegated to the realm of superstition, once in a while they emerge in a big way, such as in 2019 when the Mathura family in Gasparillo, Trinidad, insisted their home was being terrorized by a creature known locally as a buck (alternately baku or buckhoo) (Mohammed 2019). The story gripped the nation, as sceptics flooded social media to both defame the Mathuras for believing in such nonsense and to claim the family’s experience as real evidence of the power of the supernatural.
Eventually the story faded from the headlines, but not without generating significant discussion. For example, Ishtla Singh, a columnist for the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian observed, ‘The spirits and demons that inhabit Trinidad are not just narrative relics of the many races and cultures that have walked it but are also the malcontent ghosts of conquest, invasion, exploitation, slavery, indentureship’ (2019). From this perspective, the folkloric invention of the churile can be understood in part as a social response to strict behavioural expectations placed on women. In a study of violence against women in North India, the homeland of most indentured labourers who were transported to the Caribbean, nearly 25% of a sample of about 1700 women in rural Uttar Pradesh reported being victims of domestic abuse as early as age 15, with nearly 95% identifying their husband as their abuser (Mogford 2011: 843). In a similar study in neighbouring Bangladesh, women felt they had no control over their husbands’ abusive behaviour: ‘they said it was the lot of women to suffer, or their bad luck or fate to be abused’ (Schuler and Islam 2008: 53). Meanwhile, gender-based violence in the Caribbean remains a serious problem regardless of age or ethnicity (G. Hosein 2010; 2018). Where women are subjected to marginalization and abuse in life, the churile represents a stark reversal of such powerlessness. On one hand, she represents an over-the-top kind of trouble-making, an utter out-of-controlness as a result of women’s independence being left unchecked. On the other, she embodies the pent-up rage borne from the straitjacket of domesticity and abuse. Below, I discuss four examples that centre elements of churile folklore in reevaluations of Indian Caribbean femininity. In one way or another, each suggests ways of embodying and transfiguring the horrific and transgressive toward a re-visioning of alterity, agency and the feminine body.
Vanessa Godden, Churile (2016)
Vanessa Godden is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist whose installations and performances examine the intersections between the intergenerational legacy of colonialism and personal experiences of trauma. A hallmark of Godden’s work is the centring of the body as a locus of postcolonial negotiations and a target of gender-based violence. For example, in the performance piece Bite Your Tongue (2017), Godden methodically and unemotionally chews then spits out a series of materials: a mound of curry powder, a mound of flour, a pile of eggshells and five pomegranates. The performance grew out of Godden’s experience of enduring trauma. Drawing on the idiom ‘to chew on something’, Godden chews and mixes these elements, metaphorically processing the material ‘through a methodical commitment’ that considers ‘the complex ways processing one’s own trauma is isolating; it is a task of looking inward whilst external stigma is imposed on persons living with trauma’ (Godden 2017). In Bite Your Tongue, this inward-looking trauma is necessarily voiceless as the mouth is busy with chewing and spitting, never allowing sustenance to enter the body nor voiced protests to get out.
Godden’s video performance Churile (2016) likewise centres on the body as a site of trauma while also focusing quite literally on the mouth (Godden 2020). As the title implies, the work is in part drawn from churile folklore. In the performance, we see Godden’s mouth, periodically opening and closing, in the centre of the frame. As the piece unfolds, the mouth progressively fills with more and more black hair to the point that it grotesquely protrudes from the back of the tongue, dripping with saliva. The abject process of ingesting hair — or perhaps more accurately growing it — from the mouth is multifaceted. First, it evokes the transgressive character of the churile who according to standard folkloric narratives is imagined as having wild black hair. Second, though Godden does not attempt to speak in the video, the ever-growing mass of hair literally clogs the mouth, making it impossible to speak (Figure 1).
a–b. Stills from Vanessa Godden’s Churile (2016), 3:49 video and audio, hair, and saliva. Sound composition by Thembi Soddell using sounds from Alice Hui-Sheng (voice) and Jim Denley (flute).
It is Indian Caribbean culture that created the churile as a supernatural, malevolent manifestation of rebelliousness. In death, the churile sets out to get what she wants, no matter the cost. This of course contrasts with the expectations placed upon Indian Caribbean women in life. Godden’s work draws our attention to the ways that, through such strict gender expectations, Indian Caribbean women can become like churiles — frustration building to rage, which in turn leads to potentially transgressive self-expression. Yet, as is symbolized by the growing ball of hair clogging Godden’s mouth, this expression is suppressed within a socio-cultural system that normalizes racialization and gender-based violence. ‘Through sexual assault’, Godden writes, ‘it has been reinforced that my flesh is not only a signifier of my difference but also that it does not belong to me’ (2020). In this way, Godden conceptualizes Churile as an expression of the suppressive forces that restrict the body and limit avenues of escape.
Sabiyha Rasheed, ‘Choorile’ (2020)
Sabiyha Rasheed is a British-Guyanese musician born and raised in Croydon. First garnering attention as a singer-songwriter about ten years ago, Rasheed’s recent style has become more pop-centric with impactful arrangements built around her powerful voice. At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Rasheed used the time in lockdown to read about postcolonialism and the history of Indian indenture, an effort meant to help her better understand her heritage. In one social media post at the time (Rasheed 2020b), she posed with a stack of books including Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman (2014) and the anthology We Mark Your Memory (Dabydeen, Kaladeen and Ramnarine 2018). Rasheed’s music during and after this period features numerous references to Indian Caribbeanness, especially including themes that deal with powerful women and assertive femininity. One example is the song ‘Lullaby’ (2021), the rhythm and chorus of which is based on a lullaby Rasheed’s grandmother used to sing. The recording begins with a clip of her grandmother singing the repetitive refrain, ‘Baba want to do-do’ (‘the baby wants to sleep’). Rasheed then reworks the words and rhythm of the refrain into the structure of the song, especially in the chorus that directly quotes the lyrics and melody of her grandmother’s lullaby.
Another striking example that draws on Rasheed’s Indian Caribbean heritage is ‘Choorile’ (2020a), a song about breaking free from gender expectations and embracing individuality. While the churile persists in Indian Caribbean cultural memory as a ghost story, the epithet ‘churile’ is sometimes used to describe those who transgress the norms of femininity. In Guyana especially, an assertive or disobedient woman or girl might be described as a churile, linking her real-life behaviour with the out-of-control qualities of the supernatural. It’s from this perspective that Rasheed composed ‘Choorile’. In the song’s text and music, she reclaims the insult ‘churile’ to embrace and celebrate her own sense of self.
The opening moments of the first verse feature two sampled vocal elements integrated into the thinly textured groove (Figure 2). First, is a sampled ‘o’ that sounds on each beat, creating a rhythmic foundation around which all other elements are built. Second, and perhaps with a more dramatic effect, is a breathless gasp that occurs in the second half of beat four in each measure. While the texture thickens as the song progresses, this foundational groove remains intact for each iteration of the verse. The voice, namely moaning and screaming, is an important aspect of churile folklore. As such, Sabiyha’s sampling of her own voice integrated into the scaffolding of the music in a sense reflects the powerfulness of the churile’s voice.
A representation of the first four measures of ‘Choorile’ by Sabiyha Rasheed. Small arrows point to the ‘o’ sample while big arrows point to samples of a gasping sound.
These breathless gasps intensify the lyrical content of the song. Resounding with the voiceless and visceral expression of trauma apparent in Godden’s work, Rasheed laments in the first verse, ‘Why I can’t speak for meself?’ As the verse continues, she recalls the kinds of critiques she has received about her appearance and personality.
Hush now, bab, and keep them words to yourself.
To be sad and quiet, not heard by anyone else.
Why I can’t speak? Why I can’t speak for meself?
Question you, he, she, and everyone else.
Colors burst from the seams of me mouth and mind.
[They] say, ‘me dress too small and me hair too coarse and wild.’
Why you can’t see, why you can’t see these lines?
She too sharp, too loud, [she’s a] churile.
As the song progresses, Rasheed takes on an ever-more aggressive and gritty tone, her voice literally growing louder as she continues to figuratively evoke the voice of the churile. The edgy textures and distorted timbres of the backing track provide a firm foundation for Rasheed’s hard-hitting vocal delivery. Such qualities musically embody the churile, whose voice is alternately terrifying and alluring, intensifying the song’s impactful lyrics. In this way, Sabiyah celebrates herself and others like her as purposefully, churile-ishly disobedient.
Kevin Jared Hosein, ‘Maiden of the Mud’ (2016)
A schoolteacher by profession, Kevin Jared Hosein is a Trinidadian writer known for weaving narratives in and through Caribbean supernatural folklore, with his compelling stories often rendered in Trinidadian English Creole. One such example is ‘Passage’ (2018), for which he won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. What seems at first a truly mysterious ghost story — as one character relates: ‘“Woman coulda be La Diablesse for all I know. Temptation incarnate. All that was missin was the hoof”’ — turns out to be an allegory at least partially about minding your own business. In an interview, Hosein claims that he wrote ‘Passage’ ‘in one feverish night’ (Burt 2023). The same is true for ‘Maiden of the Mud’ (2016a), a story he wrote for a staged reading event on the theme of Indian Caribbean feminism. ‘It was written in one night’, he told me, ‘but the ideas had been floating around for a while before that’ (K. J. Hosein 2021). The story came during a period when Hosein had become very interested in writing about demons, especially those from Indian Caribbean folklore (K. J. Hosein 2016b).
‘Maiden of the Mud’ is written from the perspective of an unnamed woman who from the start is already dead, murdered by Leon with whom she was having an affair:
I drive him mad whenever I can, just because I can. Me and him – we have a connection. I ain’t know how, but I could tell you – he livin goodgood over there and I dead as dead over here. It must have some thread that hangin in-between, extendin from my mouth and fastenin round his neck, cause when I speak the man name – Leon – he and only he could hear. And it ain’t take long for him to start listenin. And he’d come in the night, draggin he nice shoes along the muddy bank, smellin like rum, voice tremblin like a schoolyard sissy. (2016a)
We find out in the course of the story that she was pregnant when she died and that Leon killed her when she threatened to tell Leon’s wife about the affair and the baby. Though Hosein waits until the middle of the story to use the word ‘churile’ to describe the narrator, his witty and grotesque narrative immediately reveals to the knowing reader that she is indeed a churile spirit. She haunts Leon relentlessly both to torture him for his crime and because she seems to believe that she still needs him, even in death, even when it was he who killed her. As the story unfolds, we learn that the woman was a wedding singer, a profession that reflects her posthumous churile status, as she uses her voice to haunt Leon and, as we discover, lure other men as well.
Importantly, the story is set in a real-life location, the iconic Sewdass Sadhu Shiva Mandir, more popularly known as the Temple in the Sea, located in the village of Waterloo on the west coast of central Trinidad (Figures 3a and 3b). The temple is located adjacent to an important Hindu cremation site where bodies of the dead are burned to ensure proper release of the atma, or soul; afterwards, their ashes are scattered along the seashore around the temple.
The Temple in the Sea and cremation site at Waterloo, Trinidad (top). The brackish mud surrounding the temple (bottom). Photos by the author.
He make sure to bring two gallon of milk with him every time. See, is not only me who cryin out for him. Have a next one here. A baby girl. A scrawny little thing. I never give the child no name – never get the chance back then, and never bother to now. The thing wasn’t even born when I dead. I wake up here in Waterloo Bay, facedown in the mud, just a stone throw away from the old pyres. And the child was right next to me, cryin, cryin. It was wet, covered head to toe with muck and slime. I stare at it for a few minutes, wonderin if it was a creature of foot or fin, lung or gill. (2016a)
This visceral image of the mud around the temple consuming the bodies of the woman and her child reflects the ways that human remains are routinely scattered in the same place. The only difference is that the woman and her child did not receive a proper cremation so that now their souls are left trapped in the mud. However, the narrator makes the best of the situation in a way, as she delights in tormenting Leon, haunting other visitors to the temple, and cruelly snatching unborn babies from pregnant women. In the final scene of the story, the narrator reflects on her spectral status:
You know, I’m not so much a ghost, I’m a demon. A young demon. And I feel like demons ain’t born. Demons are made. Demons are moulded. Demons get stuck wanderin a place over and over for centuries, hauntin the same old people, unable to move forward with time. Women demons, especially, obsess with man and only man. Why? This is how I want eternity to play out? Hauntin some string of men? Listenin to some child cry whole day? Even in death, I realise I still stuck bein a blasted untouchable. (2016a)
Hosein adeptly plays with our expectations. While the churile has historically been feared, we are instead meant to feel sympathy for her. Throughout the story, she does some truly terrible things, but we nonetheless want her to succeed, to brutalize Leon, and hopefully to find her own kind of peace. She ultimately realizes that she can finally break free from the cycle of violence, the cycle of non-existence, as she dislodges herself from the mud and walks out to sea. Hosein casts the churile as a product of society, one created by circumstances that restrict women’s agency and force them to relinquish control over their own bodies.
Ryan Persadie, Coolieween
Ryan Persadie is an artist and scholar based in Toronto whose professional and personal interests coalesce around performance, embodiment and the legacies of bound labour, especially focusing on the intersections between and among Indian Caribbean queer diasporas and Caribbean feminism. Since 2017, Persadie has performed his drag persona Tifa Wine on various stages including academic conferences, diasporic events, invited lectures and workshops, and his ongoing Instagram photo series Coolieween. A pictorial and experiential articulation of the queer Caribbean diaspora, Coolieween has become a pivotal project through which Persadie explores and articulates his concept of ‘tanty feminism’. As Persadie explains, the Caribbean ‘tanty’, or aunty, is ‘indispensable to contemporary Caribbean discourses and practices of disaggregating structural power’ (2022: 69).
To do this work, the tanty figure moves through adaptive multiplicities throughout the temporalities and geographies their epistemology moves through. As such, the tanty cannot be read as indebted to a singular person, figure or legacy but operates as a fluid pedagogical force of ontological Caribbean feminist knowing. (2022: 69–70)
Persadie’s work brings to light ways in which tantyness lay at the centre of how Caribbean and diasporic communities ‘come to know of the sensational parameters of Caribbeanness and its feminist formations’ (2022: 70). Through opposition to colonial (i.e. ‘proper’) expectations of race, class and gender, the tanty defies ‘normative rules of racialized femininity that, specifically for Indo- and Afro-Caribbean women, has been bound up in ideas of heterosexual domesticity, submission, passiveness, docility and respectability’ (2022: 72). In Coolieween, Persadie and his collaborators embody Indian Caribbean queerness inclusive of carnivalesque masquerade, drag, the tanty and supernatural folklore among other references.
Persadie was born in Canada; his father is from Trinidad and his mother is Portuguese. While he spent a lot of time with the Trinidadian side of his family, Persadie knew very little about churile folklore growing up. ‘My grandma’, he said, ‘would tell me all these stories’ about Trinidadian culture, but he recalls that ‘she only mentioned [the churile] once’ in passing (Ramsawakh 2023). Looking back, Persadie recalls his grandmother talking about the churile as a kind of morality story. His grandmother was ‘a very God-fearing person’, he said. As such, warning him about being the victim of a churile ‘was more with the aim of [saying], “Don’t be bad.” Like she used to always say to me, “Are you acting propuh?” 3 … And that was also I think coding for, “Don’t be gay”’ (ibid.). In Persadie’s view, the churile narrative is just one expression of the duality of pleasure and pain in the Indian Caribbean experience. On one hand, is the tanty whose example urges toward authenticity and the embrace of both practicality and pleasure; while on the other is the churile, a deadly creature ready to prey on those who stray from respectability.
In Coolieween, Persadie explores this duality as it intersects with postcolonial negotiations of South Asian, Caribbean and diasporic femininity. The main character in Coolieween is Persadie’s drag persona Tifa Wine — already and always a construction and an embodiment — who becomes a chameleonic figure taking on various personalities throughout the photo series. ‘Tifa’s immaculate curation of her body through pose, dress and fleshiness’, writes Kareem Khubchandani, ‘presses on the figure of the aunty to offer a theoretic through which to consider the hag, witch, ghost, spinster, party queen, widow, field worker and mother in relation to each other’ (2023: 83). Through the lens of Tifa Wine, Coolieween depicts various folkloric and invented characters that provide opportunities to engage with anti-colonial and feminist politics through embodied knowing.
One of the most iconic sets of images in Coolieween is the series titled ‘Tanty Feminisms’ through which Persadie looks to bridge the past and present to draw attention to the ongoing problem of gender-based violence in the Indian Caribbean diaspora. While embodying and reimagining the gendered experience of indenture, the images urge reflection on the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, bound labour and migration to the secondary diaspora as it comes to bear on the present problem of gender-based violence within the transnational Indian Caribbean community. For example, in a statement about the project, Persadie begins with a litany of Indian Caribbean women and girls — from Trinidad, Guyana, New York, Toronto, etc. — who were recently harmed or murdered, most often by close family or friends.
Donne Dojoy. Vanessa Bailey. Omwattie Gill. Riya Rajkumar. Stacy Singh. Vanessa Zaman. Christina Sukhdeo. Andrea Bharatt. The names listed here are just a mere fragment of the lists upon lists of diasporic Indo-Caribbean women in Canada and the US who have been recently injured, harmed, and murdered at the hands of heteropatriarchal power — whether that be in the form of their parents, community members, or even partners. (Persadie 2022: 60)
At first glance, ‘Tanty Feminisms’ seems full of contradictions. In one image, Persadie as Tifa Wine poses alongside two others (Figure 4). All three are dressed as indentured women and stare directly at the camera, their noses made to appear blackened and bloodied, a reference to Bahadur’s retelling of a particularly heinous form of indenture-period violence in which women’s noses were mutilated in retaliation for perceived infidelity and other offences (Bahadur 2014; Persadie 2022: 61–63). If the series is meant to comment on present-day gender-based violence, why dress as historical figures? And it is hard not to notice the rather outlandish figure of Tifa Wine, in platform shoes and full makeup, anachronistically posing as an indentured woman. Moreover, the trio are depicted in the middle of a North American deciduous forest rather than a tropical Caribbean plantation.
‘Tanty Feminisms’ (2020). Models (left to right): Premika Leo, Ryan Persadie (Tifa Wine), Anjuli Shiwraj. Photo by Mashal Khan.
These seeming absurdities are of course integral to the meaning of the project, one that comes at the confluence of the interconnected legacies of colonial exploitation, Caribbean carnivalesque masquerade, drag performance and the murky webs of identity borne from intergenerational migrations. The characters in ‘Tanty Feminisms’ and in the Coolieween project as a whole personify these contradictions. Tifa Wine is situated at the centre of this embodiment. Persadie’s drag persona already draws on the trope of Caribbean creolized identities 4 and masking traditions. These implications are deepened as Tifa appears in portrayals of other characters in Coolieween while the multivalent legacies of indenture, alterity and queerness collapse into her body, a body that is not fully her own as she shares it with Persadie.
These layered referents suggest a kaleidoscopic quality: a sense of being one thing, then another and all at once. In another set of images, Tifa Wine embodies the churile (Figure 5), in this case bringing the churile’s shapeshifting ability to bear on sensing the chimerical essence of the diasporic post-indenture experience. Dressed in white and bloodied from the waist down, her face is painted white with dark lips and eyes, her long black hair flowing down across her shoulders. Her black boots blend into the darkness of the night, so it seems she floats down the Toronto sidewalk, all the more eerie as she is framed by the glowing orbs of surrounding street lamps. The churile’s appearance in Coolieween is a significant gesture that pulls from well-known folkloric tropes to once again refigure the churile, this time in juxtaposition and in dialogue with true-to-life horrific representations of gender-based violence in the indenture and post-indenture periods. Through such comparisons between the otherworldly and the real, Persadie sketches a web of relations that connects experiences of intergenerational trauma while working to reclaim the bodies and narratives of Indian Caribbean women.
Far from situating such work within well-worn theories of diasporic dislocation, Persadie very deliberately chooses to locate his Coolieween characters within the environs of his home in and around Toronto: a field and forest become a representation of the plantation while a North American kitchen becomes the setting for Tifa Wine’s glamourous tropes of heteronormative domesticity. In Coolieween, the churile plays a small but important role in locating Indian Caribbean folklore and worldviews within the diasporic experience. As Persadie related to me, ‘I am interested in the paranormal because it evades a linear and material consciousness and allows us to build new frames of reference’ (2024). In embodying Tifa Wine as the ghostly figure of an indentured woman, Persadie uses his and her body as a way ‘to think with other forms of knowing: affective, emotional, psychic’ (ibid.) that are frequently left out of academic texts.
Concluding remarks
‘The monstrous body is pure culture’, writes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. ‘The monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again’ (1997: 4). As the examples discussed in this article suggest, the churile remains a relevant concept in Indian Caribbean cultural memory, even while few still really believe in such supernatural beings. The churel/churile was invented and made real through specific sociocultural circumstances that cast her as a reflection and refraction of feminine expectations: mother, witch, hysterical wailer, sirenic beauty, vengeful ghost, murderous ex-lover, exile. The churile’s continued discursive power lay in her alterity, at once an aberration of proper femininity and a spectral being able to transcend both supernatural boundaries and the confines of respectability.
As Cohen writes, ‘the monster is difference made flesh’ (1997: 7). It is the churile’s ‘fleshiness’ (Khubchandani 2023: 83) that makes her spectral embodiment of the abject at once alluring and repulsive. ‘We weep for King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon’, writes China Miéville, ‘no matter what they’ve done’ (2012: 143). Drawn in by her tragic narrative, we sympathize with the churile but also keep our distance. Though an apparition, the churile is made corporeal — is ‘enmonstered’ (ibid.: 144) — via the assignation of transgressive femininity; in some contexts, she is the out-of-controlness that we fear, while in others she is a personified expression of multilayered diasporic experience. The abject appellations we use to talk about her — witch, hag, blood-sucker, churile — are in turn used to label real-life women and girls whose behaviour transcends the norm. The churile’s discursive relevance lay in her irrevocably linked victimization, vengeance and subversion.
In the space between the ‘invention’ of the churile and her evocations in the works discussed in this essay, she has put on new masks, shapeshifting in ways that speak to modern narratives moulded by the intertwined legacies of slavery, indentureship, colonialism and transnational migration. Godden evokes the churile to express a sense of personal trauma coming from within the diasporic community. Rasheed celebrates the churile’s out-of-controlness to embrace her own transgressive femininity. Hosein casts the churile as an anti-hero trapped by the strictures of gender expectations. Persadie embodies the churile as one part of a constellation of gendered anti-colonial diasporic referents. In all these cases, the churile plays a part whose powerfulness is only possible because she is both a well-defined element of Indian Caribbean folklore but also an elusive spectre always ‘invigorated by change and escape’ (Cohen 1997: 6). We must examine these creative renderings of the churile against the backdrop of the present moment in which feminist and decolonial politics are now mainstream, both in academia and popular discourse. Narratives of the horrific and grotesque, both real and imagined, offer an experiential archive through which we might work through histories of violence and postcolonial struggles for autonomy. With this in mind, we must remember that the churile was once a person, an indentured woman who never had full control over her own body and who achieved agency over herself only in death.