â¦
âµ
In his collection of poetry Métisse fille (2001), politician, writer, and cultural activist Ernest MoutoussamyâGuadeloupean of Indian descentâportrays Guadeloupe as a métisse island âcarried by all the oceansâ. By invoking its creolised Carib name Karukera,1 the poem highlights Guadeloupeâs precolonial
Moving away from exclusionary discourses that look back to continental India to retrieve a supposedly authentic Indianness, I tease out the transcultural and federative potential at the heart of the French Caribbean cultural and identity construct of Indianité by arguing that Indianité is a constantly shifting process and a negotiated creolising performanceâboth in the artistic and behavioural senses of the termâwherein Indian cultural elements and practices are always already related to and shaped by other cultural elements (in particular African, Amerindian and European ones). I contend that these cultural cross-fertilisations are articulated in the âinter-connective spaces of metamorphosis, of material practices, culture and politicsâ which, according to Jonathan Pugh, define island movements that can only be fully grasped when âthinking with the archipelagoâ.3 To excavate such spaces, this chapter close reads the collections of poetry Métisse fille (2001) and à la recherche de lâInde perdue (2004) by drawing
The formation of Caribbean island cultures has long been understood as transnationally connected to other spaces, and works like Antonio Benitez-Rojoâs have challenged the boundedness and seclusion usually associated with islands by defining the Caribbean as âa meta-archipelago [â¦] having neither a boundary nor a center [that] flows outward past the limits of its own seaâ.7 While taking stock of the spatial turn in island and archipelagic studies, I am also indebted to more recent scholarship taking the archipelago as a âmodelâ to âproduce discourses [â¦] with, from and for islandersâ by tracing ânetworks, [â¦] filaments, mobilities and multiplicitiesâ to elucidate ânovel, powerful and revealing commonalities and relations of islands qua islandsâ.8 Using these theoretical frames, I demonstrate how the collections of poems that conjure up physical islands and archipelagos are also metaphorically poetic archipelagos that connect memories and cultures, including memories of enslavement and indentureship which often seem to compete in memory politics, in particular when comparative perspectives are reduced to an âindenture-as-slavery
Given that âthe island metaphor leaves room for at least two interpretationsâit can be a symbol of oneâs remote seclusion on the one hand and of oneâs keen awareness of many-sided relation with othersââI will demonstrate that the poems operate as âfragments.â My understanding of Moutoussamyâs poems as âfragmentsâ draws on Ottmar Etteâs analysis of literary islands to designate what he identifies as self-contained âi(s)land-worldsâ, which can also be interpreted as connected to each other and to a whole that makes up a âworld of islandsâ or an archipelago.11 Moutoussamyâs poems, too, are akin to fragments connected to a âworld of islandsâ, that is to say the collections, through quasi-similar themes and tropes that ârepeatâ across the poems and collections and interrelate them. Additionally, the poems themselves can be interpreted as poetic archipelagos, as within the economy of a same poem, complex networks of tropes forge multidirectional contacts of memories and cultures. In that sense, a poem could be read not simply as a âfragmentâ of a collection but
I begin by analysing how the contradictory pulls of métissage and nostalgia for Lost India which recur in the collections, when read dialogically and archipelagically, contribute to the creolisation of Indianité. I then show how the ambivalence of the Kala pani trope redefines rootedness and challenges claims to an atavistic Indian culture. I subsequently examine how earthly and vegetal elements shape multidirectional âvectorsâ of (traumatic) memories that interrelate the poems within and across the collections.14 Lastly, I suggest that, when combined with water metaphors, these terrestrial elements become fertile grounds for cultural cross-fertilisation, most fully articulated in Moutoussamyâs use of the doubly creolised trope of âcoui of massalèâ, as I define it here, which includes Carib culture within the creolising poetics of Indianité.
1 Archipelagic Readings of the Tropes of Métissage and Lost India
Moutoussamyâs poetry âconveys the strength of Caribbean writers to recreate, to speculate on questions of identity and to find a way of expressing pluralism and diversityâ, as it constructs a Guadeloupean cultural identity formed through diverse linguistic and ethnic components by drawing on memories
As indicated by the title Métisse fille, the collection pays homage to women, who play a major part in the authorâs global oeuvre. Significantly, while the collection is placed under the sign of métissage, in several poems the female figure appears as the poetâs Indian indentured ancestor, or as an anonymous daughter or mother; the latter in turn transforms alternately, or sometimes within the course of a same poem, into the island of Guadeloupe and the long-lost Indian motherland. Such emphasis on female family members is not surprising as islands have traditionally been gendered female. They have become sites for utopias, appear as providential nourishing mothers welcoming a shipwrecked sailor, or, in military and colonial conquests, metaphorically stand for female bodies to be conquered and exploited.17 While Moutoussamyâs collection incorporates the East Indian presence in his imagining of Guadeloupean métisse identity, his poems also search for an original matrixâa mother figure which might be India or Guadeloupe. This echoes what Ramasaran and Lewis have observed in the anglophone Caribbean, where Indianness is caught between an âauthenticâ culture from the Indian mainland and âa compromise within the local situationâ, a tension that similarly frames Indianité as âdistinctâ and âdifferentâ and may leave it marginal to Caribbean creolisation processes.18 Indeed, for a long time, the Asian presence remained peripheral to Caribbean identity and cultural discourses, even those that sought to integrate the regionâs multiple cultural components, such as Créolité and creolisation theories, which incorporated yet marginalised the East Indian presence.
This lasting marginalisation is a legacy of colonial policies. Following the British and the French abolitions of slavery, respectively in 1833 and 1848, about 560,000 indentured Indians were introduced in the Caribbean (Antilles and Guianas) from the late 1830s to the 1910s to replace former slaves and safeguard the plantation economy, after the failure of recruitments of Madeiran, Annamite, Chinese and even African indentured labour.20 42,873 Indian labourers reached Guadeloupe after the perilous crossing of the Kala pani or âdark watersâ, of whom approximately 60% came from Tamil Nadu.21 While some left to flee poverty, misery, famine or social constraints, many were deceived by fake promises of prosperity and comfort, some were even drugged, kidnapped and forcibly transported. Today the number of Guadeloupeans of Indian descent approximates 9% of the total population.22 The Indian labourersâ late arrival on the island, combined with cultural and religious practices that differed from those of groups already living in the Caribbean, meant they had to adapt to hierarchies shaped by the Creoles, the Europeans, and the Africans,
Indianité emerged in the 1970s, to counterbalance such marginalisation. The decade bore âpreliminary thoughts on what would eventually be conceptualized as Indianité [â¦] in the journal, Soleil indien, launched in March 1974â by Gilbert Francis Ponaman. Indianité was then defined in Michel Ponnamahâs 1985 interview for Antilla,23 and gained more visibility as a project to promote Antillean Indian culture thanks to Ernest Moutoussamyâs essay La Guadeloupe et son indianité (1987).24 For Martinican ethnologist Juliette Sméralda-Amon, Indianité served as an assertion of difference and even, to some extent, resistance, in the context of a French juridico-administrative system of integration favouring mono-identification in its definition of ânational identityâ and encouraging a âprocess of cultural uniformisationâ. Yet the concept has âexploded in a plurality of expressionsâ, and defendersânot necessarily of Indian originâhave different interests and objectives in mind, some of which might include reclaiming an atavistic Indian culture and identity.25 This helps explain why, to this day, Indianité remains entangled with fears of communitarianism, especially as cultural and religious (Hindu) elements often overlap in commemorative practices, and as the desire to recover a supposedly âauthenticâ Indian identity and culture continues to loom large.
Such a construction of Indianité appears clearly in several of Moutoussamyâs poems that express a longing for a distant ancestral Indian motherland. In particular, the poem âLibellule en Sariâ/âDragonfly in a Sariâ focuses on Pondicherry and the crossing of the Kala pani by the poetâs maternal foremother, Latchman Sounder n°24931, who is depicted as travelling onboard the first coolie ship that reached Guadeloupe in 1854, the Aurélie. The poet freely mixes imagination with family archives by reinventing the journey of this ancestor, whose registration number and name he found in public archives, even if her actual journey could only be partly recovered from orally transmitted family stories.26 Written in an elegiac and tragic tone, the ode pays homage to the uprooted Indian foremother, welcomed with disdain and insulting creole slursââMalaba, kouli, zandoliâââTied to the plantation house to bind sheaves of
Lost India is a common trope of diasporic Indian writing, and in this collection the poetic voice recreates minute objects, landscapes, sounds, rhythms or smells to conjure up the Indian motherland.29 But the latter appears frozen in time as the poetry often returns to ancestral Hindu myths and the Vedas thereby conferring a timelessness to India which contrasts sharply with the historical context and hardships of 19th-century indentureship. This is also at odds with the métissage and creolisation of Indian culture, which undeniably took place in the Antilles even on the plantations, where Indians and Africans came into contact, for, as Shalini Puri explains, colonists imposed new laws: âintended precisely to halt processes of cultural hybridization that were generating cross-ethnic imagined communities at the popular levelâ.30
The poem âInde je salue la partie divine qui est en toiâ/âIndia I salute the divine part in youâ is another telling example of how the Lost India trope participates in the reinvention of an atavistic Hindu culture, as it enumerates several Hindu rites and sacred textsââpujasâ, âvedasâ, âupanisadsâ, and so onâand deities.31 Yet, while seemingly monolithic, the Hindu culture the poem portrays is already mixed because it combines both mainstream and subaltern gods âMariaman and Shivaâ, âSarasvatî and Hanumanâ, and âMarudaïVirènâ.32 Lisa Outar
A parallel reflection is offered by Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who discusses how his early misreading of Indo-Trinidadian cultural expression changed on seeing the preparations for a Ramleela performance in the village of Felicity, Trinidad. Walcott expected a nostalgic evocation of a lost ancestral homeland, shaped by the âsigh of Historyâ, or filtered through the traumas of enslavement, indenture, and colonial violence. Yet what he encountered challenged that view: there was no sense of loss, but a living enactment of cultural continuity rooted in the present. âWhy should India be âlostââ, he later asked in his Nobel lectureââwhen none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not âcontinuingâ?â34 His revised understanding resists the idea that Indo-Caribbean culture is nostalgically derivative and asserts instead its dynamic role and central place within Caribbean cultural life.
While acknowledging the relevance of Outarâs analysis, I contend that an archipelagic reading of the collections of poetry Métisse fille and à la recherche de lâInde perdueâby tracing the networks of poetic tropes that connect themâ helps understand Indianité as intrinsically creolising in the Antilles, and the Indo-Antillean literary imaginary as an integral part of Caribbean creolisation aestheticsâa point also made by Atreyee Phukan with regard to Anglophone Indo-Caribbean literature.35 The connections thus woven, as I will demonstrate, are often tenuous filaments which can only be traced through dialogical micro-analyses of the poems and collections. Underneath mythical reinventions of an atavistic Indian (Hindu) culture, Moutoussamyâs poems also rely on historical archives, family stories and even Guadeloupean politics, which illustrate how India is being creolised and also participates in creolisation in the Antilles. This is shown by the poems âDragonfly in a Sariâ and âShandelia et la Guadeloupeâ/âShandelia and Guadeloupeâ.36 Both poems retrace, in lines
Additionally, as noted above, the poems can be read as ârepeating islandsâ, a term through which BenÃtez-Rojo argues that within the seeming disorder of the Caribbeanâthe regionâs discontinuous landmasses, diverse colonial histories, traditions, ethnic groups, languages and politicsâthere is an âislandâ of paradoxes that repeats itself and by so doing gives shape to a complex sociocultural archipelago.40 Indeed, each of the poems comprises complex networks of tropes that attest to a creolising Indianité and therefore works as a mise-en-abyme of the creolisation processes brought out from a contrapuntal reading of the two collections. Besides, when read together, the lines âRoche à Massalè, mandja, palpou, potouâ and âYou, woman of colombo and rottiâ (âDragonfly in Sariâ) find an echo in âYou courageously kept | Roche à massalè, mandja, lotti, colomboâ (âShandelia and Guadeloupeâ).41 Here the poems shift away from imagining an atemporal Indian motherland to a creolising Indianité by referring, in creolised Tamil and Hindi, to Indian food, spices and cooking utensils; this is a point I develop further below. The multiscale repetition of poetic tropesâand at times, even specific linesâwithin individual poems, between them, and across the collections, weaves a poetic archipelago that, I suggest, reflects the challenges of equally integrating the diverse socio-cultural components of Antillean society. Such difficulty is exemplified in the poemsâ oscillation between opposite understandings of memory and culture, that could be summed up in Glissantian terminology in the binary âroot identityâ vs ârelation identityâ.42 While the concepts of métissage and creolisation suggest that cultures, peoples, and memories are mixed and intertwined, the âMother Indiaâ trope points toward the atavistic culture of a mythic, eternal, and predominantly Vedic India. Not only do these paradoxes confirm the
2 Tidalectic Poetics and the Creolisation of the Kala Pani Trope
While waters and aquatic metaphors have long formed part of island culture and of Caribbean literatures, the Kala pani trope complicates these images given its socio-cultural, religious and historical connotations.44 Following Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, I consider these complications as âtidalecticâ interventions into the Kala pani trope which help ârecognize that the sea is for many a site of historical (and contemporary) trauma and drives much artistic work recuperating the trace of lost bodies of history.â45 For indentured Indians, crossing the Kala pani entailed a transgression of sacred Hindu norms, exposing them to the risks of caste and gender mixingâor miscegenationâand marked a profound rupture from a structured and familiar social order. Additionally, Kala pani âwas used by colonial masters and their second-order mediators [â¦] as âa structure of feelingâ to reinforce the hopelessness of their [the indentured Indiansâ] situation as bonded coolies once they had left their homeland. In other words, the Kala pani was both existential and a
While it is undeniable that many of Moutoussamyâs poems mobilise the Kala pani trope mostly to nostalgically dream of an eternal Indian motherland, the trope also points both to the continuation of life and new beginnings. For instance, the final lines of the poem âFor you Indiaâ, firmly invoke Hindu ancestral culture, rites, deities and symbols yet social and religious codes are also turned upside down as the coolie ship embraces together the âoutcastâ and the âBrahminâ and eventually generates a wisdom inclusive of all mankind:
Through a subtle shift from liquid imagery (the seas and blood) that evokes death and loss to allusions to earth and soil in the image of a âuniversal gardenâ, i.e., the Antillean garden creolised through Indic cosmology, the poem ends on the optimistic hope for a brighter life opened âby the light [â¦] that illuminates the pathsâ of the migrants in the Americas. In this way, Kala pani no longer signifies solely death and irretrievable loss. Rather is it reframed as the
Islands, archipelagos, seas, and water imagery recur in the poems, yet these images combine with references to earth, gardens, trees and the savane which the poet sees as a muse and a second mother.56 When mentioned in his poetry,
3 Humus and Silt: Multidirectional Flows of Indianité and Africanity
DeLoughrey observes that âGeologically and symbolically speaking, the earthâs surface cannot represent its deep history; the island poet must plumb the subterranean and the subaquatic layers of human and planetary change.â60 Moutoussamyâs poetic interplay of earth, soil, and vegetation with metaphors of liquid and water contributes to this âplumbingâ by fleshing out an archipelagic, multidirectional network of creolising cultures and memories, where Indianité and Africanity intertwine. This is exemplified through the recurring trope of âhumusâ in the poem âAntilles.â âHumusââthe product of decaying vegetationâbecomes a vessel for memories of both enslavement and indentureship: âThere is the humus of Delgrèsâs resistance, | There are the diamond words of Solitude | There is the fertile writing of Sidambarom.â61 Here, âhumusâ emerges as a
In Moutoussamyâs poetry, the Indian indentured migrant and her descendants are connected to Africa and India simultaneously: âChild of Africa and India without childhood | There was no astrolabe to measure my wanderingâ, âBut I never showed my distress | I knew that my umbilical cord held me in Pondicherryâ.65 The title of the poem, âShe and Iâ, centres on the male poet and an unidentified female figure, but the umbilical cord evoked here could be the poetâs or his anonymous foremotherâs. Significantly, the poetâs self-conscious affiliation with Africanity destabilises the seemingly single-rooted connection to Pondicherry and even creolises the idea of genetic attachment normally conveyed by the umbilical cord. These lines echo the opening of the poem: âI was a deportee three centuries old | I had left Gorée by the door of no return | And Pondicherry by the port of return with no return | Africans and Indians my ancestors had reddened the oceanâ.66 The French noun âdéportéeâ ending with a feminine âeâ indicates that these lines are voiced by the female ancestor, and they too deconstruct monocultural roots. Neither Africa nor India is privileged, rather this ancestor embodies the Guadeloupean island itself and the cultural cross-fertilisation it generates. These multiple affiliations are only possible because soil and earth are poetically construed, through their
Echoing the trope of âhumusâ, âsiltâ is another significant poetic trope shaping Moutoussamyâs archipelago of multidirectional memories and histories in his 2005 poetry collection Des îles, baisers de Dieu à la terre: âDear Guadeloupe | [â¦] Would you like to let the fertile and fraternal silt of a destiny forged in the crucible of métissage settle on your lands kneaded by Amerindian, African, European and Indian hands?â67 âSiltâ, or muddy sediments in a river, combine earth and water to form a fertile terrain for cross-cultural exchanges. This malleability has led to interpret âmudâ, which both âsiltâ and âhumusâ relate to, as a âliminal substance between land and waterâ which symbolically indicates the âopennessâ and âporosityâ of islands. Therefore, âmudâ appears as an interstitial space which can become an apt âcontact zoneâ for cultural mixing.68 Moreover, Moutoussamyâs poetry does not merely affiliate Indianité with Africanity, but it also operates a radical return to indigenous peoples. Conceptualisations of creoleness have sometimes developed at the expense of forcefully displacedâor exterminatedâindigenous populations. For instance, with regard to Guyanese indigenous peoples, Shona Jackson observes â[a]s the product of the labor of the enslaved and indentured in the Caribbean, the postcolonial state is perceived as an ethnic inheritance for Creoles, not for Indigenous Peoplesâ and the latter are kept in a state of âcontinued subordinationâ.69 Interestingly, Moutoussamyâs poetry goes against such marginalisation as it restores the sidelined Amerindian people and culture by highlighting how they keep shaping Antillean culture, albeit discreetly, regardless of the early decimation of Amerindian peoples, who had disappeared from Guadeloupe by the end of the 17th century.70 In the two collections under scrutiny, the ongoing influence
4 âCoui of Massalèâ: Archipelagic Creolisation of Amerindian and Indian Memories
In Métisse fille, Guadeloupe is often referred to as Karukera (for instance in the poems âMétisse filleâ, âFlacon de parfumsâ, âà la recherche de ton nomâ, âMa terre chérieâ).72 In addition, Amerindians (Caribs and Arawaksâspecifically the Tainos) are mentioned as an integral part of the islandâs métissage alongside Europeans, Africans and Indians (for example in âMétisse filleâ, âMa citéâ, âBouquet vertâ).73 As for the coui, the term appears discreetly in a poem whose creole title, âDeva-Yéâ, refers to the poetâs native village.74 The latter is depicted as a âcradleâ and a âcoui of tendernessâ. The reference to the âcouiâ comes after an allusion to African and Indian drums, the âkaâ and the âmatalomâ. These three elements merge to form the âfraternityâ that, for the poet, is the ânappy
In fact, evocations of food culture, and specifically of Indo-Antillean massalè and colombo, recur in Moutoussamyâs poems. Disseminated in his collections, these fragmented references shape the poetâs vision of Antillean society as creolising. Indo-Antillean food culture is so significant to his poetic imagining of Indianité that the poet expressed the wish for colomboâhe also uses the creole term âkolbouââto enter UNESCO World Heritage.80 More than a dishâsometimes vegetarian but customarily served with chicken or goatâcolombo, in its poetic evocations, encapsulates the Antillesâ capacity to welcome and mix cultures from diverse continents.81 In Guadeloupe, the main ingredient, âmassalèâ spices, was traditionally ground using the Indic technology of food preparation called in Tamil Ammi Kalloo: a flat mortar and pestle found everywhere in India under different names, known to Guadeloupeans as anmi kalou and more commonly in creole as âroche à massalèâ or âmassalè rockâ.82 Today, the domestic tool can be found in some Indo-Guadeloupean garden-kitchens where it is passed on from a generation to the next and stands, in memorial imaginings, as a last token of the indentured migrantsâ crossings
Through recurrent references to earth and vegetationââearthâ, âsapâ, âbarkâ, âplantationâ, âsugarcane sheavesâ, âstalkââthe poetry transforms the suffering of plantation labour under enslavement and indentureship into a prospective source of fraternity between African and Indian heritages. This symbolic alliance is embodied by the figures of Delgrès and Solitude on one side, and the Hindu goddess Sita on the other. Brought together in a shared gesture of resistance, they evoke the mutual tolerance that emerges from common struggles against exploitation. This vision of togetherness, a leitmotif in Moutoussamyâs oeuvreâincluding his political essaysâis metonymically expressed in âthe paste of [â¦] massalè spiced with toleranceâ.
The poetic voice insists that Sita remains the âdaughter of Indiaâ in Guadeloupe, even though âthe land of Ganeshâ is not ârecreate[d]â on the island. India is thus not recovered as origin, but reimagined through the Caribbean, forming what might be called an islanded India. Indianness becomes a creolising Indianité, challenging monolithic identity narrativesâwhether from India, where indenture was seen as caste degeneration, or from France, where it was equated with bondage. Beyond the uprooting caused by colonial exploitation, the poetry gestures toward new cultural crossings between African and Indian heritages, one of which resonates with a key trope in Moutoussamyâs work: music. In the passage above, this resonance is indirectly mediated through fire.
The term âsérénadeâ, while derived from French, carries layered creole meaningsâless an evening performance than a domestic ritual around the hearthâassociated with cooking, storytelling, and transmission. This tension underscores the fireâs symbolic ambivalence: it unites, but also carries
5 Indian Karukera and beyond: Poetics of a Multilingual and Multiscale Archipelago
Through interconnected networks of tropesâhumus, silt, coui, among othersâMoutoussamyâs poetry traces what Ette calls the ââvectorsâ of historically cumulative movements [that] intersect and overlapâ and âare always retrievableâ.90 Yet, such retrieval necessarily involves transformation, most clearly evidenced in the poemsâ multilingualism and their subtle yet meaningful use of Guadeloupean Creole. Though sparingly deployed, the creolised words chosen are layered with cultural and symbolic resonance, making Moutoussamyâs collections legible as âarchipelago[s] of multilingualismâ.91
The poem âVanakam Karukera!â exemplifies this multilingual creolisation, interweaving French, Indian, and Amerindian linguistic elements. Notably, the collection à la recherche de lâInde perdue, which includes the poem, ends with a glossary defining terms such as Karukera and vanakam.92 The repeated exclamation âKarukera!ââcried seven times by an unidentified Indian indentured foremother arriving in Guadeloupeâthus echoes like a refrain. The poem reads as both a plea and a dream: to integrate without erasing oneâs Indian heritage. Material and immaterial elements of Indian culture are imagined as transported across the seas: âAccept the âmangalsutraâ around your neckâ, pleads the speaker, conjuring the Hindu wedding necklace in hopes that Guadeloupe symbolically weds its Indian indentured arrivals. Deities, priests, trees, and food are invokedââShelter my gods and my massalèâ, âmy vatialousâ, âMake the sap of India rise in me | My fig-banyan tree of Pondicherryââmany already creolised through terms like massalè, mandja, semblani, and vatialou.93 Integration,
While the poems celebrate Guadeloupeâs pluricultural heritage, they also scale outward to connect it with other islands, archipelagos, and continents. The opening poems of Métisse fille remind us that Guadeloupe/Karukera is itself an archipelago, never a self-contained island. In âLa lune un soirâ/âThe Moon One Eveningâ, dedicated to Marie-Galante, and âUne île poèteâ/âA Poet Islandâ, which references also La Désirade and Les Saintes, Guadeloupe is imagined as âa bridge between drifting continentsâ.95 Another poem, âLaissez-moiâ/âLet meâ, refers to Guadeloupe as a ânecklace of fascinating islandsâ.96 If in âVanakam Karukera!â the mangalsutra symbolises integration through Indian imagery, here the necklace metaphor links womanhood, archipelagic identity, and beauty. These island-images never portray Guadeloupe as isolated, but rather as the âcradleâ97 of world civilisations, connected to the wider Caribbean meta-archipelago, and to shared colonial trauma: âFrom Cuba to Trinidad, your sisters | Covered in the rags of a shattered history | Resisted, their chests open to the bullets | Of the riflemen who shattered Africaâ.98
One might initially read à la recherche de lâInde perdue as a nostalgic attempt to retrieve âhistorico-genealogical links with an âoriginalââ India or imagine Guadeloupe as âan island world in which the island becomes the entire world pieced togetherâ.99 Does this suggest a poetic re-continentalisation? Or, as Ottmar Ette asks in his reading of Derek Walcottâs Nobel lecture, might each island and each poem be seen âas the âshardâ of a broken vessel [with] its fixed
Moutoussamyâs Guadeloupe is often envisioned as a coui, a calabash bowl where the fragments of great civilisationsâAmerindian, European, African, and Indianâmeet and mingle. His poems may suggest a desire to restore ancestral roots, particularly Indian ones, but they also question whether such roots can ever be singular or pure. Indeed, the Vedic references and motifs running through the collections underscore the enduring presence of Hinduism and Indian culture in Guadeloupe. Therefore, if, as Kabir argues, religious and culinary practices in the French Caribbean sometimes reflect a âdecreolisationâ of Indian cultureâan effort to distinguish Indo-Caribbean identity from a âdifferentially creolised cultural landscapeââ104 Moutoussamyâs poetic imagining of a Vedic India may be seen as contributing to such a process.
And yet, as this chapter has shown through a dialogic reading of Métisse fille and à la recherche de lâInde perdue, the unbound movement of free verse across and within these collections enables not a re-continentalisation, but a poetic ârecreolisationâ.105 His poems form multiscale, multilingual archipelagos through a complex network of tropes, in which India becomes a creolised islandâconnected to, informed by, and in dialogue with other islands and continents, most notably Africa. The multidirectional links between Pondicherry and Gorée, between Indianité and Africanity, re-centre indentureship as a foundational Caribbean experience, long marginalised in comparison to enslavement. An archipelagic reading of Moutoussamyâs work resists the binary logic of cultural competition, showing instead how histories, memories, and identities are entangled and continually reshaped across the Caribbean.
Acknowledgements
This chapter has been enriched by a series of interviews with the author, Ernest Moutoussamy, conducted over several years since the summer of 2018. I am sincerely grateful to him for his generosity and for the valuable insights he offered into his literary work, and his poetry in particular.
I also wish to acknowledge the LISAA (Littératures, Savoirs et Arts) research centre at Gustave Eiffel University for its support of the research underpinning this chapter.
Funding for Open Access provided by Gustave Eiffel University.
References
Alexandre, G., S. Asselin de Beauville, E. Shitalou, and M. F. Zebus, âAn overview of the goat meat sector in Guadeloupe: conditions of production, consumer preferences, cultural functions and economic implicationsâ, World, 10.5 (2008), 2â5.
Ashcroft, Bill, âArchipelago of dreams: utopianism in Caribbean literatureâ, Textual Practice, 30.1 (2016), 89â112.
BenÃtez Rojo, Antonio, âThe Repeating Islandâ, trans. by James Maraniss, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, 7.4 (1985), 430â52 (p. 432).
Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité.In Praise of Creoleness, édition bilingue, trans. By M.B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, [1989] 1993).
Beunel, Rosa. Creolising Archipelagos Gender, Race and Spatiality in Novels from the South-West Indian Ocean Islands (Kingâs College London, 2023), pp. 1â230, <https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/creolising-archipelagos> [accessed 13 July 2024].
Brathwaite, Kamau. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savacou Publishing, 1974).
Brathwaite, Kamau. âCaribbean Culture: Two Paradigms,â in Missile and Capsule, ed. by Jürgen Martini (Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen, 1983), pp. 9â54.
Breton, R.P. Raymond, Dictionnaire caraïbeâfrançais (1665), ed. presented and annotated by CELIA and GEREC (Paris: Karthala-I.R.D., 1999).
Carter, Marina, and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002).
Chaville, Antoinette, and Ernest Moutoussamy, La Cuisine indo-créole des Antilles (Pointe-à -Pitre: Jasor, 2022).
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Routes and roots: navigating Caribbean and Pacific island literatures, (Honolulu: University of Hawaiâi Press, 2017).
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., and Tatiana Flores. âSubmerged Bodies. The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Artâ, Environmental Humanities, 12.1 (2020), 132â65.
Ette, Ottmar, Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode, trans. by Vera M. Kutzinski (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016).
Gabrakova, Dennitza, The Unnameable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Boston: Brill, 2018).
Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Glissant, Ãdouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan Press, [1990] 1997).
Glissant, Ãdouard, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
Hall, Stuart. âCréolité and the Process of Creolization.â In The Creolization Reader. Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures, ed. by Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 26â38.
Hirsh, Marianne, <https://postmemory.net/> [accessed 13 July 2024].
Islam, Najnin, âCreolization.â Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South. <https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/creolization> [accessed 14 December 2025].
Jackson, Shona, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
Jiounandan, Lindy, âLes plantes médicinales utilisées par les descendants dâengagés indiens en Guadeloupe: étude bibliographique et enquête de terrainâ, Sciences du Vivant (2019). <https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-02417837> [accessed 13 July 2024].
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, âBeyond Créolité and Coolitude, The Indian on the Plantation: Recreolization in the Transoceanic Frameâ, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4.2 (2020), 174â93.
Lacour, Auguste, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, vol.3 : 1798â1803, Book IX, Chapter VI, preface by Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande (Basse-Terre: EDCA, [1858]1976).
Lal, Brij V., Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Australian National University, 2001).
MartÃn-i-Pardo, Meritxell, âColombo cabrior vegetarian meal: where in lies the power?â Anthropology of Food, 5 (2006), <https://doi.org/10.4000/aof.89> [accessed 13 July 2024].
Mishra, Vijay, âTheorizing the Troubled Black Watersâ, in Kalapani Crossings. Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from Indiaâs Perspective, ed. by Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak (Delhi: Routledge, 2021), pp. 19â30.
Mohammed, Shanaaz, âDisarticulating Indianité: Re-imagining the motherland in Ernest Moutoussamyâs Chacha and Sossoâ, Romance Notes, 57.2 (2017), 221â32.
Moutoussamy, Ernest, La Guadeloupe et son indianité (Paris: Ãditions Caribéennes, 1987).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Faune, Flore. Espèces Rares du Palais-Bourbon (Paris: Club des Poètes, 1994).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Métisse fille (Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge Ãditions, 2001).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2004).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Des îles, baisers de Dieu à la terre (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2005).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Peuple: Moun Gwadloup! (Pointe-Ã -Pitre: Jasor, 2017).
Moutoussamy, Ernest, Ma savane natale (Pointe-Ã -Pitre: Jasor, 2022).
Murugaiyan, Appasamy. âChants tamouls Aux Antilles: un patrimoine entre écrit et oralâ, (2011). <hal-01191754>.
Outar, Lisa, âLâInde Perdue, LâInde Retrouvée (India lost, India found): representations of Francophone Indo-Caribbeans in Maryse Condéâs Crossing the mangrove and Ernest Moutoussamyâs A la recherche de lâInde perdueâ, South Asian Diaspora, 6.1 (2014), 47â61.
Phukan, Atreyee. Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2022).
Ponnamah, Michel, Antilla, n°159, 12â19 juillet 1985.
Pratt, Marie-Louise, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (New York, Routledge, 2008).
Pugh, Jonathan, âIsland Movements: Thinking with the Archipelagoâ, Island Studies Journal, 8.1 (2013), 9â24.
Puri, Shalini, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Ramasaran, Dave and Linden F. Lewis, Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018).
Rojo, Antonio BenÃtez, trans. by James Maraniss. âThe Repeating Island.â New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, 7.4 (1985), 430â52.
Rothberg, Michael, âIntroduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to NÅuds de Mémoireâ, in NÅuds de Mémoire. Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture, ed. by Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman, Yales French Studies, 118/119 (2010), 3â12.
Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (California: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Rothberg, Michael, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019).
Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981â1991 (London: Viking, 1991).
Schnakenbourg, Christian, âLâImmigration Indienne en Guadeloupe (1848â1923). Coolies, Planteurs et Administration Colonialeâ, Les collections patrimoniales de Manioc, (2005). <ID : 10670/1.2t0pb1> [accessed 13 July 2024].
Schwarz Bart, André, La Mûlatresse Solitude. (Paris: Points, [1972] 2015).
Sharpe, Jenny, Allegories of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Sidambarom, Henry, Procès Politique. Contestation des droits électoraux opposée par le Gouverneur de la Guadeloupe, M. le Vicomte de la Loyère, aux fils dâHindous nés à la Guadeloupe (Bordeaux: Ãditions Bergeret, 1904â1906).
Singaravelou, Les Indiens de la Guadeloupe. Ãtude de Géographie Humaine (Bordeaux: Deniau Frères, 1975).
Sméralda-Amon, Juliette, La Société Martiniquaise entre Ethnicité et Citoyenneté (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2008).
Stephanides, Stephanos, and Susan Bassnett, âIslands, Literature, and Cultural Translatabilityâ, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Hors série (2008), 5â21.
Stratford, Elaine, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko and Andrew Harwood, âEnvisioning the Archipelagoâ, Island Studies Journal, 6.2 (2011), 113â30.
Torabully, Khal, Cale dâEtoiles, Coolitude (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Azalées Editions, 1992).
Toumson, Roger, coord., Les Indes Antillaises. Présence et situation des communautés indiennes en milieu caribéen (Paris: LâHarmattan, 1994).
Vergès, Françoise, âWandering Souls and Returning Ghosts: Writing the History of the Dispossessedâ, Yales French Studies, 118/119 (2010), 137â54.
Walcott, Derek, âThe Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memoryâ, The New Republic, (28 Dec. 1992), 26â32.
Weber, Jacques, âLa vie quotidienne à bord des âcoolie shipsâ à destination des Antilles. Traite des Noirs et âcoolie tradeâ: la traverséeâ, in Les Indes Antillaises. Présence et situation des communautés indiennes en milieu caribéen (Paris: LâHarmattan, 1994), pp. 5â54.
Zanoaga, Teodor-Florin, âMots dâorigine amérindienne du français régional des Antilles dans un corpus de littérature contemporainâ, Ãédille, revista de estudios franceses, 6 (2010), 257â75.
The word Karukera is commonly translated as âthe island of beautiful watersâ, though research suggests the original Amerindian name for Guadeloupe referred to the archipelagoâs gum trees. A key source for these interpretations is Raymond Bretonâs Dictionnaire caraïbeâfrançais (1665), the only surviving record of the Amerindian language once spoken in the Lesser Antilles. This work was edited and annotated by CELIA and GEREC (Paris: KarthalaâI.R.D., 1999). Variants of the name include Caloucarea, associated with Basse-Terre, and Cibuqueira, âthe island of gum treesâ, referring to Grande-Terre. The latter derives from chibou (âwhite gum treeâ, Breton, p. 258) and acaéra (âislandâ or âcountryâ, Breton, p. 5). Other recorded forms include Carucueria, Carucueira, Caracueira, Queraqueira, and Caraquéira. Each islet of the Guadeloupean archipelago also had its own nameâfor instance, Les Saintes were known as Caaroucaéra. Although Karukéra is the spelling used in Moutoussamyâs French poetry, this chapter adopts the more common unaccentuated form, Karukera, which remains the most widely remembered name for Guadeloupe.
Moutoussamyâs poetry has not been translated into English, so all translations of the poems are mine. Translation of the epigraphs: âYou are a cradle for all children | You are a bed for all men | Karukera! | Travelling island carried by all the oceans | From the Santa Maria sailed by Columbus | To the Aurélie that came from Pondicherry laden with Indiansâ, Ernest Moutoussamy, Métisse fille (Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2001), p. 24. And âIndia, my mother!â [â¦] | Iâll plant your story in the soil lent to me | To welcome you on the threshold of the huts | And indianise the dawning tomorrowsâ, Ernest Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2004), p. 24.
Jonathan Pugh, âIsland Movements: Thinking with the Archipelagoâ, Island Studies Journal, 8.1 (2013), 9â24 (p. 10). Pugh introduces the concept of âmetamorphosisâ in contrast to the mimetic understanding of interrelatedness between islands within an archipelago implied by Benitez Rojoâs ârepeating islandâ. Instead, by drawing inspiration from Derek Walcottâs writings, he proposes that âthinking with the archipelago highlights how island-to-island movements are generative of âcreativityâ because they âadapt, transfigure and transform their inheritances into original formâ, Ibid.
Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Elizabeth McMahon, Carol Farbotko and Andrew Harwood, âEnvisioning the Archipelagoâ, Island Studies Journal, 6.2 (2011), 113â30 (p. 118).
Ãdouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Ann Arbor (MI: The University of Michigan Press, [1990] 1997).
See Pugh, âIsland Movementsâ, p. 10; see also footnote 3.
Antonio BenÃtez Rojo, trans. by James Maraniss, âThe Repeating Islandâ, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, 7.4 (1985), 430â52 (p. 432).
Stratford, Baldacchino, McMahon, Farbotko and Harwood, âEnvisioning the Archipelagoâ, p. 114.
On the competition that may emerge between enslavement and indentureship memory politics, see for instance Jacques Weberâs staunch rejection of scholarship and artworks that present indentureship as âa new slaveryâ: Jacques Weber, âLa vie quotidienne à bord des âcoolie shipsâ à destination des Antilles. Traite des Noirs et âcoolie tradeâ: la traverséeâ, in Les Indes Antillaises. Présence et situation des communautés indiennes en milieu caribéen (Paris : LâHarmattan, 1994), pp. 35â54. See also Brij Lalâs rebuttal of the âindenture-as-slavery paradigmâ in Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University, 2001), pp. IXâX.
On multidirectionality, see Michael Rothberg, âIntroduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to NÅuds de Mémoireâ, in NÅuds de Mémoire. Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture, ed. by Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman, Yale French Studies, n° 118/119, (2010), 3â12 (p. 7); see also Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (California: Stanford University Press, 2009). For the latter two quotations, see Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 20 and 2.
See Ottmar Ette, Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode, trans. by Vera M. Kutzinski (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), p. 85. See also Godfrey Baldacchino, ed. A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader (Charlottetown, Canada, Institute of Island Studies University of Prince Edward Island, 2007).
I borrow the idea of ârepetitionâ from Benitez-Rojoâs âThe Repeating Islandâ; however, whereas in Rojoâs usage the term was used by dominant colonial powers to duplicate the mainlandâs political and economic structures across their empire and thus maintain control colonised islands, I use it to refer to quasi-similar repetitions of poetic tropes. For âself-similarityâ, I rely on Etteâs use of âfractal geometryâ to portray the Caribbean (I)sland-worlds and their literary imaginary, see Ette, Writing-between-Worlds, pp. 85â88.
Stephanos Stephanides, and Susan Bassnett, âIslands, Literature, and Cultural Translatabilityâ, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Hors série (2008), 5â21 <https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.212> (p. 8).
I return later to the concepts of âvectorsâ and âvectoralityâ borrowed from Ottmar Ette, p. 96.
Stephanides and Bassnett, p. 10. The critics refer here to Glissantâs poetics of relation.
Edouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris : Gallimard, 1996), p. 92.
On seas, ships and islands gendered female see Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and roots: navigating Caribbean and Pacific island literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaiâi Press, 2017), p. 43.
Dave Ramasaran and Linden F. Lewis, Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), p. 5.
Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité. In Praise of Creoleness, édition bilingue, trans. By M.B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, [1989] 1993), p. 13. For the second quote, see, Shanaaz Mohammed, âDisarticulating Indianité: Re-imagining the motherland in Ernest Moutoussamyâs Chacha and Sossoâ, Romance Notes, 57.2 (2017), 221â32 (p. 223). Stuart Hall, âCréolité and the Process of Creolizationâ, in The Creolization Reader. Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures, ed.by Robin Cohen and Paola Toninato (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 26â38. For recent work on the marginalisation of the Asian presence in Créolité and creolisation theories see: Ananya Jahanara Kabir, âBeyond Créolité and Coolitude, The Indian on the Plantation: Recreolization in the Transoceanic Frameâ, Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4.2 (2020), 174â193, and Najnin Islam, âCreolization.â Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South <https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/creolization> [accessed 14 December 2025].
Singaravelou, Les Indiens de la Guadeloupe. Ãtude de Géographie Humaine (Bordeaux: Deniau Frères, 1975), p. 13.
For the figures quoted, see Christian Schnakenbourg, âLâImmigration Indienne en Guadeloupe (1848â1923). Coolies, Planteurs et Administration Colonialeâ, Les collections patrimoniales de Manioc, (2005), p. 563 and p. 501.
Estimations may vary given that French censuses do not keep ethnic records. This figure is provided online <https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/guadeloupe-population> [accessed 14 December 2025].
Le Soleil indien is quoted in Mohammed, âDisarticulating Indianitéâ, p. 221. Michel Ponnamah, Antilla, n°159, 12â19 juillet 1985 is quoted in Juliette Sméralda-Amon, La Société Martiniquaise entre Ethnicité et Citoyenneté (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2008), p. 7.
Moutoussamy, La Guadeloupe et son indianité (Paris: Ãditions Caribéennes, 1987).
Juliette Sméralda-Amon, p. 8 and pp. 13â14.
This information is based on conversations with the author between 2019 and 2023. The family stories indicate that his ancestor would have first been to Reunion before migrating to Guadeloupe and did not actually come onboard the Aurélie.
For long quotes and complex translations, the French source will be provided in footnotes. Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 12: âTe voici orpheline de ton pays | Toute nue au cÅur des Amériques, | Au pied de lâéchafaud dressé pour décapiter lâInde | LâInde des Védas, lâInde du Mahabharata | LâInde de Ãakyamuni, lâInde de Ganeshâ.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 13.
In this volume, Ananya Kabir also evokes how Pondicherry came to embody the grandeur of âLâInde perdueâ in Franco-Pondicherrian literature; see Ananya Kabir, âPorous Coastline, Creolising Memory. Kochi, Pondicherry and the Archipelago of Fragmentsâ.
Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 44.
Moutoussamy, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 15, 16 and 18.
Moutoussamy, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 13, 17 and 19.
Lisa Outar, âLâInde Perdue, LâInde Retrouvée (India lost, India found): representations of Francophone Indo-Caribbeans in Maryse Condéâs Crossing the mangrove and Ernest Moutoussamyâs à la recherche de lâInde perdueâ, South Asian Diaspora, 6.1 (2014), 47â61, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2013.828501 (p. 48).
Derek Walcott, âThe Antilles: Fragments of epic memoryâ, The New Republic (28 December 1992), 26â32 (p. 27).
Atreyee Phukan, Contradictory Indianness: Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022), p. 2.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, pp. 12â13 and Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 93.
âThe Dragonflyâ in Ernest Moutoussamy, Faune, Flore, Espèces Rare du Palais-Bourbon (Paris: Collection Club des Poètes, 1994), pp. 79â80. The poem is dedicated to Christiane Taubira, a French politician and former Member of Parliament for French Guiana (1993â2012), who initiated the 2001 law recognizing slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. French source quote: âLibellule des fleuves, des Noirs, des Indiens, | Petite fille au grade de général | Elle a appris à dessiner des courbes de tous les degrés | Pour chérir son idéalâ.
Ernest Moutoussamy, La Guadeloupe et son indianité, p. 13: âLâindianité perçue non pas en termes de cloisonnement ou dâopposition, mais en termes dâunité dans la diversité au plan de lâaffirmation de la personnalité des peuples concernés, doit ouvrir encore plus le champ du syncrétisme qui caractérise la plupart des nations de la Caraïbeâ.
Roger Toumson, coord., Les Indes Antillaises. Présence et situation des communautés indiennes en milieu caribéen (Paris: Harmattan, 1994).
BenÃtez Rojo, pp. 430â52.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 12: âToi, femme du colombo et du rottiâ; Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 93: âTu gardas courageusement | Roche à massalè, mandja, lotti, colomboâ.
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan Press, [1990] 1997), pp. 143â44.
Phukan, p. 6.
Kabir, âBeyond Créolité and Coolitudeâ, p. 186.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, âSubmerged Bodies. The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Artâ, Environmental Humanities, 12.1 (2020), 132â65 (p. 135).
Vijay Mishra, âTheorizing the Troubled Black Watersâ, in Kalapani Crossings. Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from Indiaâs Perspective, ed. by Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak (Delhi: Routledge, 2021), pp. 19â30, (p. 20).
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 13: âPondichéry! jâai peur de Kalapani | Jâentends hurler les démons | Mes regrets, comme des roches sur les rives du mal | Ãcrasent les émotions qui se lèvent en moiâ; and p. 17: âInde ! Là -bas où le soleil fait lâamour avec Kalapani | Jâai peur de te trahir | Je veux rester ta fille | Aide-moi à emporter tes dieuxâ.
Moutoussamy, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 18: âLa mer vole ma jeunesse | Kalapani me fait des grimaces de deuilâ.
Vijay Mishra, âTheorizing the Troubled Black Watersâ, in Kalapani Crossings. Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from Indiaâs Perspective, ed. by Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak (Delhi: Routledge, 2021), pp. 19â30, (p. 20).
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 28: âLâHorizon croupissait dans le noir | Ma salive une écume amère. | Traversée dâenfer, odyssée maudite | Gouvernail drogué par le profit | Et mon corps et mes bras inlassables poulies | Font vaciller mon âme dans les meurtrissuresâ. On tidalectics, see Kamau Brathwaite, âCaribbean Culture: Two Paradigms,â in Missile and Capsule, ed. by Jürgen Martini (Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen, 1983), pp. 9â54. See Pugh, Island Movementsâ, p. 10.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 18â19: âTon gopuram de Kanchipuram ouvre le ciel | Il alerte les dieux | Fait jaillir le sang de ta civilisation sur lâhumanité | Et la lumière des Upanisads éclaire les chemins | Pour le paria et le brahmane sous toutes les latitudes | Inde Mère ! | Accompagne-moi là -bas dans les Amériques | Avec Garuda, Nadan et Surya | Je porterai le trident de MadouraïVirèn | Pour briser la malédiction des fauves | Et voir pousser ta sagesse dans le jardin universel.â
See Lal, p. x; and Marina Carter, and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002), p. 17. See also Khal Torabully, Cale dâEtoiles, Coolitude (Saint-Denis, Réunion: Azalées Editions, 1992).
Phukan, p. 43.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Glissant, âThe Open Boatâ in Poetics of Relation, p. 7. Kabir highlights a difference between Glissantâs âcryâ which corresponds to a âstifled utteranceâ and a traumatic experience and Coolitudeâs use of the phrase âmurmur from the holdâ to suggest that the indentured worker had some mobility and could even speak onboard the ship when leaving India, see Kabir, âBeyond Créolité and Coolitudeâ, p. 182.
I borrow and expand on the term âinterculturationâ used by Brathwaite in his definition of creolisation processes. For him, âinter/culturationâ refers to âan unplanned, unstructured but osmotic relationshipâ that proceeds from the âyokeâ of âac/culturationâ; see Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savacou Publishing, 1974), p. 6.
I use the French term âsavaneâ, which the poet employs to refer to the place he grew up in, located on a plantation site in his hometown; whereas in mainstream English the term âsavannahâ usually refers to large-scale grassland, and in places such as Trinidad it carries yet other connotations, referring namely to the main grassy space in the centre of an old town. See Ernest Moutoussamy, Ma savane natale (Pointe-Ã -Pitre: Jasor, 2022).
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism 1981â1991 (London: Viking, 1991).
Marianne Hirsh, <https://postmemory.net/> [accessed 13 July 2024].
The terminology comes from Glissantâs opposition of ârootâ and ârhizomeâ in âErrantry, Exileâ in Poetics of Relation, pp. 11â22.
DeLoughrey, Routes and roots, p. 17.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 11: âIl y a lâhumus de la résistance de Delgrès, | Il y a les paroles de diamant de Solitude | Il a lâécriture fertile de Sidambarom.â
For more on Sidambaromâs electoral fight see Henry Sidambarom, Procès Politique. Contestation des droits électoraux opposée par le Gouverneur de la Guadeloupe, M. le Vicomte de la Loyère, aux fils dâHindous nés à la Guadeloupe (Bordeaux: Ãditions Bergeret, 1904â1906). While few historical facts are known regarding Solitude (mainly from Auguste Lacour, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, vol.3: 1798â1803, Book IX, Chapter VI, preface by Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande (Basse-Terre: EDCA, [1858] 1976), p. 311), she enjoys national and international recognition. Solitude (1772â1802), born Rosalie, is mainly remembered today under the name âMulâtresse Solitudeâ thanks to Andre Schwarz-Bartâs novel of the same name, published in 1972. On 10 May 2022 Solitudeâs statue was unveiled by the Mayor of Paris and former PM Jean-Ayrault, President of the FME (Fondation pour la Mémoire de lâEsclavage, Foundation for the Memory of Slavery) in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris. It is the first statue of a black woman in Paris. The FME also co-produced the Pantheon temporary exhibition âDare Freedomâ (9 November 2023â11 February 2024) devoted to heroes of the fight against enslavement. Interestingly, the short black-and-white documentary film introducing major figures of this fight includes two slides dedicated to Sidambarom, thus pointing to a budding acknowledgment of how indentureship should be integrated into French collective memory alongside enslavement.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 53â55. While âmulattoâ is often considered pejorative, the French nickname âMulâtresseâ given to Solitude does not bear this negative connotation. The semblanni also spelt samblani (from Tamil sambirani also known as sambrany/i) is a Hindu ceremony in homage to oneâs ancestors. It is practiced in the Antilles and has also influenced the Reunionese servis kabaré.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 55 : âJe tâenveloppe de mon sari de lâInde | Et te parfume de mon semblanni trempé de fraternitéâ; and Métisse fille, p. 11: âAux Antilles, on est tous des rescapés dâaventuresâ.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 34: âEnfant de lâAfrique et de lâInde sans enfance | Il nây avait pas dâastrolabe pour mesurer mon erranceâ, âMais je ne montrais jamais ma détresse | Je savais que mon cordon ombilical | Me retenait à Pondichéryâ.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 34: âJâétais une déportée veille de trois siècles | Jâavais quitté Gorée par la porte du non-retour | Et Pondichéry par le port du retour sans retour | Africains et Indiens mes ancêtres avaient rougi lâocéanâ.
Ernest Moutoussamy, âLettre à mon îleâ, in Des îles, baisers de Dieu à la terre (Paris: LâHarmattan, 2005), p. 12: âChère Guadeloupe | [â¦] Voudrais-tu laisser sâinstaller sur tes terres pétries par des mains amérindiennes, africaines, européennes et indiennes, le limon fertile et fraternel dâun destin forgé dans le creuset du métissage ?â
Rosa Beunel, Creolising Archipelagos Gender, Race and Spatiality in Novels from the South-West Indian Ocean Islands (Kingâs College London, 2023), <https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/creolising-archipelagos>, pp. 1â230 (p. 100 and p. 104). I expand on the term âcontact zoneâ used in Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (New York, Routledge, 2008), p. 8. For Pratt, the âcontact zoneâ is âthe space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relationsâ.
Shona Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 4 and p. 5.
The last surviving Amerindians fled to Dominica, where the British Crown allocated them a reservation in 1903. Today, approximately 3,000 descendants of the Amerindians reside there. According to oral testimony collected in May 2025, some individuals in Guadeloupe may also trace part of their ancestry to Amerindian forebears.
Moutoussamy sometimes uses the spelling âkwiâ (used in Guadeloupean, Martinican and Haitian Creoles) for instance in Ma savane natale, p. 9. See also, Ernest Moutoussamy, Peuple: Moun Gwadloup! (Pointe-Ã -Pitre: Jasor, 2017), p. 12. Etymologically, coui comes from the word âcujeteâ in Tupi-Guarani (sometimes abbreviated as Tupi). Although Tupi-Guarani languages are not attested as having been spoken in Guadeloupe, the term circulated locally through inter-Amerindian contact. âCujeteâ can be broken down into âkuyaâ (which gave coui or âcalabashâ) and âeteâ (âlargeâ). The Tupi languages form a family of Amerindian languages comprising around seventy languages; the most represented sub-family of these languages is Tupi-Guarani. In Guadeloupe, the coui is still used in the kitchen alongside other containers in particular to macerate meat and fish. The calabash is also used almost everywhere in Africa, where it is a symbol of femininity and fecundity. In the Antilles, the coui is also used in arts and crafts and in music. For instance, the emptied and dried calabash is filled with grains and used (in varied shapes and sizes) as a âchachaâ instrument which frequently accompanies the âkaâ (creole drum of African origin) in the Antilles traditional music (for instance during Carnival).
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 17, pp. 24â25, pp. 28â29 and pp. 36â37.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 17, p. 18 and p. 23.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 38.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 86: âJâai enfermé mon Inde dans mon coui | Coui de lâAurélie, coui de mon coeur, coui de ma main | Coui de mes yeux, coui de ma vie | Calebasse dâOrient pleine de mystères et de lumière | Portée par lâocéan du Mahabharata | Inde ! Ton Gange coule en moi | Mon corps devient une baie infinieâ.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, âVanakam Karukéra !â, pp. 37â38: âJe refuse le néant de lâhistoire | Ma chair de massalè dans ta végétation océane | Remplit ton coui dâépices et de rosée.â Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 36â38. âVanak[k]amâ is a greeting from Tamil.
The calabash tree was introduced from tropical America in the Antilles and other tropical countries around the world, see Teodor-Florin Zanoaga, âMots dâorigine amérindienne du français régional des Antilles dans un corpus de littérature contemporainâ, Ãédille, revista de estudios franceses, 6 (2010), 257â75 (pp. 265â66).
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 43.
See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) quoted in DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene, p. 44.
Antoinette Chaville, and Ernest Moutoussamy, La Cuisine indo-créole des Antilles (Pointe-à -Pitre: Jasor, 2022), p. 11.
See MartÃn-i-Pardo, Meritxell, âColombocabriorvegetarianmeal:whereinliesthepower?â Anthropology of Food 5 (2006). <https://doi.org/10.4000/aof.89> [accessed 13 July 2024]; Alexandre, G., S. Asselin de Beauville, E. Shitalou, and M. F. Zebus, âAn overview of the goat meat sector in Guadeloupe: conditions of production, consumer preferences, cultural functions and economic implicationsâ, World, 10.5 (2008), 2â5.
For an explanation of the name âanmi kalouâ see Chaville and Moutoussamy, La Cuisine indo-créole des Antilles, p. 10.
Lindy Jiounandan, âLes plantes médicinales utilisées par les descendants dâengagés indiens en Guadeloupe: étude bibliographique et enquête de terrainâ, Sciences du Vivant (2019), pp. 235â36. <https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-02417837> [accessed 13 July 2024]; Chaville and Moutoussamy, pp. 10â11.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 25â26: âLâAurélie qui mâa jetée sur les rivages | Rivage de clous, rivage dâépines | Rivage de mains cassées | Ne mâa laissé quâune roche à massalè | Câest toute mon histoire, câest ma langue | Câest le berceau de mes dieuxâ.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 93: âTu gardas courageusement | Roche à massalè, mandja, lotti, colomboâ.
My translation of Jiounandan, p. 73.
Chaville and Moutoussamy, pp. 9â10.
The géreur was the plantation overseer in the French Antilles, a figure associated with labour control and exploitation in the context of slavery and, later, during the period of indenture.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 71â72 : âSîta ma mère [â¦] Tu ne recréas pas la terre de Ganesh | Mais la sève de Delgrès et de Solitude | Remplaça dans tes bras le pays de Râma. | Ãcorce de vie dans les affres de la plantation | Tu repoussas les monstres enragés de profits | Et la pâte de ton massalè épicée de tolérance | Sur les trois pierres de ton feu en sénérade | Conquit les profondeurs de lâîle avec le colombo | Tu plias sous le poids des gerbes de canne à sucre | Tu pleuras quand le géreur amputait ta journée | Pour un tronçon manquant parmi les milliers de la tâche | Mais tu demeuras toujours toi, | Sîta, fille de lâInde!â.
Ottmar Ette, Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode, trans. by Vera M. Kutzinski (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), p. 96.
Dennitza Gabrakova, The Unnameable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Boston: Brill, 2018), p. 12.
Moutoussamy, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue, pp. 98 and 99.
Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 36: âAccepte à ton cou le âmangalsutraââ; âAbrite mes dieux et mon massalèâ; and p.37 : âFait monter moi la sève de lâInde | Mon figuier-banian de Pondichéryâ. On the etymology of âvatialouâ (from Tamil vÄttiyÄr) and the role of âvatialousâ in Antillean society, see Appasamy Murugaiyan, âChants tamouls Aux Antilles: un patrimoine entre écrit et oralâ, (2011). <hal-01191754>.
Moutoussamy, Ã la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 38.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 9: âTu te dresses sur les lèvres de la mer des Antillesâ, âTes messages à feuilles ouvertes | Font palpiter la Désirade, Marie-Galante et les Saintes | Qui dans la valse de lâarchipel sur les eaux | Frappent à la porte du destin pour grandir.â And âTu es un pont entre les continents en dériveâ, p.10.
Moutoussamy, Métisse fille, p. 14: âun collier dâîles fascinantesâ.
Occurrences of the word âcradleâ can be found in the poem âFlacon de Parfumsâ/âPerfume flaskâ: âKarukéra ! [â¦] You are a cradle for all childrenâ, Métisse fille, p. 24 and in âLettre à mon îleâ/âLetter to my islandâ: âAnd you shine to spread peace from your open hands | On the august cradle of your memoryâ in Moutoussamy, Des îles, baisers de Dieu à la terre, p. 8.
âMon île dâexilâ in Moutoussamy, à la recherche de lâInde perdue, p. 43: âDe Cuba à Trinidad, tes sÅurs | Couvertes des haillons dâune histoire défoncée | Ont résisté la poitrine ouverte aux balles | Des tirailleurs qui brisèrent lâAfriqueâ.
Ette, p. 99.
Ette, p. 99.
Walcott, p. 27.
Walcott, p. 27.
Ette, p. 99.
Kabir, p. 188.
Kabir, pp. 187â88.
Moutoussamy, Ma savane natale, p. 136.