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kreoling sisters: (un)intimate relationships, child marriages and women spirits
Abstract
The non-fiction piece, ‘kreoling sisters’, explores the overlapped histories of slavery and indenture in the Indian Ocean context, Mauritius in particular. It merges memoir writing, indenture studies and Black study and theory to discuss antiblack/antikreol racism and unfreedom during the critical historical time between the beforelife of indenture (that is slavery) and the afterlife of slavery during indenture. ‘kreoling sisters’ unearths a personal story that touches on the (un)intimacy or unofficialised intimacy between Black mothers and men of Indian descent and their Black-Indo/Kreol children. The aim is to discuss the entanglement between freedom, intimacy, slavery, antiblackness and indenture and disrupt the official, institutional, colonial and patriarchal narratives. The question the piece finally asks is how intimacy and love can exist, with the thought of what freedom could have been in the colony and could be in contemporary times. ‘kreoling sisters’ wishes to envision how Indenture studies can engage with a Black philosophy of freedom and abolition, that is the abolition of the plantation police, prison and property, inherited from colonialism.
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Notes
In her poetic teachings, Lorde recollects how Carriacou women who love each other not only survive life's hardships but create joy in the fellowship of each other.
Spillers (2017) discusses the aftermath of the notion of partus sequitur ventrem in the Americas, which proclaimed that the child born of an enslaved mother and a slave owner would also be enslaved by the father.
See Hartman (2019), on Black intimate life and the ghetto as a continuation of the plantation structure.
I draw from the work of Hartman on Black pain here.
For Spillers, public traditions of courtship assured the acknowledgement of an intimate relation unfolding, and are normalised as a kind of knowledge, or an epistemology distributed to members of a class.
It reminded me how, in Lose Your Mother, Hartman reviews her preliminary notes to look for a great-great-grandmother that she was convinced she had encountered. ‘It was as if I had conjured her up. Was my hunger for the past so great that I was now encountering ghosts?‘ (2008a: 18).
Hartman (2008b) discusses critical speculation and fabulation as a method to write the silences in the official archives into history. See also Hartman (2021).
Creolizing Europe, Creolizing Hegel, Creolizing Political Theory, the list of books is endless and has nothing to do with the historical violence of the plantation on the Creole and Kreol children of enslaver fathers and Black mothers.
See the work of Sylvia Wynter on autopoiesis (McKittrick 2015).
In ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Hartman asks ‘Must the future of abolition first be performed on the page?‘(2008b). See also the work of Ruth Gilmore, Rinaldo Walcott and Ananya Roy on the abolition of prison and property.