Lubna Alli

As someone of Guyanese descent, in particular identifying as an Indo-Guyanese Muslim woman that thas has experienced dispossession in Guyana, I found the discourse in this reading entirely captivating. There was a familiarity with the context (especially with the symbolism of the seawall) but also a much-welcomed respite from the informal community gossip about racial gendered violence in Guyana to a much more structured academic approach. 

Having left Guyana at the age of 7, dissecting Cordis’ work made me feel like I was learning a lot more about the place I once called home than I thought I knew about through lived experience. The one line that resonated with me most, almost sending cold shivers up my spine was, “The very sea they believed would conceal her death refused to accept her.” (Cordis, 2019). Like this quote references, I also have vivid memories of going to visit the seawall in Guyana, climbing the rocks to find the perfect seat to sit next to my dad and watch the waves crash onto the shore. As much as it was a place of fond memories, it is also a place I was taught to fear for there were stories about the strong currents pulling people in and never returning them home. Like Cordis talks about, “The seawall is also a place of death, the killing fields where the dispossessed bodies of other Guyanese women and men have been similarly discovered and scrutinized in political discourse as indicative of the country’s collective social decay and psyche of violence, viewed as impediments to social and economic advancement.” Later on, in the reading, she goes on to use the example of the Buxton Butcher as her main point of reference for the issues of domestic violence in Guyana. 

 I remember hearing the story about the Buxton Butcher when it happened. In fact, Buxton, a predominantly Afro-Guyanese village, was a place in Guyana that I was always taught to be fearful of because of the ongoing violence and tensions between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese peoples. I grew up in the predominantly Indo-Guyanese village of Enmore, on the East Coast of the Demerara River, which meant that driving through Buxton was a requirement to get into town. Throughout my time in Guyana and even onto now, there have always been tensions between Indo- and Afro-Guyanese due to the political issues surrounding ethnoracial and ethnonationalist boundaries. Dr. Alissa Trotz, whose father was coincidentally my mother’s headmaster at Queens College, touches on this reproduction of heteropatriarchal violence and how the gendered female body becomes the site upon which bounded racial ascriptions are contested, challenged and reproduced. She goes on to argue that Afro- and Indo-creole women actively participate in upholding the stereotypical bounded notions of womanhood attached to their respective ethnic/ racial groups. Innately, this is not something I can deny as I have seen microcosms of it in my day to day life, where the women in my family still take on the primary domestic role, conform to the stereotype of the shy and coy Indian woman, and silence themselves for fear of displeasing their husbands and other male figures in their lives. There has always been skewed and nonsensical rhetoric that Indian women are subordinate, while the opposite discourse relative to this is that Guyanese women are brazen and promiscuous. How does someone, like myself, make sense of this when I fit the bill as both Indian and Guyanese? This is not to take away from the dominant feminist discourse around ownership of the body and freedom of sexual expression, but I believe relationality has something to do with it. Depending on who you talk to and their lived experience, the placement of Indo-Guyanese women on the spectrum of promiscuity varies. Among non-West Indian folk, the general feedback I have experienced is that we are glorified and fetishized as promiscuous by men outside our culture, whereas within the West Indian discourse, there is strong sentiment among men that we are quite the opposite. 

 

These ascriptions of women’s perceived promiscuity have resulted in countless incredibly graphic cases of gendered violence on women in Guyana, domestic violence being one of the major issues grappling the country. I, myself, have indirectly been affected by this through the story of Nafeesa, a family member of mine that died in the late 70s at the tender age of 14 as a result of her teacher demanding her hand in marriage and retaliating upon learning that her parents had another suitor in mind. He stalked her family and violently stabbed her to death. This violence was extended onto her mother and sister who were also stabbed multiple times and who survived to tell the story. He then dramatically doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire. Unfortunately, these are not new stories in the landscape of domestic violence in Guyana as they have lasted since the times of indentureship when Indian labourers had to be separated on different plantations to avoid men chopping their female partners to death for speculatively having other partners. 

 

Given Nafeesa’s case, I have a very hard time wholly agreeing with Trotz’s argument as I think that women are often trapped in the ethnoracial boundaries of heteropatriarchal violence. It’s not that they don’t want to or are not trying to fight the silences and struggles women experience, it’s that it is extremely dangerous to do so without putting yourself in heightened situations for domestic abuse. In the case of Nafeesa, it led to death. She was Muslim, he was Hindu. Telling him no when he professed her love to her and asked for her hand in marriage was already her way of defying those boundaries at the risk of being hurt. Unlike the two dimensional narratives of the shy, subordinate Indian girl and young girl, standing her ground was a contestation of this. Yes, she might have reproduced ethnoracial boundaries as a result of heteropatriarchal violence by subjecting herself to her parents’ request to marry a Muslim man, but the key missing factor in Trotz’s argument is the violent coercion that often times subjects women to these ascriptions against their will. 

In many ways her experience makes me think about The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Ch. 4 Colonization and Gendered Oppression touches on these systematic and cyclical systems of oppression that have trapped Indo-Guyanese women into spaces of violence. I never thought I would have a personal connection to missing and murdered Indigenous women but now that I am actually sitting down and dissecting my thoughts I’ve come to realize that the violence on the bodies of Indo-Guyanese women is not far off from that of Indigenous women, not to take away from their experiences, of course. As the report says, ”Many of the policies and ideas in place today, as well as the structures they are associated with, are modern iterations of the same historical atrocities.” These same heteropatriarchies of violence are still seen today in the generational trauma that exists as a result of the historically poor way women were treated, othered, and sidelined. Colonialism itself is still gendered in this way as these notions of ownership, property, and freedom are fundamentally situated on a threshold of racial gendered violence, what McKittrick dubs as relatively stable images of dispossession (captivity, loss of homeland, displacement, criminality and incarceration). As a result of the violence and crime in Guyana, it became an unsafe place to stay, leading to an indirect displacement of the land as many of our family members generation after generation have lost our connection to our homeland and moved to Canada and the United States. Like Cordis says, the possessive investment in white supremacy travel reconfigures itself in new spatial arrangements, often through the language of national development and liberation. Saidiya Hartman talks about this as “the afterlife of slavery,” which to me is an incredibly powerful statement. It highlights that we are still grappling with the trauma of our pasts and that the healing needed to reconcile hundreds of years later remains immeasurable. 

 

Works Cited

Cordis, Shanya. “Forging Relational DifferenceRacial Gendered Violence and Dispossession in Guyana.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 23.3 (60) (2019): 18-33 

MMIWG 2019. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:  Ch. 4 Colonization and Gendered Oppression https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a-1.pdf