Reading "Callaloo"/Eating Callaloo: A Special Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Mixing Matters: "Callaloo Nation" Revisited

Mixing Matters: "Callaloo Nation" RevisitedAuthor(s): Aisha KhanSource: Callaloo, Vol. 30, No. 1, Reading "Callaloo"/Eating Callaloo: A Special ThirtiethAnniversary Issue (Winter, 2007), pp. 51-67Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30135865 .

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MIXING MATTERS Callaloo Nation Revisited

by Aisha Khan

In "Todos Somos Primos" ("We Are All Cousins"), his moving introduction to Callaloo's 2004 special issue on Afromestizo peoples in Mexico, Charles Henry Rowell makes a call to

expand the concept of African Diaspora as site; to interrogate identity politics, race, cultural

politics, and forms of power; and to explore how these dimensions of diaspora "relate to uncharted regions of the African Diaspora" (xiii). The goal of this revisionist work would be to broaden the concept and discourse of African Diaspora from its connotation as a site to encompass its eclipsed historical, cultural, and regional dimensions (Rowell xiv). In

drawing attention to the elision of peoples of African descent by scholars and others, and

insisting on the recognition of the "absent-presence" of these communities (xiii), Rowell underscores the need for a deeper and more politically inflected understanding of race, culture, and memory in Afro-Latin American Diasporas. The recognition of "absent-presence," however, requires nuanced efforts because race is not simply a "regime of visual ascertainment" (Rowell xiii). That is, the visual does not necessarily reveal genealogical descent or its myriad symbolic significance; there are multiple and often subtle ways that the African Diaspora remains vital. Despite centuries of miscegenation and transforma- tion into mestizos, many Mexicans, Rowell explains, identify themselves as Afromestizo; or they acknowledge some relationship with Africa; or they "carry Africa in their bodies" (xiii), establishing what Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran calls the "biological basis of Mexican

nationality" (qtd. in Rowell xiii). 2007 brings Callaloo to another special issue, one commemorating its thirty year an-

niversary as a major literary voice of the African Diaspora. My invitation to contribute to this issue provides an opportunity to consider how key points in Rowell's 2004 call resonate with another major diaspora of the Americas, that of South Asians ("Indians," as they are locally called) in the Caribbean.

Ending slavery in its colonies by 1838, the British colonial government struggled to meet the needs of sugar plantation production, particularly with respect to a cheap and

plentiful labor supply. In the early post-emancipation period, strategies were debated and

experimented with: immigrant and indentured labor were brought from such far-flung places as China, Madeira (Portugal), West Africa, other Caribbean colonies, and, after 1812, the United States. The majority of laborers who were headed for sugar plantations, however, arrived as indentured immigrants from India, the colony commonly known at the time as Britain's "jewel in the crown." Beginning in 1838 and lasting until 1917, this indenture scheme contracted laborers from such places as Uttar Pradesh, Oudh, and Bihar, and shipped them out of ports in Calcutta and Madras. Over a period of seventy-nine

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years almost a half-million Indians went to the Caribbean. About fifty-five percent of them ended up in what was then British Guiana, the first group arriving in 1838; seven years later, in 1845, the first shipload of indentured laborers arrived in Trinidad. By the end of the indenture period the Trinidad-bound totaled 33.5% of Indians sent to the Caribbean. Yet by the beginning of the indenture period, Trinidadian society was already permeated by what Donald Wood, among others, has characterized as "the whole intricate experience of the

Afro-European encounter since the Renaissance, [and] the stereotypes formed by slavery I . . . I" (248). This was the context within which the various sectors of the Trinidadian

population interacted and into which Indian (and other) immigrant laborers entered.

Despite its greater recency than the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as its

involving, at least in legal precept, voluntary as opposed to coerced labor, the Indo-Carib- bean Diaspora, like the African Diaspora in the Americas, has also suffered its own forms of ideological elision and also contains its own expressions of nuance. The critical meeting points between African and South Asian Diasporas that I will consider here, prompted by Rowell's provocative discussion, are addressed as a series of key questions. Seeking to expand the concept of diaspora as it applies among African descended peoples in the Americas raises the question of boundaries: where do the boundaries of the African Di-

aspora (as opposed to other American diasporas) lie; of what historical, cultural affinities are these boundaries composed; and in what ways are these affinities miscible with each other? What vision of "nation" informs nationality, biologically based (as Beltran reasons) or otherwise? What kinds of cultural emblems produce what forms of "visual ascertainment"? These questions rest at the heart of what unifies and distinguishes African and South Asian Diasporas, and thus of how we might grasp the histories, cultures, memories, and presences of diasporic peoples. My thoughts here reflect an anthropological and

ethnographic perspective, and derive in part from my most recent book, Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad. Moving toward answers to these questions is what I will pursue in this essay about "mixing matters" and

why "mixing" matters in Trinidad. A first step is to think of diasporas in terms of relationships rather than as sites, events,

or conditions, thereby getting at the social messages that coalesce into themes that are reiterated in any diaspora discourse. Rethinking the meaning and potential usefulness of "site" in the study of Afro-British Diasporas, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, for example, points to the cultural constructedness of "localness" in Liverpool's African Diaspora population; these representations, Brown argues, elaborate "diaspora" as constituting "diverse Black histories, experiences, and constructions of race and identity" (6). In a similar vein, in his work on the epistemological foundations of the diaspora concept, Brent Edwards argues that diasporas are made meaningful in "diaspora discourse," which involves translation across national and international contexts, a diversity of "takes" (perspectives), and the articulation of competing and disparate "societal elements" (59-60). Its intellectual history reveals that the concept of diaspora underscores intra-group as well as inter-group differences (Edwards 64). Brown and Edwards, then, both approach diaspora as a multivocal, relational process.1 My present concern is also with the multidimensionality of experience and the relationships across the diverse and unpredictable borders that multidimensionality engenders. My angle of entry is in problematizing diasporic sites, such as the mixed, or "callaloo" nation of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, by querying some of the con-

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ventional boundaries that distinguish groups and communities who ostensibly comprise diasporas.2 That is, as Brown, Edwards, and Rowell would concur, diasporas simultaneously produce affinities and negotiate antagonisms: they are dialogic and in translation; and they are cacophonies that can become harmonized and visible through sentiment, ideology, and the politics of cultural struggle.

In Trinidad the politics of cultural struggle and the attendant politics of race and nation are an indelible part of Indo-Trinidadians' collective memory, and Afro-Trinidadi- ans' collective memorialization of their respective diasporas. In both instances, certain key themes link the meaning of "diaspora" to the ideology of "nation." Arguably the preeminent theme is that of Trinidad callaloo. In the Trinidadian celebration of its being a land of many heritages, a nation of coexisting multicultural groups, including African, European, Indian, Chinese, and Syrian-Lebanese brought together during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries through various forms of labor migrations (both in- voluntary and otherwise), and other diasporas, "callaloo" symbolizes that felicitous and mutually transforming combination of cultural, racial, and religious diversity. Each of the ethno-cultural streams brought by emigrants is thought to make up the multicultural callaloo of Trinidadian national identity. Yet, as we shall see momentarily, Afro and Indo in particular stand out from this mix, both credited with certain, differently valorized selected cultural contributions, and thus both vying for material and symbolic capital as part of the national voice.

Callaloo, literally, is a national dish-not surprisingly a stew with many, seemingly disparate ingredients (e.g., pumpkin, crab, greens). As a metaphor for identity, "callaloo" signals the idea of differentiated parts constituting a mixed whole, representing a heterogeneity that connotes democratic tolerance of difference, equal political representation, a cosmopolitan world view, and therefore consummate modernity in a global context. More than simply a land of contrasts, then, from the perspective of national identity, Trinidad's heterogeneous population embodies the image of the Trinidadian nation as the centerpiece of sanguine multiplicity, a veritable "rainbow," as the local tourism industry, among others, enthusiastically promotes. But in the words of two local commentators: "They say we are the rainbow country." Her companion wryly qualified her observation, "People existed here for a long time on this lie [. . .] . Trinidad as a unified society is what we can only dream of [. . .1 This rainbow has teeth" (Los Angeles Times 1 January 1999).

In order to make Trinidad's particular political dentition clearer, we must place callaloo within the broader conceptual rubric that encompasses lexicons of "mixing" in the Americas. This is the concept of creolization. As both a social fact and an interpretive category, creolization is a product of colonialism and its particular structures of unequal power relations. More specifically, as a social fact it is the consequence of engineered assemblages of disparate ethno-linguistic groups brought together under conditions of coerced labor by and for colonial labor schemes; it is the process of culture contact within

unequal power relations, and the consequential combinations, or "mixes," of cultures, phenotypes (races and colors), religions, or genders. Creolization is also an interpretive category in its treatment, by scholars, as moments that generate the conditions of possibility-"contact zones" (Mary Louise Pratt) or "in-betweens" (Homi Bhabha)-which are fertile ground for cultural transformations to produce alternative (subversive) cultural forms. Voiced through a range of expressions depending on language and historical mo-

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ment-e.g., mestizaje, hybridity, multiculturalism, polyculturalism, coolitude, callaloo, metissage, ajiaco, transculturation, and creolite-the concept has long been a foundational theme in Caribbean and Latin American societies, employed by scholars, activists, politi- cians, and in common parlance.

Language and historical moment are not simply indicative of regional distinctions.

They also signal significant differences in meaning that inform the specific ways each of these terms is relevant in a given social context. Whereas mestizaje in the Hispanophone Americas and creolization in the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean both address fundamental problems of culture change and assimilation, share a foundation in Euro- colonial ideas about race and cultural evolution, and have been an important dimension of independence and national identity struggles in their respective regions, there are important ideological distinctions between them. Mestizaje began as, and in some cases remains, a nationalist project in Spanish America. It is an ideology of cultural homogeneity promoted by elites as a standard practice of nation building; mestizaje requires a successful blending of ethnic-cultural-racial "parts," emphasizing the homogenization of different, "pure" domains into a new whole. While also an ideology of identity and culture change, creolization in the Caribbean has been institutionalized in nationalist ideology in a distinct way. Despite an emphasis on cultural and social harmony and a unified community, creolization does not typically envision a symbolic absolute synthesis of difference into a new, unrecognizable outcome. Instead, unity is achieved with each ethno-cultural-racial part standing both separate and together. As an ideology creolization always accounts for the attributes involved, which are recollected, traced, and thus accounted for in some way. This model of always-retrievable parts that constitute the whole has played an important role in discourses about Caribbean nationalism and Caribbean Diaspora.

Among the most important points for understanding race and the politics of cultural struggle is the difference between mestizaje's image of blending, its ideal goal being harmonious eventuation of untraceable ancestral differences (which Rowell, above, complicates so well), and creolization's image of juxtaposition, with its ideal goal of harmonious yet ever-traceable ancestral differences. Another critical difference in these two models of the nation and its nationals is the large degree of representation of indigenous populations that figures crucially in mestizaje discourses (due in large part to the duration of indigenous populations in Spanish mainland territories), and the elided or marginalized figure of indigenous populations in creolization discourses, which typically commemorate post- Columbian peoples. Third is the difference in the degree of denial of African-descended populations in the two models. Mestizaje discourses emphasize an indigenous-European (Spanish) ancestral axis and typically embrace the ideology of blanqueamiento, or the pro- gressive improvement toward "whitening" of both phenotype and cultural values and practices. Based on a notion of juxtaposition (rather than blending), on an African-European axis, and contextually influenced by significantly smaller numbers of Europeans vis-a-vis Africans, creolization displays-as in nationalist rhetoric-the equal representation of equal parts rather than the gradual diminishment of less desirable parts; or it challenges-as in contemporary scholarship-the ideology of teleological racial betterment. Finally, the degree of emphasis on peoples of Asian descent in the hemisphere differs; while neither mestizaje nor creolization figures Asians into its foundational ancestral axis, the demo- graphics of Caribbean indenture have given Indians enough of a cultural and economic

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profile that they figure prominently, if problematically, in post-independence nationalist manifestations of creolization discourse. My point here is that callaloo and kindred discourses of creolization share the important role of symbolizing state accommodation and management of essential, heritable cultural differences that populations are socially construed as representing.

By Trinidadians' own accounting, as well as that of observers in the rest of the Carib- bean and elsewhere, Trinidadian culture epitomizes diversity: the Trinidadian nation is callaloo, creole, mixed. This "mixed" imagery has two dimensions to it that are relevant to our discussion. In the context of slave-plantation and post-emancipation society-the colonial period, in other words-Trinidadian society was conventionally depicted as a three-tier pyramid: "white" at the top, "brown" in the middle, and "black" at the bottom. This pyramid represented the color-class hierarchy of the population, and referenced the African-European ancestral foundations of Trinidadian society. As such, Trinidad

belonged to the "creole" societies of the Caribbean-those New World places where Old World populations met and, as the narrative went, produced new, variegated simulacra of themselves. This three-tier pyramid symbolizing "creole" Trinidad did not, however, generally emphasize Trinidad as a "mixed" society. That is, "mixed" and "creole" have not necessarily been synonymous images throughout Trinidad's history: ideologically, the allegedly "exotic" immigrants who came post-emancipation (East Indians, Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese) could not be mixed-as in absorbed-into the Afro-Euro foundation and were depicted (and treated) as foreign addenda that diversified Trinidadian society but did not alter its basic constitution.

The second dimension of Trinidad's "mixed" imagery came into prominence during the independence movement and post-colonial period. The rise of revisionist nationalist narratives that emerged from the political developments of the mid-twentieth century emphasized ethno-racially distinct local groups who nonetheless together comprised the "callaloo" nation, as opposed to the "creole" colony. The decades-long imprimatur of the black-white axis and the tri-colored pyramid, however, played a part in the relatively slow momentum of the evolving perception of "mixed" as more than "colored" I "brown," and "creole" as a harmonious, callaloo rainbow of ethno-cultural difference (rather than gradations of color), to take hold in the region. "Mixed" as an index of the Trinidadian national character became symbolized as the rainbow, which superceded the pyramid. The rainbow

metaphorically represents a united, independent nation of culturally and racially distinct

groups who coexist together in harmonious cooperation. But along with multicultural celebration of "unity in diversity" (the national motto) there remained an equally potent model of duality: the deep, seemingly inevitable hostility between Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian, fueled partly by the imagery of the ancestral foundational axis inher-

ently unable to accommodate extraneous ("alien" ethno-cultural) elements. The alleged hostilities between these two groups have been commented on since Indians first arrived in Trinidad, and exaggerated under the colonial gaze as part of a divide and rule strategy. In the post-independence period of party politics, Afro and Indo voting blocs were orga- nized according to supposed "racial" formations, defined by mutually exclusive cultural attributes and construed as necessarily and constantly fomenting antipathies between them. We can see this in the history of the local parliamentary system, where, with one brief exception, the political parties have always cleaved along a line of "African" and "Indian" positions.

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In sum, a curious combination of forces is at work in Trinidadian society: a ready ac-

knowledgement of multiple cultural influences and a historically heterogeneous population, along with an apparently clear ethnopolitical division into Afro and Indo. The char- acterization of Trinidad as having experienced its entire history as a callaloo society, the

presence of large numbers of variously "mixed" persons in Trinidad, and the existence of the formal as well as informal ethnic category "mixed," pose an interesting, if submerged, conundrum for Trinidadians. On the one hand, an image of cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity and amalgamation is evoked-the idea of a cosmopolitan nation with African and European founding ancestors, subsequently flavored with supposedly even more far-flung cultures (Indian, Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese). On the other hand, in the context of the indenture-based plantation political economy and the post-independence competition for scarce resources, separate-but-equal representation forms a good deal of the discourse through which political struggle is undertaken.

While the imagery of callaloo, or mixing, is used as a rhetorical celebration of the successful tolerance of the diversity that Trinidad represents, callaloo has also come to connote the

fraught association between Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian-the ideological bite, generated since the mid-nineteenth century, that wounds but does not sever the relation-

ship of alleged antinomy between these two "racial" groups. For most Indo-Trinidadians

today, the anxious, hard-bitten realities of competition for representation and resources

signify their concerns about the underlying premise of the callaloo nation: that of cultural assimilation into hegemonic cultural forms-the pre-independence period represented by English cultural hegemony, the post-independence period represented by Afro-Trinidadian cultural hegemony. Virtually all dimensions of everyday life are underpinned by Indo- Trinidadians' notions of their cultural traditions, and by the cultural change that negotiates oppositional, often more powerful cultural influences. As Indo-Trinidadians press the state for recognition and opportunity, on the basis of ethno-cultural distinctiveness that also is emblematic of alterity, they find themselves in a kind of Catch-22. In order to be subsumed (counted) one must be differentiated, and that differentiation necessarily draws on non-creole (i.e., non-local) "Indian" traditions and practices that, in turn, necessarily shore up racial boundaries. Together, and simultaneously, differentiation and belonging comprise the challenge of the callaloo nation for Indo-Trinidadians.

We are now, at this juncture, sufficiently prepared to be able to return to the questions stimulated by Rowell's discussion. To briefly reiterate, these concern the composition of

diasporic boundaries, African and others; the ways these boundaries, which define group experience, might be imbricated without doing violence to the special qualities claimed

by each group; what vision of "nation" informs "nationality"; what cultural emblems produce "visual ascertainment"; and the question of whether cultural emblems contradict or confirm the idea of immutable, essential identities. As an anthropologist whose preferred modus operandi is ethnography, my first stipulation will be that there is no one answer to these questions; history, social formation, and cultural configuration will produce context- specific cases each with its own response, if not script. My second stipulation will be that

any one of these questions is a major inquiry and properly entails extensive discussion. What I propose to do in the pages left to me is consider some aspects of the case of Indo- Trinidadians with regard to their implications for understanding mixing matters in the Caribbean. As I do so, I will also address some of the provocations that have been raised

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by my work (including Callaloo Nation) on what I call "mixing metaphors," and some of the perhaps controversial aspects of these provocations.

Callaloo Boundaries

That the absent-presence of elided or marginalized peoples must be rectified is today a

given in much of diaspora studies, area studies, and subaltern studies, yet always accom-

panying this endeavor is the question of how this absent-presence should be established. A critical issue is the identification of a particular population or community-that is, its boundaries and the cultural practices delimited by those boundaries. By what (and whose) criteria can boundaries and practices be determined; can they be determined a priori, and, if so, how might the matter of reification and essentialization of group identity be avoided? Finally, is it possible to explore the specific subjectivity of a group or a people without heading toward the dead end of exceptionalism? Albeit only a partial solution, an ethnographic approach to these conundrums must account for the vantage points of vested interests that derive from both within the group or community and outside it (as in practitioners' perspectives and those of outside observers). As I discussed above, this involves translation across national and international contexts, a number of perspectives, and negotiated linkages of a range of social factors. Its intellectual history reveals that the

concept of diaspora underscores intra-group as well as inter-group differences (Edwards 64).

An interesting example comes from the indenture period in colonial Trinidad, where Afro-Trinidadians' practice of obeah and Indo-Trinidadians' practice of "little" or "folk traditions" posed a problem for colonial typologies of the colonized, and for the post- independence Republic's model of the callaloo nation. And yet from the point of view of the practitioners (as far as we can ascertain them in this early period) the practice of obeah and folk traditions was not problematic, suggesting ways diasporic boundaries can be constructed based on the criteria of practitioners' own experience.

Religious practices and beliefs objectionable to Victorian sensibilities tended to fall within two domains: those given over to excessive ecstatic or emotional release, and those

given over to the dark forces of superstition and mysticism. Until the early twentieth

century Indo-Trinidadians, irrespective of class, were typically charged with superstition, while grassroots (poor and working class) Afro-Trinidadians and their "folk" religions, such as the pejoratively identified "Shouter Baptists," were judged ecstatic until the late twentieth century. Occasionally, however, the two-superstitious and ecstatic-would

overlap, drawing together racial and class characteristics within a religious idiom. In 1877, for example, Trinidad's New Era newspaper decried the tendency of the "lower orders"-

(Afro-Trinidadian "blacks" as opposed to the "brown" middle class)-to participate in the "heathen ceremony"-the Hosay commemoration (see below)-and labeled the tendency "strange and contradictory to our character of a strictly Christian community" (qtd. in Moore 182). In a similar vein, Victorians traced the ancestors of the so-called black races of Southern India to Africa, attributing to this ancestry the "passionate," "magnetic," "wild," "lurid," and "demonic" beliefs of this "black race," which were seen as akin to "African

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Voodoo" (Bolt 168-69). Not surprisingly, India's respectable classes were not included in these classifications. In Victorian Trinidad, local elite and chronicler Louis de Verteuil echoed these sentiments, declaring that "notwithstanding the surrounding influences of civilisation, the belief in sorcery is generally and strongly entertained among the more

ignorant classes of the population, either Asiatics or Africans" (161). When members of the grassroots, who therefore exhibit forms of "primitive" or "folk" culture, Africans and Indians are viewed as sharing commonalities that blur the differences, emphasized in

hegemonic discourses, between them. These commonalities, however, have rarely been

complimentary; such identified features as sorcery-and the ignorance and inadequate civilizing that undergird it-have gone a long way toward "explaining" the subordinate position of these two populations.

While some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers equated African obeah and the work of "the priest of Southern India" with "idolatry" (e.g., Kingsley 288), commonalities were also construed / perceived among later scholars who lacked the disap- proving slant of the colonial gaze. In their post-WWII work among Indians in Oropouche (southern, rural Trinidad), for example, anthropologists Arthur and Juanita Niehoff noted that due to the early "religious incorporation" of Indians in this region of the country, they were rarely certain from which religion spirits or deities derived (158). The Niehoffs viewed Hinduism in particular as "diffuse," as "difficult to define and difficult to circum- scribe," and thus as especially receptive to syncretism (159). Consequently, they argued, Indo-Trinidadians had "supernatural beliefs which are a part of no recognized religion on the island, but which are nonetheless very important to the daily lives of the people, regardless of their professed faith [. . .1 This is the folk religion of the people which can be divided into two parts: the world of jumbies or spirits, and the practice of obeah or

sorcery" (158). In fact, this part of the country, they reported, was surrounded by a world of spirits especially active at night, notably the lagahu (werewolf) and sukoiyaa (vampire) (159). The Niehoffs drew what they deemed the "most important conclusion that can be drawn" from rural Indian communities similar to Oropouche: with regard to "spirit beliefs" Indo-Trinidadians "borrowed heavily from their Negro neighbors (168). Almost all the traditional spirits derived from Negro culture" (182).

Given that the expectation, at least in theory, of most of twentieth-century social science was to follow the mandate of objectivity (even if today we understand the notion of objectivity to be at best naive and at worst subterfuge), the Niehoffs' primary aim was to present data, to describe the lifeways among, and cultural and religious commonalities between, Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians. Scholars are currently engaging these questions which pursue clearly articulated positions and agendas. Gaining some momentum is the quest to document the shared cultural practices common among Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian working class and "folk," in order to counter the abiding and misleading stereotypes of their putatively immutable, unavoidable mutual antagonism, which are fostered by the callaloo nation even as it decries them. Framed by models of class consciousness, analyses of the contexts of subordinate or grassroots classes seek "parallel root traditions" (Reddock 70) that have developed over time, and that reveal nodes of affinity and solidarity among them. The explicit idea here is that re- search that acknowledges forms of mixing in terms of redemption and as possible paths toward a better, more equitable future will unveil alternative visions of community and

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nation not possible in existing hegemonic epistemologies. Such epistemologies presume cultural distinctions to be decisive or effective boundary markers among groups made peripheral in a cultural milieu significantly shaped by class privilege.

Although the mixing of the philosophies and practices of Hinduism and Islam began long before on the subcontinent, it continued in the New World with ambiguous distinctions between "coolie" and "creole" grassroots traditions. These distinctions reflected both the empirical realities of local practice among Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian neighbors, and the answers posed by observers about the "type" of group in question; these answers in turn suggested how best to understand these groups, either for purposes of rule or for science (and often for both at the same time). The distinctions between these distinctions-between practice and interpretation-are not always readily apparent, and this obscurity complicates the duality of absence and presence. That is, in the example of Indo "little traditions" and Afro "obeah," neither were expunged from the historical record as a literal absence, but the ambiguity (perceived by outside observers) regarding the beliefs and practices of these groups meant that exactly how they could be catego- rized, as akin to or distinct from each other, and by what criteria, crafted a particular sort of existence: in the Victorian colonial gaze, a negative imagery that exhibited one kind of presence; and in the scholarly gaze, a century later, an ostensibly distanced imagery which represented another. Interpretation of any kind is always a political endeavor. The Victorian colonial gaze understood certain kinds of Africans and Indians as racially and culturally synonymous according to certain kinds of objectives. Mid-twentieth-century anthropology, based on ethnographic fieldwork methods, accounted for overlaps between Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian cultural forms, without bald prejudice in its processes, perhaps, but still without neutrality in its implications. Even challenges to preva- lent world-views-such as those framed by questions of consciousness and class-which desire to negate messages of essentialism and predictability must contend with what they leave out, and with whose perspective is being promoted. In this way challenges might thus clarify the nature of their political implications, intentional or not, as they envision new ways to comprehend the lived complications of callaloo and to redress absent-presences, to recognize the relational character of diaspora (that is, translation, diversity, and histories and experiences in the plural), and therefore to imagine new geographies and communities of diasporic peoples.

Callaloo Nations

That "nationality" needs a "nation" as its referent is a statement of the obvious. What is often not so obvious, however, is the nature of the ideologies, suppositions, and prescriptions that configure the nation, and how these shape the forms (and allowances) of belonging that confer nationality. An interrogation of Trinidad's callaloo nation that delves deeper than tracing its rhetorical assertions reveals it to be in reality a limiting and exclusive, not

expansive or inclusive, basis upon which groups-construed as "racial" and substantiated with "cultural" properties-may lay claim to full and equal membership.

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As discussed earlier, a "creole" person is generally viewed in the Caribbean, and specifically in Trinidad, as possessing local culture but also as possessing local biology-that is, a combination of African and European, black and white, that derives from sexual re-

production and social intimacies over protracted periods of time. Add to this lodestar the

peculiar formulation of colonial racial and cultural evolutionary hierarchies-particularly with regard to New World European "whites," where proximity to colonized populations placed in doubt their authenticity as legitimate claimants of racial purity and privilege, and local ideology historically distinguished gradations of whiteness among them; hence the difference between "white" in Trinidad and "Trinidad white," the latter signifying that doubt. Even in its rehabilitation as an all-embracing callaloo representing the Trini- dadian nation (where the "mixedness," as opposed to "purity," of callaloo is celebrated as evincing modernity), this concern with purity is tenacious among significant sectors of the Trinidadian population, because ideologies like callaloo, mixed, pure, and so on, are always implicated in quotidian power relations, relations which are far more complex than a simple binary between colonizer and colonized.

The purchase that the idea of callaloo holds for contemporary Trinidadians cannot be

glossed simply a rhetoric of unity in diversity. Callaloo as harmonious juxtaposition is

differentially interpreted depending on context and vantage point, is pregnant with am- bivalent assessments of the value of a particular heritage, and is fraught with anxieties over social inequality. Because of its meaning in daily life, the tension of callaloo lies in the contradiction between inclusion and absorption: the callaloo model of nation-building ideally is equally empowering of all its population segments, yet inclusion invites oblit- eration (getting absorbed by the hegemonic cultural element). The definition and merits of conforming to the callaloo ideal are a contested discourse among Indo-Trinidadians, as well as a rhetorical strategy with which to engage other groups. Indo-Trinidadians' concerns about the dubious merits of the callaloo script involve such diverse aspects of daily experience as "racial" intermarriage, "cultural" participation in performances of national identity such as carnival, and the increasingly significant incursions (since the 1970s) of evangelical Christianity into Indo-Trinidadian Hindu, Muslim, and Presbyterian congregations.

Summarizing these concerns, the two most highly charged domains of "mixing" for Indo-Trinidadians are racial miscegenation and religious syncretism. Religious syncretism refers to combinations of religious knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Defended by most Indo-Trinidadians as characteristic of "long time" generations who tenaciously sustained "we culture," as local parlance phrases it, syncretisms are also decried today as derailing "correct" or "authentic" (pure) practice, forcing contestations over authorized knowledge (orthodoxy), and confusing the role of cultural traditions in religious expression. Race mixing ostensibly produces biologically and culturally hybrid offspring, whose lack of inheritance of a clearly defined identity makes Indo / Afro distinctions ambiguous and, therefore, as the logic has it, politically unreliable.

Even when the political dimensions of an identity are less institutionalized, as in the locally familiar identity category dougla, the boundary ambiguity is unsettling enough to cause it to be used with some hesitation, at times with disapproval. The recent rise of the dougla as a subject in the study of popular culture and identity has considerably nuanced perspectives on douglas and "douglarization," and presented an interesting shift

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in Trinidadian public discourse. In the 1960s the Mighty Dougla's calypso, "Split Me In Two," about the predicament of douglas, humorously lamented: "If they sending Indians to India, And Africans back to Africa, Well, somebody please just tell me, Where they sending poor me, I am neither one nor the other, Six of one, half dozen of the other, So if

they sending all these people back home for true, They got to split me in two" (A10.3 Yet

today, a number of Caribbean and international scholars, as well as some local observers, celebrate a reified dougla (or its more generalized expression, "mixedness"-for example, callaloo) as a symbol of national unity and the harmonious, one might say, multicultural

hybrid of the future. It is true that "dougla" is arguably more socially threatening than "mixed" as a form of identity, because it marks specifically Afro and Indo intimacies and power relations, whereas "mixed" leaves the category options open, and thus more

oblique. Douglas, however, no longer strictly call forth the fear of Indo-Trinidadians' cultural and political absorption, or social disapproval, at least not from the vantage point of certain political-theoretical positions. Still, in these discussions, agency is seen to lie somehow within the abstraction itself; the meaning that inheres within it gives it a motive force beyond the varied agents who presumably embody, and act out, the category. Any significance of the actual members of the community that "dougla" implies is elided when the symbolic work of the category "dougla" is disarticulated from, and privileged against, its living and breathing constituents-whose individual identities as douglas, moreover, are certainly always fluid and multivocal, and occasionally indeterminate or irrelevant.

Disarticulating from the empirical and privileging the hypothetical encourages us to lose

sight of the unintended consequences and conflicting interests that define and empower specific relations of race and power.

For Afro-Trinidadians, racial emblems come from the marked category "African culture," which subsumes ideas about African religious practice. For Indo-Trinidadians, racial emblems come from the marked category "Indian religion," which encompasses much of what is recognized as Indian cultural practices. In the Trinidadian context, religion has been Indo-Trinidadians' alterity, that is, the marked category largely definitive of the Indian "race." A major reason for this difference is the fact that by 1845, when Indians arrived in Trinidad, Trinidad's black-white racial continuum included (and arguably emphasized) a shared Christianity. Indo-Trinidadian community leaders, as well as those in "Indian

opposition" political parties, have worked to endorse Indian religion as an icon of Indian- ness, as constituting a natural, national constituency.

At the same time this staging of culture is problematic for Indo-Trinidadians, caught between attempts to belong in the national portrait of the callaloo nation, where selected cultural traditions become iconic representations of racial constituencies; and attempts to

keep the emblem of their cultural identity, religion, within a special, protected sphere. As

Ravi-Ji, a nationally known spiritual leader and newspaper columnist, commented, "there is a thin line of demarcation in what is cultural and what is sacred" in the carnivalized, secular environment of nationalist performance (qtd. in Frankson 5). These are instances where the inclusivity of callaloo and the exclusivity of boundaries clash, at least within the particular vested interests of Indo-Trinidadians.

In the callaloo nation, nationality is constantly negotiated and navigated in everyday experience, even while established nationalist agendas of equal belonging suggest these concerns and practices are not necessary (or merited). From the perspective of most Indo-

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Trinidadians, "callaloo" is an at best ambiguous and at worst fraught template; from the

perspective of most Afro-Trinidadians, it is still a measure of nation-state sovereignty, the

ideological extrication from colonial restraints and the visible statement of deservedness of membership in the global community of forward-looking, modern countries. I must make it clear that Indo-Trinidadians also subscribe wholeheartedly to the philosophical ideals of callaloo, yet their historically more precarious position in enjoying its fruits motivate their various looks askance. These doubts must also motivate analysts (scholars, et al.) to consider visions of nation and bases of nationality as dependent on unequal relations of power, which generate always shifting, always simultaneously perspectival, and thus always slippery positions with respect to the meaning and importance of tropes such as "mixing" in Trinidad, in the Caribbean, and in the Americas as a whole. Once again, while the problem of absent-presence demands a more politically engaged grasp of race, culture, and memory, at least two knotty questions become foregrounded: what the term "political" means (and entails), and how to manage analytically the fracture of this binary into multiple parts (perspectives, vested interests, shifting affinities and disparities), once this sort of nuanced scrutiny begins.

Callaloo Cultural Emblems

Regimes of visual ascertainment are certainly unreliable and, like most power relations, can be oppressive. But if we take a look at daily life on the ground, we need to ask what is left (and who is responsible) if the visual is eschewed; and whether it is possible for the sentiments that inform the affinities that help distinguish boundaries and belonging to be meaningful and effective without visual ascertainment, and if so, in what forms and ways. These questions require us to consider local and external debates about what constitutes the visual, and about who "owns" prevailing visual cultural emblems-that is, who can claim the authority of some emblems over others. The case in point which I will discuss briefly is that of Hosay, which will show that, once again, these questions can never have just one answer. This answer again raises the issue of callaloo and mixing, insofar as these local tropes may fly in the face of our interventionist efforts to redress absent-presences by clarifying group boundaries, and to seek a more politically inflected understanding of race, culture, and memory. Boundaries shift according to the ideological purposes they serve, and "political" is really more an adjective than a noun.

Hosay in the Caribbean is today practiced only in Trinidad. It is the regional name for the Shi'a Islam annual commemoration of Muharram, the procession of mourners of Hassan and Hosein (hence "Hosay"), grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed who died martyrs. Mourners march with elaborate and large representations of tadjahs (tazias), or tombs of the martyrs. Brought to the Caribbean by both indentured Muslims and Hindus (and not, strictly speaking, a Shi'a observance there), Hosay has been practiced, with one brief exception, continuously throughout Indo-Trinidadian history. Importantly, Hosay has consistently involved Afro-Trinidadians as well as other participants in certain, non- ritual aspects of its annual organization and performance.

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Considering Hosay a cultural right, as well as a moment of respite from the crush of the sugar plantations, indentured Indo-Trinidadians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries convened in the hundreds for the observance. Needless to say, for colonial rule this posed a problem: breaks in sugar production, and large assemblages of unsupervised and momentarily autonomous laborers. In 1884 the infamous "Hosay Riots" erupted, when colonial authorities tried to prohibit, and then curb, the commemoration. Indentured Indians, along with working-class Afro-Trinidadian sympathizers, resisted, resulting in a bloody battle which has been interpreted by some as representing the grassroots (poor and working class) unity of Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians. In this context Hosay can be interpreted as representing the empirical absence of racial antinomies and cultural xenophobia between Indo and Afro, where subalterns sought both pleasant diversion and inalienable rights in being able to hold the Hosay commemoration as they saw fit, according to both Muslim doctrine and local patterns of social relationships. From this vantage point one can argue that "race" and "culture" as dividing lines meant little to people united by a stronger sense of affinities deriving from the relations of production and the perceptions of a class for itself. Given the historical record there is no reason to doubt this perspective, but it does complicate the ways we ascertain diasporic populations and ascribe boundary divisions among them. In this context, where, for example, does "Indian" end and "African" begin? What makes them distinct? What makes them

comparable? These questions require conscious decisions that follow intellectual paths; their answers are not self-evident, uniform, or necessarily predictable.

This same mode of interpretation can also support an explanation that confirms racial unity not from a class perspective but from that of callaloo harmony. That is, it is possible for this perspective of Hosay to demonstrate the success of the post-independence nation-state's (ostensible) striving to make racial and cultural alterity immaterial in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness while still underscoring racial and cultural autonomy and uniqueness. In this scenario, this callaloo diaspora, if you will, race and culture very much matter but not in ways that hinder universalist goals of democratic representation, progress, and modernity. If race and culture can be shorn of the unequal relations of power that inform and shape them, as this interpretation suggests, then the deeply visual cultural emblems of Hosay-the huge, elaborately gorgeous tadjahs steered forward by mourners in procession, the (largely Afro-Trinidadian and "mixed") drummers along the sides and at the back of the procession, and the religiously and ethnically heterogeneous onlook- ers-all convey a message of mixing that defies assertions of race as simply a "regime of visual ascertainment" (Rowell). However, rather than confirming the "Indianness" of this

diasporic tradition, which, in turn, is elemental in establishing the presence and value of this elided and marginalized population, the visual here suggests that diaspora-in the sense (as mentioned above) of relationships-does not possess a racial, or even necessarily cultural valence. Indeed, genealogical descent (if that can even be indubitably established) belies its myriad symbolic significance, but in certain important instances the multiple and often subtle ways of diasporas are arguably what keep them vital. Again, where "Indian" ends and "African" begins is not so clear in this straightforward and conventionally ac-

cepted tradition of diaspora. This nexus of participants and their varied forms of involvement has given rise, es-

pecially in post-independence times, to deep debate over the authenticity of Hosay and

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its vulnerability to succumbing to "carnivalization": the secular and thus inappropriate consequences of treating this mourning rite as an occasion for revelry, with drinking, drumming, and dancing moving across the borders of ritual sacrality and religious ex-

clusivity. Participants may well carry the diaspora in their bodies, but what it is that is

being embodied, as well as its value, is a matter of varied and contested determination, not simply self-presentation.

Taken from ancestral, subcontinental forms of cultural "authenticity," the emblems of

Hosay have been claimed as the special property of constituencies who would protect Hosay from what they perceive as the taint of irreligious or sacrilegious influences. These stewards tend to come from the local Muslim-Indo or Afro-religious leadership, or are lay practitioners who reject "innovations" and deviations from "correct" modes of

practice. Speaking from the vantage point of orthodoxy as a way to safeguard Hosay's authenticity and purity, every year during the Hosay period, representatives of orthodox modes present both learned and anecdotal objections to the way that Hosay is carried out. These objections stimulate lively debates locally about the practice of Islam, the role of culture in religion, and the tension between, on the one hand, the idealized callaloo embrace of national unity and equal participation, and, on the other hand, the reality of Indo-Trinidadians absent-presence from the Afro-Euro foundational ancestral axis, and their struggles to be equally represented by state patronage based on "racial" constituencies whose competitive arsenal relies on the visual ascertainment of "cultural" emblems.

Participants defined as non-belongers may participate in Hosay, to the great reluctance or resentment of some, but they may not own Hosay, that is, claim it as a legitimate part of their identity. The logic goes that the resulting dilution, impersonation, or acquisition of this flagship of Trinidadian practice blurs the boundaries distinguishing "Trinidadian"

(representing the nation), "popular" (representing the people), "Indian" (representing the "racial" or ethnic group, irrespective of religion), and "Muslim" (exclusively representing Islam, and a specific interpretation of Islam, at that). From this orthodox stance, the egalitarian call of callaloo is not the point; mixing is undesirable in itself, as it jeopardizes the purity and authenticity of certain practices, in this case, religious ones.

Rowell's "regime of ascertainment" operative here is in part visual, that is, the commonly understood phenotypic distinction in Trinidad between Indo and Afro. Further compounding this division is the historical association between, respectively, Indos as Muslim and Hindu, and Afros as Christian. But ascertainment is muddled by both the callaloo (Hindu, Muslim, Afro, Indo, and "mixed") demographic of Hosay participants, and the religious membership itself, comprised of both Indo and Afro Muslims. Demograph- ics and adherents, both, complicate the importance of genealogical descent as a mode of claiming religious membership and authority. If a key diagnostic of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is Hosay in Trinidad, then its expression on the ground (i.e., ethnographically) points out that what keeps Hosay vital is more subtle than obvious. And this vitality derives in no small degree from local diaspora discourses about Hosay's religious authenticity (how much it diverges from "correct," Old World practice), its proximity to South Asian cultural traditions (the infusion of which, from various orthodox perspectives, would render it illegitimate), and its rightful representatives, whose claims rest largely on diverse and competing interpretations of Muslim identity and religious doctrine. In asserting proper diasporic traditions and validating select groups, the sensible choice for

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a number of Hosay practitioners seems to be to embrace what some academics would call "essentialism," that is, the true and unadulterated forms of Islam. Yet many, academics and others alike, have also warned that in other, much more highly charged contexts (of which there are, unfortunately, far too many in the world), essentialized identities are also the stuff of profound discrimination and terror. What the Hosay example tells us, among other things, is that "essentialism" should not simply be a term of academic dismissal; in some contexts it can also be a lived engagement with the ideology and politics of callaloo, a means of inscribing the presence of the muted or the absent-whether or not those means are palatable to outsiders, observers, or opponents.

Articulating Diaspora, Cooking Callaloo

My intention here has been to join and further stimulate discussion of these always highly charged yet imperative questions, about how to understand and redress the unequal relations of power that shape our epistemological constructions and pedagogies as well as our quotidian experience. The mixing matters manifested in Trinidad, and why mixing matters there, reveal that the concept of "mixed" has diverse and often internally contradictory valences. Callaloo is a floating signifier that in the Trinidadian (and larger Caribbean) context informs ideologies of post-independence sovereignty which posses their own agendas and vested interests, sometimes at odds with each other.

Our challenge is to explore the ways that callaloo, as metaphor and as lived experience, reconciles the contradiction inherent in claiming a space for the uncharted and undervalued (memories, histories, and power relations) without seeking "true" essences, without anes-

thetizing the actually protean and context-contingent boundaries that distinguish among diasporic peoples and that emplace them on, albeit shifting, hisorical and cultural geographies. A useful frame with which to begin is the concept of "decalage" offered by Brent Edwards. Building on Stuart Hall's approach to diaspora as "articulated"-as structured combinations of elements related through their differences as well as their similarities (Hall 33, 38) Edwards translates decalage idiomatically, where "gap" or "discrepancy" becomes in the context of diaspora "the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity," "a changing core of difference" that works within unity (65). Edwards argues that expressions of belonging, together with "points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation" (66), articulate to constitute diaspora formations. What we have historically and today are not seamless, balanced diasporic solidarities that unite diasporic (in Edwards's case, African-descent) peoples; unity in the sense of decalage is not synonymous with solidarity. Rather, decalage points to connective tissue that can withstand rents, ever reassembling itself into intra- and inter-diverse sensibilities, traditions, and practices.

Taking Edwards and decalage a bit further, nothing "escapes or resists translation" in

diaspora (66) except that which is made absent through its own gaze; in the lived experience of diasporas and their necessarily callaloo constitutions, absence makes presence possible; they are relational. In other words, the disarticulations-whatever goes against the grain of the ostensible coherence that "diaspora" requires-are never not there (absent). Rather, they represents gaps, fractures, animosities, and divergences that are fundamental to the

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possibility of presence-the affinities, similarities, and consensuses-by which "diaspora" is defined, by scholars refining a concept and by populations defining themselves as "communities." Callaloo, like diaspora, is a multivocal metaphor for diverse and cross-cutting relationships and processes, rather than a condition or a site (e.g., the callaloo nation). Viewed in terms of decalage, callaloo is more than simply a mask over, or wishful thinking about, putatively inevitable breaks and walls between Indo and Afro in Trinidad. Those breaks and walls are a necessary part of the rainbow (its teeth, if you will), because they are what allow "mixing" to be perceived and accounted for in the first place.

Understanding diasporas first and foremost in relational terms, rather than as sites, events, or conditions, is an imperative inaugural step toward rectifying the political and intellectual blind spots about absent-present peoples of the Americas (and elsewhere, for that matter). But these interventions and corrections should be viewed as processes which are themselves continuously in flux, as ongoing problematics instead of resolutions. As

my discussion has invited us to consider, multiple perspectives, interests, and forms of consciousness reflect and engender multiple relations of power. Bearing this in mind as a basic principle affirms that "mixing" and "callaloo" are as healthily slippery as they are

unwholesomely subject to reification and essentialization. And this slipperiness is the slide across which absences allow, and become, presences-celebrated, decried, denied.

NOTES

1. See also Clifford and Brah on diaspora as a relational concept. 2. In this paper I draw my material from Trinidad. Although the two islands now comprise the in-

dependent Republic, Tobago's history, among other things, is different from Trinidad's, and Afro- Trinidadians have always been Tobago's majority population.

3. There are numerous spellings of the Mighty Dougla's given name: Clatis, Claytus, Claytis, etc. I have retained the spelling used by Caribbean Beat (www.meppublishers .com/ online/ caribbean-beat/ archive/ index. php ?id).

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Ali, Clatis. "Split Me In Two." Telco, 1961. Bhabha, Homi K. "Culture's In-Between." Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay.

London: Sage, 1996. Bolt, Christine. Victorian Attitudes To Race. London: Routledge, 1971. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996. Brown, Jacqueline Nassy. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 2005. Clifford, James. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (Aug. 1994): 302-38. De Verteuil, Louis. Trinidad: Its geography, natural resources, administration, present condition, and prospects.

London: Cassell, 1884. Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Uses of Diaspora." Social Text 19.1 (Spring 2001): 45-73. Frankson, Geoffrey. "Sacred and the Profane." Sunday Express (11 Mar. 1990): 5. Hall, Stuart. "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance." Sociological Theories: Race and

Colonialism. Paris: Unesco, 1980. Kingsley, Charles. At Last, A Christmas in the West Indies. London: Macmillan, 1873. Khan, Aisha. Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad. Durham:

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Moore, Dennison. Origins and Development of Racial Ideology in Trinidad: The Black View of the East Indian. Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago: Chakra, 1995.

Niehoff, Arthur H., and Juanita Niehoff. "East Indians in the West Indies." Publications in Anthropology 6 (1960).

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reddock, Rhoda. "Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad and Tobago: The

'Little Tradition.'" Caribbean Quarterly 44.1-2 (1998): 62-80. Rowell, Charles Henry. "'Todos Somos Primos' /We Are All Cousins: The Editor's Notes." Callaloo 27.1

(Winter 2004): xi-xiv. Wood, Donald. Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery. London: published for the Institute of Race

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Documents

Reading "Callaloo"/Eating Callaloo: A Special Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Mixing Matters: "Callaloo Nation" Revisited