Arrival Day themes and contributions to East Indian literature
They Came In Ships
They came in ships
From far across the seas
Britain, colonising the East in India Transporting her chains from Chota Nagpur and the Ganges Plain.
Westwards came the Whitby,
Like the Hesperus
Alike the island-bound Fatel Rozack.
Wooden missions of imperialist design. Human victims of Her Majesty’s victory.
They came in fleets of ships. They came in droves
Like cattle.
Brown like cattle.
Eyes limpid, like cattle.
Some came with dreams of milk and honey riches.
Others came, fleeing famine
And death,
All alike, they came—
The dancing girls,
Rajput soldiers—tall and proud
Escaping the penalty of their pride.
The stolen wives—afraid and despondent. All alike, crossing black waters.
Brahmin and Chamar alike.
The came
At least with hope in their heart.
On the platter of the plantocracy
They were offered disease and death.
I saw them dying at street-corners
Alone and hungry, they died
Starving for the want of a crumb of British bread
And the touch of a healing hand.
Today, I remember my forefather’s gaunt gaze.
My mind’s eye sweeps over my children of yesterday
My children of tomorrow.
The piracy of innocence.
The loss of light in their eyes.
I stand between posterity’s horizon And her history.
I, alone today, am alive,
Seeing beyond, looking ahead.
I do not forget the past that has moulded the present.
The present is a caterer for the future. I remember logies
Barrack-room ranges
Nigga-yards.
My grandmother worked in the field. Honourable mention.
Creole gang, child-labour—
Second prize.
I recall Lallabhagie.
Can I forget how Enmore rose in arms For the children of Leonora?
Remember one-third quota
Coolie woman.
Was your blood spilled so that I might reject my history?
Forget tears in shadow—paddy leaves.
Here, at the edge of the horizon
I hear voices crying in the wind.
Cuffy shouting—Remember 1763.
John Smith—If I am a man of God,
Let me join forces with black suffering. Akkarra—I too had a vision
Before I lost it.
Atta—in the beginning, I was with the struggle.
And Des Voeux cried
I wrote the Queen a letter
For the whimpering of the coolies
In their logies would not let me rest.
Beaumont—Had the law been in my hands.
And the cry of coolies
Echoed around the land.
They came in droves
At the door of his office
Beseeching him to ease the yoke off their burden.
And Crosby struck in rage
Against the planters
In vain
He was stripped naked of his rights
And the cry of coolies continued.
The Commissioners came
Capital spectacles with British frames Consulting managers
About the cost of immigration.
They forgot the purpose of their coming. The commissioners left,
Fifty-dollar bounty remained.
Dreams of a cow and endless calves, And endless reality, in chains.
Mahadai Das
The Weeding Gang
I know the girls are coming,
For I hear the gentle humming
Of choruses they’re singing on their way; I hear their saucepans jingling,
And their cutlasses a-tingling,
Which as their music-instruments they play.
They fill the silence after,
With their peals of merry laughter Which float upon the pinion of the air; And also ease their walking
With some idle, silly talking,
With kheesaz and boojhowals very queer.
Then once again their singing
They resume, until the ringing
Of their voices mingles with the whistling breeze;
I love to see their faces
With their smiles and subtle graces,
And I love to hear their charming melodies.
CEJ Ramcharitar-Lalla
Creole Gang
Bailing and throwing among green canes from rusty punts, their sweated faces show how many days and nights have passed between cane roots and black streams, sunburnt trashes and parched earth, wearied days and restless reality.
Their hands and limbs are but fragments that walk and bathe, when sun shines, rains fall and drivers shout.
Who can tell when midday meets their rest – they eat, they talk?
Their limbs cry and hearts burn.
Is this not the century of dreams, of tales told by ancestors of a faith told by life?
Again and again they will bale and throw, curse and rest among green canes and black earth, wishing, wishing. . .
Rooplall Monar
These are three important poems for the occasion of Arrival Day, marked in Guyana each year on May 5. It is the day on which ships arrived in British Guiana after the first crossing, bringing immigrants from India under the indentureship experiment in 1838.
Two ships, the Whitby and the Hesperus, are mentioned by Mahadai Das
in the poem “They Came In Ships”, along with the Fatel Rozack, which was the first of the migrant ships to land in Trinidad in 1845.
Das’s poem was excerpted in this column before with analysis and commentary, but is well worth reprinting in full because of its significance. It is a definitive poem in Guyanese East Indian literature, and more so the literature of indentureship in Guyana. Das, who started out as a sworn nationalist, grew to be an existentialist, psychological and post-modernist writer not known to exhibit great interest in poetry of the Indian ethos. Yet “They Came In Ships” occupies a distinguished position as one of the most defining poems on human arrival and Indian indentureship.
The other two poems have also merited previous attention and are worth revisiting because of their important place in East Indian poetry and post-indentureship realities. Printing them together allows immediate comparison, with respect to how they relate to each other and to the literature.
“The Weeding Gang” by CEJ Ramcharitar-Lalla and “Creole Gang” by Rooplall Monar both describe groups of women workers on the sugar estates, organized in “gangs” to carry out particular types of work. “The Weeding Gang” was published in 1934 and stands out as the only published verse by East Indians in British Guiana at that time to escape imitation and truly attempt to be an original poem that reflects local conditions. Yet, it romanticises the weeding gangs and glorifies what has otherwise been deemed an experience of hardship among women at the time.
Rooplall Monar’s “Creole Gang” is a product of the 1980s when the literature had matured and assumed a more plausible identity as social realism. The same group of women workers is presented in a much harsher light, more accurately reflecting their more harried cycle of existence. Monar followed Sheik Sadeek as a writer who revolutionised Guyanese East Indian literature.