Im/Possibly Black: The Coolie Poetics of Bazodee

Abstract

Walter Rodney noted that colonial racist constructions of Africans depended on Africans oppressing each other more than it depended on Africans oppressing Indians or vice versa. ‘No ordinary Afro-Guyanese, no ordinary Indo-Guyanese can afford to be misled by the myth of race’, he stated, ‘time and time again, it has been our undoing.’ This paper affirms Rodney’s position, and challenges Caribbean historiographies that produce a notion of Indo-Caribbeanness that is incompatible with Blackness. It argues compatibility can be achieved through the arts, namely poetics, because the arts reposition indentureship identities as more than labour-based and subvert memorial practices that create a static historiography that cannot progress beyond affect. Focused on the 2015 film, Bazodee, the paper outlines the history of the system of indenture as it relates to slavery to show how the conceptualisation of the figure of the ‘coolie’ highlights the identity’s impossibility. Through Bazodee, it shows how the theoretical implications of the impossible coolie apply to life after indenture.