‘Two Bo-rat Can’t Live in the Same Hole’: Revis(ion)ing Indo-Caribbean Female Subjectivity in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge

Résumé 0

Providing a clear-sighted analysis of the absence of Indian women in postcolonial discourse, Verene A. Shepherd points to the widely accepted belief that Indian women ‘functioned largely in the private, domestic sphere, under the control of Indian men in the patriarchal Indian family system; that they were subsumed to their male counterparts in the economic and social spheres and did not merit separate treatment in the historiography’ (234). Indo-Trinidadian author, Ramabai Espinet, in her debut novel, The Swinging Bridge, addresses this neglect. Offering a much broader perspective of Indian women’s reality, while according them the status of speaking subjects, Espinet engenders resistance in her female subjects. Unearthing Indian female subjects from oblivion necessitates that the novel’s protagonist, film researcher, Mona Singh, perform an excavation of sorts. Hence, in exhuming the women in her family whose lives are shrouded in silence and secrecy, Mona engages a politics of resistance, captured in the idiom ‘two-bo rat can’t live in the same hole’. Of noted relevance, this idiom is appropriated from the masculinist discourse. Reinforcing patriarchal rule and order under his roof, this phrase, during the ‘big row’, was uttered as an ultimatum to her brother, Kello, by their father, Da-Da. Mona narrates that the ‘big row’ had transformed Kello into a man ‘even though he was only nine years old at the time’. Appropriating this highly-charged masculinist narrative to script a narrative of her own, Mona defies and defiles patriarchal and cultural expectations of Indian womanhood, of female subjectivity and sexuality. This essay chronicles Mona’s revision and reappropriation of the master narrative. Further, it demonstrates how she renegotiates Indian women’s subjectivity by refuting the patriarchal construct of the ‘fallen woman’ (the binary of entrapment), widow or whore, accorded the Indian woman who dares to defy male authority.