Indo-Caribbean people

I know Nikolai personally, but I think, again, as he was sort of motioning us towards, one thing that drew me to really having you on the show is your chapter in the book, The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora, Essays on Migration, Identity, and literary and cultural representation.

And so I think, you know, for our listeners wanting to learn more, that's just one of the many resources I'll throw up there on our Strictly Facts syllabus for you all to check out before diving really deep into even your own personal history i do sort of want to foreground us in this understanding as you were talking about of indentureship and colonialism and so in a lot of ways we tend to center and more so focus on conversations about indentureship in the caribbean on Indo-Caribbean communities or, you know, the movement of people from India serving as indentured servants in the Caribbean.

And I, you know, of course can understand why, because there's obviously a difference in numbers significantly.

And so that's not to discount that importance or anything at all, of course.

They come to a country, no community, they can barely speak English, like we talk about the English Caribbean.

You know, they have to, you know, kind of just function on their own and rely on their very small networks.

So yeah, and land violence has always been a part of just our communities in general in the Caribbean, but there are really interesting stories that you hear about the violence that the Chinese community has endured over time, right? When we think about racialized violence, not necessarily as physical violence, but being outcast and all these things, which is a large part of a lot of the stories we hear, not only in Chinese communities and in the Indo-Caribbean communities and Black communities, right? That racialized violence is a part of our history that we continue to contend with.

And that's actually something that I discovered in my granddad's story.

And it is similar to... to a lot of people that I've talked about in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, where, first of all, the way we look and the fact that we're from the Caribbean is confusing for a lot of people who don't understand the history of the Caribbean and the fact that there are people from all walks of life and all different skin tones, different ancestries in the Caribbean for varying reasons.

But I know for a lot of the younger people Indo-Caribbean people that I've spoken to, trying to parse out and understand the difference between Indo-Caribbean and Indian sometimes is difficult.

And I think it, for me growing up, you know, I grew up in Toronto in the 70s where racism was rampant and self-preservation meant that I didn't identify with anything except for just being Canadian.

It's not dissimilar to what I've heard from a lot of people in the same position.

You can be seen, you can be heard, you can be loved, you can be everything that you want to be, despite everything that we were taught.

I think short films like yours and some of the other people that I talk to, writing stories and books and educating through entertainment, I think is so important because the truth of the matter is you and I can break out of that colonial mindset and move forward in the world, but we also have to deal with how the world reacts to us.

And those reactions are changing through the generations and people are becoming more accepting and more understanding but there's still a long road to go through educating people so that they really, truly understand who we are as not only just Indo-Caribbean people, but people from the Caribbean, because there's such a long, rich history that I think is hidden behind the doubles and jerk chicken and sun and sand and beaches and resorts.

There's people that live behind that and whole lives behind all of that.

I

was going to say, I think in Queens, which is a high Indo-Caribbean Guyanese population, I've seen like flyers stapled to telephone poles and things along the way.

Yeah, that he does exorcisms.

Yeah, you'll see that in India too.

And it wasn't conscious, it was just, it's, I think it's more of a traditional thing.

I'm Indo-Caribbean.

There's, it's a thing.

You know, we talk about dreams as though they're messages and journeys, who visited, things like that.

If, if you are playing an Asian subcontinent team in the Caribbean, the two places you don't want to play them are in Guyana and in Trinidad.

You may want to play them there because they may feel, because of the huge Indo-Caribbean communities, um, within those two countries, it may be that they feel more at home there in terms of food, culture, et cetera.

I don't know.

I'm spitballing, but I'm s- I'm assuming so, right? So for all I know, Pakistan requested for games to be in Trinidad, if not in Guyana.

And for me, I think it's important to document a time and a place with some of these recipes because I see so much changing.

I went to an event in the summer, and it was an Indo-Caribbean Canadian showcase of artists and musicians and writers, and there was a family attending, and their son, who was, I wanna say about 13 or 14, asked a question, and his question to the artists that were on stage was, "You keep saying this word Indo-Caribbean.

I don't even know what that means." And so if he doesn't even understand what that means, I feel like there needs to be something that these people can refer to if they choose to.

I'm in the middle, too, of, like, this sort of Indo-Caribbean identity and what it means to me and how closely I hold it.

So I guess my very incomplete response is when it comes to books, and I am a writer, right? I take my tech- my style in writing, I take a really long time before I put anything down on paper because I feel like it's so permanent, right? And a lot of my process is in the thinking.

And so with Indo-Caribbean, for example, I feel like there is still so much discussion around what it means because it is, uh, rooted in race and ethnicity, but we're still, um, as a sociological study, exploring, well, what is race, and then what is race in the Caribbean, which is such a particular context, right? So to, to, to start writing [laughs] about, you know, terms like this, um, at least for me, I'm not ready to commit to any sort of definition.

And with cookbooks or books about food, even there I feel it feels so final [laughs] to just say, "This is how to make pepperpot," without the context of there is pepperpot in Guyana and Antigua and Jamaica, and they do it like this.

And, you know, like, I am just not that type of writer to be, like, to, to declare this is what this is.