1Lakshmi Persaud was among the first Caribbean women of East Indian descent to publish a novel. Like many of her Indo-Caribbean male counterparts, Persaud engages with the specific experience of the East Indian Trinidadians in colonial and postcolonial Trinidad and explores a number of recurring themes in Caribbean fiction such as the creolization process, colonial education, and the interplay between tradition and modernity. Nevertheless, while novels by a number of prominent Indo-Caribbean male writers often disregarded the specifically female point of view, Lakshmi Persaud’s work appeared innovative as it moved away from both masculine and Afro-centric issues. The Indo-Caribbean female subject has in fact a specific historical burden due to her femaleness and her Indianity. From the crossing of the kala pani to the indentured patriarchal Indian society in the Caribbean, the Indo-Caribbean woman has remained a second-class citizen among a patriarchal Hindu community and a subaltern to Indian men in general. Her belonging to an Indian minority group in the Caribbean as well as to the indentured male-dominated society makes her doubly alienated. The diasporic Indo-Caribbean female subject is therefore a distinctive one with regards to race and gender, but also to history and culture:

By naming a culturally identifiable woman-centred experience, in the process of self-discovery, the kala pani discourse uncovers a literature that emerges from a nexus that has been silenced, objectified and marginalized. Coming to writing represents an act of self-assertion and recovery, giving voice as it does to a previously unarticulated Caribbean reality in which Indo-Caribbean women have had to confront a triple dislocation within the power structures of history, culture and gender inequality by inhabiting the very ‘margins of marginality.’ (Mehta 2004: 7)

2Published in 1990 and 1993, Lakshmi Persaud’s first two novels Butterfly in the Wind and Sastra exemplify the growth of Indo-Caribbean women’s writing as Lakshmi Persaud is among the first Indo-Caribbean writers to give a voice to the previously silenced Indo-Caribbean woman. As a matter of fact, the two novels are both highly significant in representing Indo-Caribbean women and their specific experience in an era of change. Both set in Trinidad, in a traditional Caribbean-Indian village, the two narratives deal with the life of two young Indian women, bound to face their destinies and to take the responsibility for their choices. The celebration and endurance of life in a hybridized postcolonial Indo-Trinidadian community are expressed in the two novels.

3 Butterfly in the Wind is an at least partly autobiographical Bildungsroman, while Sastra is a moving love story. The two novels’ main protagonists are young Indo-Caribbean female characters. In Butterfly in the Wind, as Kamla goes from childhood to adulthood, she is progressively confronted with the many restrictions imposed by her community and has to struggle to reconcile her fragmented self. Sastra is a young Indian woman confronted with the gifts and terrors of life who has to choose between her sense of duty and her desire. In both novels, the importance of caste is also emphasized as an additional restricting factor in the specific context of Indian Brahmin families in Trinidad. As a matter of fact, framed and constructed by traditional religious and cultural Indian values, she is restricted to live in a closed space where, despite her inner desires, her identity, present and future are pre-constructed by a patriarchal Hindu order and by Brahmin social rules. Her space is also limited by the fact that she belongs to a minority Indian group among a predominantly African Caribbean society in Trinidad.

4Referring to Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), one may wonder whether Persaud manages to move her heroines from voicelessness to self-assertion. As a matter of fact, to what degree does she author-ize her two protagonists to progress towards independence and even self-enhancement?

5Indo-Caribbean cultural identities are very complex, and according to writer Ramabai Espinet, it is necessary to consider them as progressive rather than static or fixed:

We are people who emerged out of the South Asian diaspora and are forming another diaspora here, but we are also Caribbean people. In a definition of our identity I don’t think that we can homogenize the multiple subject identities that we bring to that definition. Indo-Caribbean is not a homogenous group because Indo-Caribbean people are Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Atheist… The process that we are engaged in now is describing our multiple subject identities. I don’t know if Indo-Caribbean is the best term for us. We ought to be prepared for it to shift and change as we come up with other categorizations. At the moment, it is the most useful term to describe who we are: people who come out of India and the Caribbean. (Espinet 1989, unpublished essay)

6In fact, when they were transported to the Caribbean, Indians, soon to be called Indo-Caribbeans, had to recreate their own cultural space since they were confronted with the existence of the dominant African Caribbean community and Creole culture. According to Professor Rhoda Reddock, the word Creole originally referred to three groupings:

1. A local European minority who nevertheless controlled the entire economy;
2. People of African descent; and
3. The dominant Afro-Trinidadian indigenized culture, a most notable example being Creole food. (Reddock 1998: 8)

7The marginalization of the female Indian subject is in fact embedded in the larger perspective of the Indo-Caribbean community in Trinidad as a minority group. The Trinidadians of African descent came to Trinidad through the horrific Middle Passage as they were deported as slaves from Western Africa to the Americas while Indo-Trinidadians came to the island after slavery through the process of indentureship. Both peoples are marked with their specific historical burden of a submissive and subaltern people exploited through colonialism. As less numerous and later arrivals, the Indian community has long been marginalized in Trinidad.

8However, although Persaud writes from an Indo-Caribbean perspective, both Indian and African cultures are acknowledged and represented in her novels. African Caribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans have cultural differences that Persaud’s characters sometimes describe in a very assertive way. In Sastra, in chapter nine, entitled ‘Only Things West Indian’, when referring to Indo-Caribbeans, the West Indian Carl Munroe states:

They not interested in our culture, in things West Indian: Parang, Shango, the Shouters, steel band music, nothing like that. (…) I mean, they keep looking back to India. They’re here and they should be interested in West Indian things, in things here and now on this island (…) They must make up their minds; if they want to live here, they should live as we do. If they want to look back to India, they have a choice. Nobody will stop them from returning. We are West Indians and this is the West Indies. (90)

9A certain irony may be noted in this passage as West Indians are also a displaced people and the return to Africa is a rhetorical theme in African Caribbean and imaginative writings. Munroe’s rejection of an Indian Caribbean culture that he sees as foreign echoes Indo-Caribbean doctor Lall’s contempt for what he sees as West Indian wastefulness and love of carnival in chapter eight: ‘A people dancing, dressing up in lame velvet and satin, spending all they have today, without a single thought about tomorrow. They want the best in everything, food, clothes… and they want it now.’ (79)

10Persaud uses Lall’s statement to emphasize specific cultural facts about African Caribbeans, their celebration of carnival, their dancing in colourful fabric woven with gold and silver metallic threads, and their valuing of cultural unity rather than saving for the future. The author seems to underline a number of cultural values that are specific to West Indian people, i.e. their perception of a work ethic, their specific relation to time and their connection and belonging to their community. This statement subtly underlines some similarities between the two peoples as the sense of community is also fundamental for Indo-Trinidadians.

11Actually, both peoples are creolized in their own ways and the author seems to exploit Munroe and Lall’s comments to parody the mirroring cultural rejections that the two communities project on each other. In fact, although their authors come from two very different social and racial backgrounds, Doctor Lall and Munroe’s speeches seem to echo each other structurally and thematically as they both use the third plural subject ‘they’ and enumerate a number of facts using the present tense, as though they were listing general truths acknowledged by everyone in their community. In addition, they both deal with the same ‘issues’ as their arguments are founded mostly on the other’s cultural habits such as dance, clothes or food. By using this subtle parallelism, Persaud attempts to reconcile the two communities and to heal past animosities between her counterparts and the African Caribbean community.

12The author’s wish to reconcile the two communities seems more obvious in Butterfly in the Wind where Kamla’s innocence as a child allows her to mix very naturally with the West Indian domestics at her parents’ house. The social gap is still omnipresent as Persaud’s main female protagonists belong to Brahmin Indian families, but the mixing is implicitly allowed as she authorizes her readers to go beyond difference, thus underlining Caribbean unity and universality. This universal perspective is also enhanced in Sastra through comments by two very idealistic characters, Rabindranath and Milly, who serve to balance the racial and cultural debate, thus emphasizing sameness rather than difference. The comments of Rabindranath, the Indo-Trinidadian teacher, perfectly illustrate this sameness between Indo and Afro Caribbeans:

We are both loving, warm hearted people; sensitive, sensuous in our foods and art, overgenerous to our friends. We can harness ourselves together to the same cart—the building of our small island, and get to understand those differences and place them at far corners, not at the centre stage. We have enough warmth and generosity to keep us together. (81)

13Rabindranath’s very optimistic statement for the future and its vision of Caribbeaness as a unifying force as well as his teaching profession make him a shepherd-like character, seeking to transfer universalist values to Indian people, inciting them to follow his rules and to consider African Caribbeans as their genuine counterparts. However, Rabindranath concludes that his teaching has failed since he does not manage to convince the educated Doctor Lall who considers Rabind’s idealism as a purely utopian vision. Although potentially very powerful messages are highlighted in the text, Rabindranath remains powerless when confronted with a narrow-minded person. Dr Lall’s narrow-mindedness is a metonymy for the attitudes of the Indian community and its traditional limits, as well as its disregard for any other value than the male Indian one. These values generate many limitations and repressions for the Indo-Caribbean female subject who desperately needs to deal with her specific hybridized identity. The Indo-Trinidadian female, despite Hindu traditionalism, may nevertheless find an alternative through the creolization process. It is a fact that Indo-Caribbean women started to write later than African Caribbean writers because they were confronted with multiple limitations on the basis of their womanhood.

At the risk of facing social ostracism, threats of intimidation and accusations of betrayal, these writers have made concerted efforts to overcome restrictions; they have done so by confronting in their writings social gridlocks through kala pani discursive transgressions that have exposed and contested fixed notions of identity and definitions of ideal womanhood, Hindu insularity, cultural chauvinism in relation to other religions and ethnicities, patriarchal strangleholds of power, limiting parameters for sexual self-assertion, homophobia and intellectual ostracism. By adopting a particular trajectory of ‘migrating subjectivities’, these women are beginning to occupy multiple subject positions that are gradually permitting them to confront their own gender, racial and religious biases […] this awareness has necessitated a dual movement both within and outside societal barriers to adopt an insider/outsider position of double consciousness as an effective strategy to contest and negotiate marginality both within and outside Indo-Caribbean communities. (Mehta 2004: 9)

14Writing is in fact a tool for Indo-Caribbean women to express themselves and to negotiate their position among their patriarchal community. As for Persaud, she strategically engages with a number of essential female-centered topics. For instance, in Sastra she deliberately gives a strong voice to the African Caribbean female character, Milly, a West Indian cook, outsider, and total stranger to her community. Nevertheless, like Rabind, Milly becomes a shepherd-like figure when she censures Carl Munroe’s rejection of Indian culture in chapter nine:

Nothing stands still. We change, our cultures change. Besides, as far back as you go, people have been traveling, taking things from one place to another and we don’t really know where many things have come from, where the good ideas that stirred people came from. All cultures have been borrowing from one another since the dawn of time. (94)

15In her attempt to widen Munroe’s restricted mentality, Milly underlines the complex identities of Caribbean people.

16The cross-cultural (as opposed to multi-cultural) perspective in Persaud’s work is thus undeniable. In an interview in the magazine Bomb (Winter 2003), Guyanese writer Wilson Harris insists on the difference between cross-culturality and multiculturality:

Cross-culturality differs radically from multiculturality. There is no creative and re-creative sharing of dimensions in multiculturality. The strongest culture in multiculturality holds an umbrella over the rest, which have no alternative but to abide by the values that the strongest believe to be universal. Cross-culturality is an opening to a true and variant universality of a blend of parts we can never wholly encompass, though when we become aware of them we may ceaselessly strive for an open unity that they offer. In this quantum way we may forestall the tyranny of one-sided being. (14)

17Harris’s definition of cross-culturalism as ‘an opening to a true and variant universality of a blend of parts we can never wholly encompass’ illustrates the universal dimension of Persaud’s novels, but above all the non-static cultural identities in her work. In fact, Milly’s earlier statement refers to the cross-cultural dimension of Caribbean identities and it seems that the author uses her words to underscore judiciously that migration, displacement, creolization and cross-fertilization have been unfolding ‘since the dawn of time’. The author strategically uses Milly’s comments to widen her readers’ perspectives, thus offering an all-encompassing perspective, both diachronic and cross-cultural.

18Moreover, the writer’s choice of an African Caribbean woman as the voice of the novel’s progressive views may come to underline the matrifocality of the African Caribbean society, as opposed to the Indian patriarchal society where the discussion operates between two men, Lall and Rabind. By giving an assertive and progressive voice to an African Caribbean protagonist, Lakshmi Persaud emphasizes the danger of an immobilized Indo-Caribbean cultural community and the necessity for the female Indo-Caribbean subject to negotiate her stance and to find a way of expression.

19Persaud’s novels seek to expose the evolution that occurred in Indian women’s expectations from crossing the kala pani on a ship, from India to the Caribbean, an unknown place for Indian people. In her article entitled ‘They Came in Ships… Indo Caribbean Women and their Construction of Safe Spaces in the Caribbean’, Rita Christian metaphorises the ship and describes the crossing of the kala pani as an exciting and hopeful journey for Indian women whose secret wishes were to move from voicelessness and submissiveness to a more independent and self-assertive life:

The ship, therefore, was far more than a vessel taking them to an unknown destination. For these women, it must have represented a break, a severing of old ties and a looking forward to possible opportunities which would be opening up for them. Thus the ship, too, must have been a metaphor for hope. Hope meant looking forward to new opportunities: expectation, excitement even. Any opportunity would have been perceived as a vast improvement on the lives they had left behind. For those women who had their children with them on this journey, recurring dreams they would have cherished for progress and a deepening awareness, must have been a cause for hope. Crossing the kala pani for the Indian woman, was an inherently subversive act, simply because received opinions of them had never ascribed to them any agency. (166)

20If the displacement to the Caribbean was a sort of liberating process for the Indo-Caribbean female subjects as they were moving away from castes, a number of past limitations were still traditionally imposed on them by their community. Despite their hopefulness and desires for independence, Persaud’s female protagonists are in fact restricted by their sense of duty and their bondage within the family. Persaud herself may have managed to transgress her community rules through writing and through migrating to England. Similarly, she may wish to allow her Indo-Caribbean female protagonists to fly away from restrictions imposed by Indian traditions, class conventions and subaltern status linked to their gender.

21In both novels, Persaud depicts an Indo-Caribbean woman thus torn between the necessity to respect the asserted wisdom of her elders and her intimate wish to free herself from traditions. Kamla’s growing awareness and Sastra’s progressive self-assertion lead to a conflicting self, torn between tradition and internal desire. Kamla’s realization of the darkness of life for women in her community is echoed throughout her educational experience:

The years rolled on. I left Miss Medina’s class and moved up the school. I had thought then that I was leaving nursery rhymes and dark tales of wolves, witches, stepmothers and dragons behind; but as I progressed I discovered that in history books were tales of far darker iniquity. (Persaud 1990: 19)

22Both Kamla and Sastra have to learn to acknowledge their hybrid identity, both their Creole and Indian allegiances, both their past and their present, both their modern education and the traditional values of their patriarchal community. The latter’s treatment of women is indeed the main source of conflict for the protagonists of the two novels. Sastra and Kamla have to deal with an ‘inner voice’ which troubles them as it forces them to question the traditional rules of duty linked to gender. As Kamla grows up, she discovers her inner feelings and internal thoughts and decides to conceal them:

As I grew taller, I began to think there was something contrary in the way my mind worked. I began innocently at first to question quite simple things. […] The presence of such an inner voice is not the sort of thing you would wish to speak about, and I had no way of knowing whether anyone I knew had one. So, unwillingly, I carried mine in silence. To add to my anxiety I had seen in a film called Joan of Arc what happened to a young woman who admitted publicly that she had listened to her inner voice. (52)

23In fact, how can Kamla acknowledge her true feelings when all the women in her family focus on her maturation process and the necessity for her to be brought up in a good traditional Indian manner, thus preconstructing her identity for her? ‘All the women, my mother, my grandmother and Sultan mother squeeze of their energy into me so that I am sure I will grow’ (11). When her grandmother massages her body with oil to heal her pains, she states: ‘my grandmother reshapes every part of me to her liking’ (12). This reshaping is rather symbolic as it suggests the shaping of her identity, as her grandmother would like her to think and behave like a traditional Indian woman, a woman bound to her destiny and who must follow a restrictive Indian pattern.

24As for Sastra, from the very start of the novel, her future is announced by the sage (the pundit) who foretells two possible karmas, a prosperous one if she keeps to the bondage of her family traditions, and one of ‘mixed joy and misery’ if she tries to ‘fly’ and follow her own desires. The pundit’s announcement foreshadows Sastra’s future struggle between her belonging to a traditional Indian path and her inner wishes. As a matter of fact, when her parents arrange for a good Hindu engagement with Govind, like Kamla, Sastra also silences her inner voice as she initially chooses not to reveal her feelings for Rabindranath. In her latest novel, Raise the Lantern High (2004), Persaud goes further in depicting the Indian diasporic woman’s internal conflict as the main protagonist Vasti first witnesses a violent rape and then realises that her arranged marriage is to the rapist she saw in the sugarcane field years earlier. Vasti is thus torn between silently submitting to her fate and tradition thus marrying the rapist or voicing her rage and defying conventions while imposing a public disgrace to her family. Raise the Lantern High explores such cultural violations on the Indian woman and develops a story of female emancipation through the conflict between modernity and traditional sacrifices. While Vasti’s conflict makes her ill and unconscious, Sastra and Kamla have to deal with their internal conflicting voices. They have to struggle so much that both novels are imprinted with a strong notion of movement and oscillation, both inner and outer.

25The Indo-Caribbean female subject has a long history of negotiating and renegotiating her identity and her freedom of movement. Persaud’s work illustrates this necessity of moving from one space to another, as movement is originally imprinted in the Indo-Caribbean female specific experience:

The idea of motion on the kala pani has been central to the Indo-Caribbean experience in general and to the specific experience of women in particular. From the first merchant ships that brought them to the islands, to their mobilization as workers and as domestic partners in the new lands and to their eventual migration to North America or England, women have always had to negotiate their access to space through creative reconfigurations. (Mehta 2004: 9)

26 In Butterfly in the Wind, the natural setting often reflects these inner and outer movements, for instance, the sun playing hide and seek or hens and ducks, ducklings and chicks walking in and out of Kamla’s house. The mosquitoes may be seen as personifications of Indo-Caribbean women as they are trapped in a closed space and try to negotiate a way out:

The doors and windows of the house were netted to protect us from these carriers of malaria, but unfortunately, when mosquitoes did get into the house, they were unable to leave, trapped within the same netting. As they whined, signaling to us that such a space was too enclosed for them, we had a task which would have challenged a wizard: how to let out those within, and not let in those out. (Persaud 1990: 63–64)

27The oscillating movement of the mosquitoes throughout the house is in fact a significant device which illustrates the female protagonists’ conflicting mind and blurred perception. Just like the mosquitoes, Sastra and Kamla are searching for a different space, for a way out. In order to reconcile their inner and outer voices, they would need the net of traditions to be at least slightly cut out, so that they could find a safe space or even recreate a space of their own.

28It seems that the only way to reconcile the inside and the outside is to find a new space, maybe this ‘in-between’ space that Homi K. Bhabha (2004) urges us to consider, ‘a third space of enunciation’ where reconciliation would be possible. Bhabha insists on ‘the historical and cultural dimension of that Third Space of enunciation’ which, according to him, is ‘the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference’:

It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory […] may reveal that the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end, we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ […] that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people’. It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this ‘hybridity’, this ‘Third Space’, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves. (54)

29The finding of one’s other self and asserting its existence is truly what Sastra and Kamla need in order to give sense to their cultural hybridity. Escaping to an in-between space, to a safer place, thus appears as necessary for the two heroines so as to reconcile their split selves. As Toni Morrison poetically explains, although the composed term ‘in-between’ may appear as a fragmented term at first, it defines a genuine space for unity and reconnection, a truly hybrid space:

In-betweenness is a form of break-link between two terms, yet the space of the break and that of the link are greater than one thinks and each of the two terms is already part of the other. There is no no man’s land in between the two; no single edge sets them apart. They are two edges but they touch or are such that fluxes circulate between them. (Diedrich, Gates and Pedersen 1999: 72)

30When Sastra decides to marry Rabindranath, she is still looking for this in-between space of recreation. By choosing her own husband, she thus breaks the rules and defies the Indian Tradition of arranged marriages. Furthermore, while Rabindranath represents hope and the future for Sastra, he is just the opposite of what her parents would expect as a husband for her. He does not belong to the Brahmin legacy and he is older than she is. By marrying him, Sastra does manage to express her inner desires but she only moves from one closed space to another. However, if her desires are not controlled by her family and community anymore, she has nevertheless followed Rabindranath’s way, that of a man, and this does not allow her to escape from patriarchy and be freed. She actually displaces herself from one form of ‘inside’ to another, and she is still looking for a third space where she can truly reconcile her split identities.

31Sastra and Kamla have a genuine need to move to another place, not here, nor there, a place between the homeland and the diaspora, a hybrid space encompassing their Creole and Indian identities and defying place and time. Escape and exile are often personified through the recurrent use of the flying motif in both novels. The wings of the birds are often depicted as they would allow Sastra to ‘fly to the moon and the stars and the bluest blue of the skies.’ (270) When she escapes to Ireland to study for three years, she thus finds a transitional refuge and avoids the arranged engagement with Govind. Her life in the diaspora, far from her community, empowers her and she can at last move freely and choose her own destiny. In his semi-autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), the Trinidadian-born writer and Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul describes a Caribbean writer who eventually emancipates himself when he reaches England, as the world stopped being a colony for him. Naipaul’s works often depict negative effects of colonialism on the Third World but in this novel, he praises exile to an alien place like England. Sastra’s stay in the United Kingdom is similarly a first step towards self-assertion.

32Kamla also achieves an exile, but hers is internal since her imagination is in itself a refuge, a third space; she imagines herself as a bird so that she can materialize her escape in her mind:

If I were a bird and flew on and on past the blues of the sky, what would I find? What are the stars made of? Does God really know what everyone is thinking everywhere, from the tundra to the Himalayas to the Pigmies? Who made God? Where did he come from? Who were his parents? (54)

33 One may notice the echoing use of ‘the blues of the sky’ in the two novels, perhaps symbolizing a third space, a space of eternity, or simply linked to the flying and journeying motifs. Kamla’s many unanswered questions highlight her confusion and her difficulties in dealing with her duality and in finding a way to reconnect her fragmented self. Questioning the Divine and family, her innocent words underline the impact of these two pressures on the diasporic gendered subject. As a matter of fact, this questioning is part of her healing process as she grows mature and comes to an awareness of her restrictions.

34In both novels, the theme of the emancipating flight is omnipresent, a common topic in Black writing when referring specifically to the Middle Passage for African slaves:

Whereas the classical topic of the liberating flight found sporadic expression in black writing of the midcentury, recent African-American authors have been increasingly fascinated with the celebration in black folk tales of the ‘Flying Africans’, slaves who take one long look at the new country, turn around and fly back to Africa, or of selected shamanic slaves who teach other slaves the magic words that allow them to fly back. (Diedrich, Gates and Pedersen 1999: 84)

35Closely linked to the flying motif, the wind is often personified in Lakshmi Persaud’s novels. Indeed, it is the wind that allows Sastra to escape through flying to a new place. It is also to the wind that Rabindranath whispers Sastra’s name for it to be transported across the channel to Ireland to inform her of his love. Furthermore, the wind can refer to breath and can thus be associated with death when Shakuntala dies, unsatisfied that Sastra and his son Govind did not marry as arranged. Last but not least, the wind can be linked to silence and void, this silence of ‘the unspoken and unspeakable’ (Morrison 1989), when Kamla’s questions remain unanswered or when she conceals her inner voice.

36 Sometimes oppressing, sometimes healing, the wind is an actor, a true character, and is at the heart of the symbolism of both texts. The wind is rather healing for Sastra as Shakuntala’s death may be seen as representing the vanishing traditions and the opening for a new wind of modernity. When Rabindranath dies, it is paradoxically a reviving wind for Sastra, as she can at last free herself totally from any male domination. Although Sastra loses her loved one, Rabindranath’s death sets her free of all female submissiveness and wifely duties. She can thus assert herself in a new space, in Canada, with her children.

Female identity is constructed through the mediation and contestation of an indigenous and colonial patriarchy and an accommodation of Hindu Tradition while adjusting to colonial education and creolization. This accommodation results in an ultimate break with tradition, symbolized by a postcolonial kala pani crossing to North America in search of a recuperated self that transgresses confinement through immigration. (Mehta 2004: 17)

37After her husband’s death, migration is a necessary healing process for Sastra and a genuine break from her Hindu patriarchal community. It is only then that she can reconstruct her inner self and acknowledge her internal desires and her hybridized identity in a new diasporic community in Canada. Persaud’s heroine flies away to this new space where hybridity and transculturality define a constantly mobile space, a space of change and progress. Describing who they are, acknowledging their other self, their liberated self and their femininity have been a challenge for Indo-Caribbean women who have long been restricted and silenced on the only basis of their gender. However, considering other Indian diasporic women’s literature, one may wonder if Lakshmi Persaud truly authorises her heroines to liberate themselves. In fact, when Monica Ali, the prominent British novelist of Bangladeshi origin allows her heroines to survive and to set free, it is through sexual liberation. In her novel Brick Lane (2003), Ali depicts two young female protagonists, on the one hand, the beautiful Hasina who elopes in a love marriage and on the other, her sister, the quiet Nazneen who has to face an arranged marriage and to survive against the odds. Although she is turned into a good Bengali wife, Nazneen eventually responds to her internal desires when she falls into a sexual adventure with Karim, a young Muslim who wants to radicalise the local community. Unlike Ali’s, Persaud’s heroines do not appear as materialising their assertion; they may free themselves from restrictions to a certain degree but their assertion appears as more subtle. Lakshmi Persaud depicts two possibilities for flying away despite traditions and conventions: material or mental, real or imagined, the journey is essential for the Indo-Caribbean female subject to assert herself and to acknowledge her hybrid identity.

38‘I have crossed an ocean/ I have lost my tongue/ From the root of the old one/ A new one has sprung’ (Nichols 1983: epilogue). These verses by African Caribbean diasporic poet Grace Nichols could well illustrate the Indo-Caribbean diasporic female subject as she has also crossed an ocean, the kala pani, and then had a new birth in the diaspora where ‘a new one has sprung’. Coming to terms with their hybrid identity constitutes a complex journey for Indian Caribbean women in Persaud’s work. The alienation of Sastra and Kamla is necessarily linked to their specific relation to space and displacement and to their consequent need for escape and evasion. However, the return homeward is often a necessary phase, which can be either salutary or destructive for the diasporic female subject.

39Persaud’s novels surely illustrate the hybridization and creolization of the Indo Caribbean female subject. Lakshmi Persaud does not criticize in any explicit ways her Indian traditional culture but her novels reflect an implicit hymn to the diasporic imagination and the need for exile, for the move away from home to express oneself. Persaud herself has undoubtedly managed to transcend space and time and to fly away from restrictions through her writing experience. Her diasporic experience as an Indo-Trinidadian living in London has undoubtedly enriched her writing and developed her very hybrid nature. Whether metaphysical or metafictional, the journey occurs for her two female protagonists. Sastra finds a safe space in the diaspora and the diasporic space is healing and liberating for her. Kamla’s space is more psychic as her consciousness moves inside out and outside in. She eventually gets to know her other self and learns to acknowledge its existence in her mind. She also learns to live at the margins of her community, as both an insider when she conforms to traditions and an outsider when she shares the West Indian domestic’s misfortune or when she imagines a therapeutic and safer space where she could find refuge. Furthermore, Kamla’s comments about a newly planted yam illustrate the hybridization of the Indo-Caribbean diasporic female subject:

It looked like the belly of a woman with child. Out of his belly of rotted kitchen compost and cow’s manure had popped a slender tendril with the tiniest of leaves; so tender, yet it had emerged and now it had the courage to wave to the wind. I thought ‘How can this clean juicy stem with leaves so well formed come out of this black earth wriggling with reddish brown worms?’ (24)

40This metaphor of the yam growing and its comparison to maternity come to illustrate further the complexity of Indo-Caribbean female identities and how the light and the dark, the ugly and the beautiful, the past and the modern interweave and give birth to new hybrid cultural identities. Just like the yam, the Caribbean female character demonstrates enough courage to wave to the wind and to move from voicelessness to the self-assertion of her hybrid identity.