kreoling sisters: (un)intimate relationships, child marriages and women spirits

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0114
• Pages: 114-124
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Gitan Djeli
• Subject Matter: intergenerational silences,Indo-Kreol relations Mauritius,indenture Mauritius,Indo-Mauritian,Afro-Asian relations

Journal of Indentureship 1.1 September 2021

kreoling sisters

(Un)intimate relationships, child marriages

and women spirits

Gitan Djeli

Gitan Djeli is an affiliate art history fellow, Indian Ocean Exchanges

Program, supported by Harpur College, Binghamton University and

the Getty Foundation

ABSTRACT

The non-ction piece, ‘kreoling sisters’, explores the overlapped

histories of slavery and indenture in the Indian Ocean context,

Mauritius in particular. It merges memoir writing, indenture studies

and Black study and theory to discuss antiblack/antikreol racism and

unfreedom during the critical historical time between the beforelife

of indenture (that is slavery) and the afterlife of slavery during inden-

ture. ‘kreoling sisters’ unearths a personal story that touches on the

(un)intimacy or unofcialised intimacy between Black mothers and

men of Indian descent and their Black-Indo/Kreol children. The aim

is to discuss the entanglement between freedom, intimacy, slavery,

antiblackness and indenture and disrupt the ofcial, institutional, co-

lonial and patriarchal narratives. The question the piece nally asks

is how intimacy and love can exist, with the thought of what free-

dom could have been in the colony and could be in contemporary

times. ‘kreoling sisters’ wishes to envision how Indenture studies

can engage with a Black philosophy of freedom and abolition, that is

the abolition of the plantation police, prison and property, inherited

from colonialism.

KEYWORDS

intergenerational silences, Indo-Kreol relations Mauritius, indenture

Mauritius, Indo-Mauritian, Afro-Asian relations