Silence of the Seabed: Reimagining Traumatic Water Crossings in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean

Abstract

"Silence of the Seabed" argues that while the colonial archives of traumatic oceanic crossings in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean are biased and incomplete, writers re-imagine these crossings from subaltern and ecological perspectives, thus fostering richer engagements with migratory history and the oceanic environment. Drawing from a corpus of contemporary poetry and fiction spanning English, French, Spanish and Hindi, I demonstrate that archipelagic writers undertake the common creative endeavor of re-imagining oceanic migrations (the Middle Passage of slavery, the kala pani crossing of indenture and contemporary clandestine crossings) by using the ocean as a conceptual prism, that is, by foregrounding oppressed perspectives through the ocean’s material and ecological specificities. Chapter One argues that the depths of the ocean are a refractive space where terrestrial understandings of trauma as individual and localized are diffracted into a collective and multispecies working-through of the past. Chapter Two foregrounds the silences left behind when the particular experiences of female migrants are excised from official records. I argue that the resilience of female migrants mirrors the indomitability of the ocean: neither can be suppressed by the blanks of history, but instead come gushing out in literary works. Chapter Three engages with non-linear experiences of time and space that arise from an ocean whose molecules and currents form part of the global water cycle; I argue that creative texts of water crossings playfully stretch boundaries of mortality, hence countering the extreme dehumanization of the oppressed. This dissertation thus explores the contemporary literature of sea migrations as an oceanic archive, where the ocean becomes an ecological repository for intergenerational trauma.