Supplied
Title: Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present
Author: Andrea Gunraj
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Pages: 312
As a child, author Andrea Gunraj knew little about how her ancestors arrived from India to present-day Guyana. The sole story she heard made her shy away from that painful history: two young boys in India lured onto a boat, landing in what was then British Guiana, never to return home again.
Gunraj’s ancestors were among the 1.6 million Indian indentured labourers who entered exploitative contracts with the British between 1834 and 1917. These contracts put workers at an immediate disadvantage – indebted to employers for the cost of housing, and the initial investment of months-long passage from one British colony to another. Workers were often paid at the end of their years-long contracts, with the option to return home or, as many opted, to remain.
While many colonial powers used this type of labour, the British notably recruited workers from India and China and sent them to colonies in Africa, the Pacific and the Americas. Just as Gunraj’s ancestors experienced, the tactics often included coercion and fraud.
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Gunraj began researching this history in university, and has spent more than 20 years examining what she calls an “undertold” past. “What is common to all racialized indentured workers is the marinade of white supremacy they are soaked in, the notion that racialized populations are best suited to work for white interests,” she writes.
This history is the starting point for Go-Between Girl, Gunraj’s collection of essays examining the legacy of indentured labour, both in her own life and its effect on culture, love, food and, most prominently, modern labour.
The Toronto-based author has built a career in the non-profit sector, and is currently vice-president of strategic policy and partnerships at CivicAction, which promotes civic engagement in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas. She is also the author of two novels, The Lost Sister (2019) and The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha (2009).
Gunraj’s debut non-fiction book blends memoir, historical critique and cultural analysis. Gunraj challenges the idea that indentured labour was simply a replacement for slavery, after the latter was made illegal in 1834 by the British.
She points out that there were different forms of indentureship preceding this date. And there is a crucial difference between the two: there was an element of choice indentured labourers had that was completely absent for enslaved people. Gunraj found it “confronting” – and necessary – to take figures like her ancestors beyond a simple category of victim, to those who made active choices in pursuit of a better life.
She connects this notion of constrained choice to modern immigration systems. As an immigrant, your identity becomes your usefulness to your host country, she argues.
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Gunraj compares the medical tests done to ensure fitness for labour ahead of indentured workers being put on boats to our modern tests for Canadian immigration for the very same reason. “To become a model immigrant, you must work. Work is the spirit of your existence,” she writes in her essay, “The Failed Model Minority.”
A history of multiple migrations is part of how Gunraj came to see herself as a “go-between,” a concept threaded throughout the book – from wanting to translate her culture to elementary school teachers, to reflecting on the pressures faced by so-called model minorities.
On the latter, she writes about the role that model minority women often take on in feminist organizations, becoming what she calls “white feminist whisperers.” While Black and Indigenous women may be seen as too radical to even subtly enforce white supremacy, Gunraj writes, model minorities such as South Asians are counted on to be placating forces. “They serve as racialized respites from the toughest challenges to white supremacy: liberation, not just charity.”
While Gunraj provides an education – one with a decolonial lens, on indentured labour – the brilliance of her analysis is evident in how she sees the reverberations of this little-known history. She also rarely diagnoses a problem without a solution – from calling to shake off expectations of model minorities to uphold existing power structures, to resisting the backbone of unfree labour that insists your value as a human only comes from your ability to work.
Ultimately, she reframes the ”go-between” not as a diminished identity, but one that draws upon multiple identities that is capable of bridging divides and challenging dominant narratives. While full of sharp criticism, Gunraj’s book leaves the reader with a gentle message: “Perhaps we all need to grow our understanding of being liminal people together.”