The West Indian Day Parade is one of the largest parades held annually in New York City. A cavalcade of people in feathers and sequins proceeds down Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, a wide boulevard two streets from where I live. It begins at dawn, dissipating only in the evening. I go late in the afternoon to see celebrants still dancing, the displays of miniature Caribbean flags sold to spectators forming exuberant structures. Festoons, tents and stalls crowd its length, with tropical fruits arrayed for refreshment.
This gathering of nations, with a shared heritage, colonial experience, and geography, started in Harlem in the 1930s, but has been held in the borough of Brooklyn since the 1960s, where most of New York’s Caribbean communities are concentrated today. The West Indian Day celebrations have roots in the islands’ Afro-Creole tradition, opening with J’Ouvert: daybreak revelry with dancers in body paint. In Trinidad and Tobago, it’s associated with the emancipation of the enslaved and the defiant joy of liberation.
There are a surprising number of parallels between Trinidad and Tobago and Malaya. They both share the same independence day: August 31st, but five years apart (Malaya: 1957; Trinidad and Tobago: 1962). They belong respectively to the Caribbean and South-east Asia, the world’s two largest equatorial archipelagoes, which at some periods in history shared the same name: the West and East “Indies”.
Our geographies—little islands juxtaposed with larger oceans and continents—have also generated similar experiences of racial encounter, assimilation and mixing. Listening to the Jamaican dancehall rhythms on Eastern Parkway reminded me that much mid-20th century Malay music—Singapore was a great centre of Malay culture then—was inspired by eclectic genres from the Caribbean archipelago: Cuban son and rumba especially, and the recordings of Havana bandleader Xavier Cugat. Miss Julia’s “Goreng Pisang” sounds a lot like Antonio Machìn’s “El Manisero”. Hispanic music continues to shape Malay youth culture today (I think of matreps’ fondness for Daddy Yankee in the early 2000s, and Puerto Rican reggaeton in Malay barber shops).
Those infectious beats came from a blending of peoples—African, European, Indigenous, Asian—mingling in the Caribbean islands through centuries of migration, colonialism, slavery and indenture. In the process, new and distinct ways of life came into being. Given the Caribbean’s proximity to the United States, their music spread to wherever the latter’s postwar imperial reach extended, like South-east Asia. New ears and bodies received those sounds. Music aside, we’re also enriched by the Caribbean’s intellectual tradition; theories on race by Frantz Fanon, the postcolonial writer from Martinique, are well-discussed at the Department of Malay Studies in the National University of Singapore.
These diffusions are uni-directional, but to me both regions’ complicated racial legacies—of hierarchy and intimacy, exchange and division—bind them in a kind of unconscious, historical kinship. They are both shaped by what another philosopher from Martinique, Edouard Glissant, termed “archipelagic thinking”: far from the centralist, territorial frames privileged by the nation-state, it is “not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation”.
Glissant’s call was recently heeded by the Singapore Literature Festival (SLF), which selected the theme “Archipelago Dreaming” for its latest iteration held in Manhattan. (Jee Leong Koh leads Singapore Unbound, a New York-based literary nonprofit that founded the SLF.) At one panel, Singaporean author Yu-Mei Balasingamchow spoke with Guyanese-American Gaiutra Bahadur and Trinidadian-American Krystal Sital. Their works are, to varying degrees, informed by their heritage as descendants of the Indian diaspora in the Malay and Caribbean archipelagos.
Krystal sliding between American English and Trinidadian Creole in her writing made me think about how literature makes home for our true mother tongues, orphaned by our shame around cultural dilution and contamination. Yet, sometimes our messy pasts are beyond the very grip of language, leaving so much inaccessible and incomplete. In Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Gaiutra remembers her mother singing bhajans to Ganesh, Hanuman and Saraswati despite knowing very little Hindi. Even so, the gods “gave the hymns she did not understand, from an India she had never seen, a tangible quality. You could touch the words.” Place is made by objects and senses.
It could also be imagined into being. Yu-Mei, co-author of Singapore: A Biography, didn’t inherit her Sri Lankan Tamil grandfather’s language. And because he died when she was still young, his stories are lost to her. Yu-Mei’s research on the island’s broad South Asian cast—sepoys, coolies, merchants—didn’t help reconstruct her family history much either. As primarily a fiction writer now, she reflected on how the imaginative space of fiction could perhaps open up what the archive has concealed or omitted.
Fictionality has, in any case, long been a meaningful mode of exploring and understanding the past before modern ideas of “objective” history came along. Sometimes, narrative itself acts as an agent of history: bridging peoples and places, rendering the foreign familiar. Both archipelagos are heirs to one of humanity’s greatest narrative traditions: the Ramayana.
The story has long been loved in Muslim South-east Asia despite now being considered a “Hindu” text. The Malays call it the Hikayat Seri Rama.
At SLF, Vivek Narayanan, India-born poet, told me about a Trinidadian Ramayana, brought there by Indian plantation-workers and called Ramleela. Puzzlingly vast, the Ramayana incarnates into myriad languages, absorbing the gods, saints and landscapes of places it passes through. Vivek’s recently published poetry collection After responds to the famous epic, which gave me the perfect chance to nerd out on it. Narrative has been far better at containing difference and contradiction, a more generous space to clarify our paradoxical selves (or not).
The Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott reflected on a performance of the Ramleela as a metaphor for the Caribbean’s composite nature. The Caribbean peoples forged through captivity and forced migration, Walcott says, had developed their own language and identity despite being dislodged from their motherlands. Far from being a “non-people”, they inherited:
...this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.
If Walcott saw his archipelago as fragments sealed by “care and pain”, as “a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent”, how did a writer from the Malay archipelago imagine theirs? Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer—who almost received a Nobel but didn’t—conjures the co-creative, social space of the Malay language, the oral lingua franca taken up by foreigners spreading Islam and trade. These were no fragments; raised in that shared speech, the children of those foreign sojourners cultivated the manners, arts and tastes of locals whom their fathers married. They were referred to in Malay as “Peranakan”.
The Caribbean term “Creole” has been used to describe this phenomenon of localisation. But to be Peranakan, not Creole, entailed adoption into an embedded way of life that was open to outside participation even while it was distinct to its local geography. In both cases, of Creole and Peranakan, there was never a transethnic utopia: there were unequal power structures, of the sexes, colour and class.
But amid those historical brutalities were born communities, dreams, and resistance. At the SLF’s opening address, Filipina novelist Gina Apostol recalled her participation in the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos, an American-backed dictator, relishing the memory of being amongst bodies converging on the streets. I remarked to her that some Malay scholars in Malaysia and Singapore today see their intellectual lineage going back ultimately to Jose Rizal, Filipino nationalist. Haitians forged the world’s first successful slave insurrection, and the Philippines mounted the first anti-colonial movement in modern Asia. Both archipelagos not only share histories of discrimination and injustice, but also a revolutionary heritage.
It was often diasporas that created these struggles. Rizal, like many South-east Asian leaders who imagined and fought for their nations’ freedom, was educated in Europe. I harbour no such pretensions as someone now part of what we can consider a Singaporean ‘diaspora’. In New York, I’m still an outsider looking in, having only been here a few months. As a student of Malay history, I especially fear losing touch with happenings back home. Too many have dissected the Malay world from faraway centres like one would a whale carcass, when it is really alive, roaring and supple: its present flows into its past, and vice-versa.
That enormity, however, also makes being here an advantage. New York provides perspective and distance, boon companions in the search for meaning. Here in the belly of another whale, I can contemplate echoes: “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs,” goes the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. The Indies are here.
At the SLF, I caught up with Nazry Bahrawi, Singaporean scholar and literary translator, who’s now based in Seattle. We wondered why the Malayo-Indonesian/“Nusantara” diaspora is so small compared to other more visible Asian communities in the West. Of course, besides the old Malay communities in Ceylon and Cape Town, we counted those in the Christmas and Cocos Islands (both Australian outposts) and more recent migrants in Perth. I remembered London’s Bayswater, which is now a little Malay kampung with restaurants frequented by expats and students.
New York today has an Indonesian concentration in Queens. But geographer Tim Bunnell has also unearthed a rich diasporic history of Malay seamen circulating between the Atlantic ports in the first half of the 20th century. Many stayed, and those who settled in New York founded the Malay Club of America in Brooklyn in 1954. I also recently found a photo from 1969 of the famous leftist Malayan poets Usman Awang and Latiff Mohidin hanging out in Greenwich Village: with its artists and writers, it must have felt a lot like Kampung Gelam, where they first met.
Nazry and I had brunch at Urban Hawker, where I ate a delicious bowl of mee rebus served by, most likely, the few other Malays in midtown Manhattan. The mee rebus here proved there was home somewhere, that could be touched and ingested.
As I ride the subway to school on weekdays, the “B” train takes me over the East River, affording panoramas of the Brooklyn Bridge, Lady Liberty in the distance, and Governors’ Island. But dominating this scene are wide vistas of water. A great harbour-town sprawled over islands and intersecting waterways, New York City itself is an archipelago, and part of others. The American writer Rebecca Solnit considered New York the “far north” of the Caribbean. Migratory routes and events like the West Indian Day Parade have subverted traditional notions of “centre” and “periphery”.
Even without a sizable presence, the Malays have also made New York part of their imaginative geography. Over it now hangs the shadow of Malaysian kleptocracy: penthouses bought with the stolen 1MDB hoard, enabled by Wall Street’s financial giants. Chiefly though, New York is seen as the heart of American empire waging war on the Muslim ummah. I grew up in the post-9/11 age, when Islamic South-east Asia had to contend with the world’s fear of “jihadist” terror that spread from Ground Zero. Like Muslims in other countries where they were a minority, Singaporean Muslims were forced to deal with suspicion over our supposedly divided loyalties.
In this mapping, New York is not a shining beacon of human achievement, but the dark centre of forces hostile to Islam. This framing is insidious too. It ignores the long presence of Muslim Americans in the city, and feeds a narrative of Islam-versus-the West that far-right American conservatives also promote. Nonetheless, this suggests that New York can’t always control how it is seen abroad: the Malay world also makes New York and what it represents.
Looking around the subway carriage high above the East River, its waves like polished silver in the morning sun, I wonder how this city remained a critical node of multiple human archipelagos encircling the world. To be in an archipelago requires openness to encounter and strangeness, something Singapore—for all its pride at being global and multicultural—struggles with today. In Singapore, I’ve often felt like we are already diasporas without leaving. The borders were drawn and the land, disavowing the regional kinship that had so crucially shaped it for centuries, had become a stranger to itself.
New York is hardly harmonious or equal, but accepts that tension comes naturally with being the meeting-point of difference. Unlike Singapore, New York doesn’t see itself as a nation, so it has fewer anxieties about striving for conformity, resolving conflict, or enforcing “tolerance”. New Yorkers can more easily slip into Glissant’s archipelagic thinking: “not made to obtain unity, but rather a new kind of Relation”.
I relish this brief sensation of crossing water, of being between places, before the train trundles into a dark Manhattan tunnel.
Faris Joraimi is Jom’s history editor.
Style note: for second and subsequent mentions of individuals, Faris has used first names for Muslims (which is standard) and for his friends (like Yu-Mei) but last names for all others.
