Anglophone Literature of Caribbean Indenture by Alison Klein

Author:Alison Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319990552
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Pagoda: Defying Colonial Categories

The Pagoda, by Patricia Powell, does not deal directly with indenture, but features a protagonist, Lowe, who smuggles himself on board a ship of Chinese migrants traveling to Jamaica under indenture. Lowe is born female but presents as male, and the novel refers to Lowe using masculine pronouns, and so this chapter does the same. Like The Counting House and The Promise, The Pagoda explores the relationship between a white man in power and the migrant that he sexually assaults—in this case, Cecil, the captain of the ship upon which Lowe stows away, and Lowe. By contrast with The Counting House and The Promise, there is no sense that the characters in this novel represent their home nations, nor does Cecil’s treatment of Lowe act as an allegory for Britain’s treatment of China. Instead, the characters defy stereotypes, and their interactions with each other, while impacted by the broader dynamics of colonialism, are shaped more powerfully by the local: individual relationships, community norms, and shared experiences. The Pagoda thus acts as an example of fiction that condemns the abuses of colonialism and indenture without replicating the hierarchies underlying those systems.

The novel begins with Cecil’s death, which stuns Lowe, who is living as a shopkeeper in Jamaica. He reflects on their first encounter decades earlier and how their lives developed in the years that followed. Lowe bore Cecil a daughter, Elizabeth, now grown and married. Cecil’s death acts as a catalyst for Lowe to reevaluate his life, and he struggles to tell Elizabeth the truth: Lowe is Elizabeth’s biological mother, and Cecil, not Lowe, is her father. As Lowe searches for a way to explain this to Elizabeth, he begins to shed the false identity that Cecil had developed for him and to recognize all of the ways that he and those around him push against the seemingly fixed categories of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

While Lowe never labors on the plantation, the suffering of those migrants who did acts as a backdrop for Lowe’s own traumatic experiences. Lowe describes his time on the ship, which he shared with “stolen Chinese…thin men spare as bones…piled in like prisoners and stowed tight with the chests of tea and silk, for sale to the highest bidder in the West Indies” (Powell 1998, 17). This description demonstrates the dehumanizing treatment of the laborers, who are packed onto the ship with the tea and silk, goods to be sold across the ocean. The words “stolen” and “prisoner” also indicate the involuntary nature of this migration, which is further emphasized when the Chinese migrants gather in Lowe’s shop and tell tales of being kidnapped or tricked into signing a contract (Powell 1998, 43). The British system of Indian indenture certainly included its share of corruption, ill-treatment of laborers, and dehumanization, but in some ways, the Chinese system of indenture may have been worse, as it was a system of private profiteers as opposed to a state-run system. Walton Look Lai writes that the

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