Gosine - final before ts


Correspondence Address: Andil Gosine, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, York 
University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3; Email: andil@yorku.ca 

ISSN: 1911-4788 

Volume 14, Issue 2, 526-527, 2020 

Creative Intervention 

Untitled (2019) 

ANDIL GOSINE 
York University, Canada 

The broken clay is of a deeya, a vessel I grew up using in Trinidad every 
Divali. Oil would be poured into each, then a cotton wick dipped in and lit. 
Over the years, this act has become akin to putting up a Christmas tree –
religious for some, a secular cultural act for others, available to all. This 
lighting of deeyas has travelled throughout the world with various 
attachments and effects. When deeyas are lit in Trinidad and Tobago, 
regardless of the lighter’s religion or ethnicity, it feels like an 



Untitled (2019) 

 
Studies in Social Justice, Volume 14, Issue 2, 526-527, 2020	

527 

acknowledgment of the history of indentureship, the system that brought 
Indians to become replacement plantation workers in the Caribbean following 
the abolition of slavery. 

Because of the persistence of acts of racialized violence we encountered 
after migrating to Canada, I remember being scared of what lighting the 
deeyas on the steps of our Oshawa home might incite. (Nothing ever 
happened.) I broke the deeya with the intention of making the two parts fit to 
resemble a ship or, rather, a shipwreck. That is the story of Caribbean 
peoples’ history; we are working from/with wreckage.1  

The glass beads reference the long-established art of beadwork developed 
in many First Nations communities, and I’ve chosen red, pink and yellow – 
“coolie colours” that are intentionally used in my other work to refute the 
derision of them as evidence of rural Indians’ poor taste. The action in the 
image is literal – stitching together futures from the shared wreckage of 
colonization. The people shipped to do plantation labour in the Caribbean 
(including the waves who then migrated to Canada), and the First Peoples 
whom have been systematically displaced and exploited since the beginning 
of the colonial project: our past, present and futures are entwined. 

 
 

Reference 
 
Gosine, A. (2016). “My mother’s baby: Wrecking work after indentureship. In G. Hosein & L. 

Outar (Eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, theories, enactments (pp. 
49-60). Palgrave Macmillan. 

 

																																																								
1 In “My Mothers Baby: Wrecking Work After Indentureship” (Gosine, 2016), I use the 
metaphor of the shipwreck to also underline the productive possibilities of wreckage as well.