In Case of National Emergency, Deploy Ethnicity and Class as Floatation Devices

The title of Shani Mootoo's second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, is enough to make anyone pick up the book, but the romance narrative will certainly keep readers turning the pages. This tale of childhood innocence and love lost is disrupted by the realities of a colonial structure, which keep hierarchies entrenched even among communities of poor indentured labourers in the colonies. As young East Indian children, Harry St. George and Rose Sangha know little about the social and political structures that shape the worlds in which they exist. Living in Guanagaspar, the fictitious Caribbean island where Mootoo sets her novel, they grow up playing with and caring deeply for one another. The games and childhood fantasies of children ultimately give way to the fears and desires of adulthood. Mootoo's novel crafts a vivid picture of Indo-Caribbean communities and the intricate politics of relationships within these Spaces during British colonial rule. Her work provides a much-needed representation of East Indian experi ences in countries such as Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, where tens of thousands of indentured labourers were imported to work the cane fields after the end of slavery in the Caribbean. Mootoo's first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, and her collection of short stories, Out on Main Street, are both singularly concerned with sexuality and identity among Indo-Caribbean people in the diaspora. Her protagonists are constantly migrating between sexual, psychologi cal and social boundaries where emerging identities, once fixed in the