It’s been a year since India “decriminalised” homosexual acts in their draconian postcolonial holdover of British Law that became known as Indian Penal Code 377. But what can we actually celebrate? 

I come from a family that has inherited these laws, made them flesh, and let them indulge in their Puritanical carnality. My parents were born in Guyana, South America, themselves descendants of the Indian Indentured Labor system set up to feed cheap, exploitable labor to colonies abroad. I suppose it should not surprise me, but the laws in Guyana are the same, wrought of the same hate as the British laws. Almost word for word.

Epigentics refers to the changes that occur in gene expression that are not based on any kind of alteration to the actual genetic code. They sit above the chemical compounds of deoxyribose, phosphate, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine — haunting the expressions with lessons learned by ancestors that did not make it into the genetic structure of the DNA but rather, affect if from the outside. What this means is that we, as animals, as queers, inherit the kinds of traumas that affect our past genetic soups. I imagine my own ancestors — indentured and forced into servitude on British sugar plantations, reacting to colonial rule and colonial hatred of queerness. 

As a queer, I am linked to these three histories in my postcolonial reckoning of myself: the British, the Indian, the Guyanese. The material history of colonization and indenture and the psychic fallout of homophobia codified in religious practice reaching its tendrils into the economic base of these societies which privilege productivity threads its red thread through these spaces.

One of the texts that I find to haunt me personally is the anti-sodomy laws, all coded in language from Britain in the 1500s. In her book Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013), Gaiutra Bahadur states that the British wielded these laws to keep white soldiers from fucking white soldiers, but also, since the brown body of the Indian was lesser, they served as justification enough of their heathen practices. These laws are now the machetes, the cutlasses that justify homophobic oppression in Caribbean spaces. These words are almost identical from colony to colony, maintained today in Guyana and India — not yet struck down for their violations of human rights. But to hold the postcolonial nation accountable for its colonial inheritance? Most folks would say, Get over it. But how to get over destitution? Abandonment? Disease? Murder? 

By practising these laws, and for taking so long to see the possibility of living without their borders, what have we done, as South Asians, but to drink the tea of our own shackles? With me, I carry my queerness, my multiple belongings, my migrations. Like my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents. I crossed another kalapani, the Pacific, into Hawaii, a deposed monarchy and a kingdom kidnapped by the United States. 

I like to think of our migrations as similar to whale migration — dark bodies singing songs across the pagal samundar. My Aji taught me sohars and bhajans, sang from with seeds from Uttar Pradesh and Crabwood Creek, Guyana all the way to Scarborough, Toronto, songs that I’ve sung in New York City, Richmond Hill, Jackson Heights, Honolulu, Opelika, Alabama, and finally to Boston. What I sing is a queer song of dis/re/placement that is a radical possibility for identity and all its shifting. I choose to queer these songs. I choose to queer sexuality. I choose to queer literature. My choice for slippage between categories is radical possibility. So, the law says that queers are no longer “criminals” but fuck you. There is a price. And that price is blood. 

There are also hauntings that affect and shade the experience of my body as I travel through time and place. Danger is coded in my epigenetic memory and inheritance. These include disease, dispossession, and are bound up in ship records now withering into dust in Guyana. I have never been but the archive looms large in my imagination since it represents textual authority: proof that yes, my ancestors did in fact cross the ocean into South America and the Caribbean. 

My parents are survivors. Or at least the equation that was instilled in me was: Silence=Survival. I’ve had to learn how to see myself when I’m painted out of the pastoral scene: to read myself into the quick definitions of others to prove that I exist; to see the Coolie in the Asian American label; to hear the queer voices in the chutney music that is home. Faggot is my gender. 

And that’s the thing about diasporic consciousness for me, at least — that my multiple belongings and exclusions happen simultaneously. I like to think of this as a piece of white paper divided into eight sections. 

Fold a piece of white paper into eight equal parts and make heavy creases that will act as different sections. Now, color each rectangle a different shade with some kind of paint: acrylic or oil. The colors should be distinct and not necessarily connected to one another by any logic of the color wheel — just through the global economics of a paper that binds them together. Fold the paper again into the sections. 

For example, 

Red for Indian descent (Indian Penal Code Section 377)

Sienna for Queerness (Criminal Law Offenses Act of Guyana)

Mauve for England (An Acte for the Punysshement of the Vice of Buggerie)

Orange for the US (Supreme court hearing on LGBTQI* rights in the workplace)

and the list goes on. 

Now, take the folded paper and tear it in half. You will notice that in every tear some bit of every color grabs the eye. Now from this cross-section try to remove all the blue without removing or damaging any of the other colors. You will have a hard time doing so as the paint all seems to blend together to form a new color composed of many different ones. 

I like to think of this as how a queer diasporic consciousness works: where time, place, queernesses all occur simultaneously without the ability to be separated. I am too American, too Coolie, too immigrant, too queer, too old to stay silent and to use silence as my means of survival in this racist, queer-hating countries. 

In what follows I have taken the words of the Indian Penal Code Section 377 and exposed all of the times that I have been a criminal when I lived in India. Following is the Criminal Law Offences Act of Guyana that I have similarly upset — as a way of linking these two diasporic spaces by their colonial stitchings. Both were previously published as a poem in the Asian American Literary Review.