One for The French Mission

[Who2]

This is an interesting article by The French Mission who can often be found celebrating in Sheik Ali's/Marsam....
http://www.nature.com/news/intricate-an ... my-1.19864

[LovelyLadyLux]

Very interesting article.

By way of a comment re: tattoos back in the day of the dinosaur when I was working on my PhD in Trinidad I'd come across from time to time very elderly ladies sporting tattoos primarily on their inner forearms.

These elderly ladies were the arranged marriage bought brides brought from India for husbands. On arriving to show ownership to a specific family their inner fore arms above the wrist were tattoo'd such that when they were serving a meal to their husband he had to be able to SEE the tattoo to show she belonged to him and his family. Failing to show the tattoo meant nobody would "accept food from my hand" and provision of food to her husband was her job. Love to say these ladies were interesting and engaging but sadly they were not. They seemed to have had no education and very structured and confined lives with really not much awareness of anything outside their immediate family. Once arriving in Trinidad they lost all ties to their family of origin and the family they came into was often very small, often just a husband who himself had been an indentured servant to the sugar plantations. Through hard work over years and years he'd been able to buy his freedom (unlike the black slaves who were freed but then denied land ownership and/or even the ability to possess tools to work the land). It was the bought wives job to cook, clean and produce children. Most of the ladies did glow when they recalled the number of sons they gave their husband and that they saw as fulfilling their obligation to their husband. None could define 'love' and those who tried for me invariably put it in terms of producing children (boys) for their husband as daughters met with arranged marriages and often complete separation from their birth parents. At any of the weddings, prayers or big family gatherings I was at these women typically just sat in the background rather blending into the woodwork. Obedience personified. There are very few left and even now I'm talking several decades back. Just interesting in the use of tattoos to claim ownership of a living soul and how it had to be placed to remind her and all the world that she was owned.

[Horus]

Not unlike the tattooing of holocaust victims in the Nazi death camps, just numbered like a commodity rather than a human being.

[LovelyLadyLux]

Not unlike the tattooing of holocaust victims in the Nazi death camps, just numbered like a commodity rather than a human being.

When I first learned of these elderly ladies in Trinidad and how they came to be there I was really quite excited to meet some of them and talk to them. I had LOTS of questions and could hardly contain myself as they're such a small discrete group that is little known. I thought I'd discovered a proverbial treasure trove of past history and a practice however after meeting several I found they were very non-communicative and none could really provide any insights. Their world was very concrete in that they could say what they did, how they did it but the "why" of it all was not within any of them to explain. Life for them just was as it had been and none of them could offer no real interpretation of it.

They actually acted like a commodity. They were people who had never been able to self determine anything in their life. They had always been at the beck and call of somebody else. No personal freedom had really ever been in their lives. They belonged to the family they were married into and there the story basically ends. Nobody particularly ever cared how they felt about it, if they liked it, if they wanted anything to change etc.

The one distinguishing thing I could say about them was that they were very obedient, very non-questioning, made no demands and did everything they did to fulfill their role as a wife. They were all living within big extended family systems scattered about Trinidad and I don't believe any knew each other.

Trying to ask anything about emotional concepts basically got me a blank stare and I can really only relate it to somebody asking a question they had never ever thought about i.e. Did you love your husband? "I gave his children" "I cooked food for his family" "I had sons"

"Did you ever say no?" Again I'd get blank stares. One asked me back why would she ever say no?

I also have to say I didn't just meet these women out of the blue. For some of them I knew their families and nobody had a problem with me seeing them and talking to them. It was all very informal. For the most part the family regarded these ladies as elderly, no longer having to work and just belonging to the family. They knew that they'd been tattoo'd but would invariably say and indicate that they do not do that with the daughters anymore (Thankfully!) BUT they DO still arrange marriages!! AND expect that daughters OBEY their husband 100% and believe me the Baba or Pundit WILL drive that into the bride mercilessly at the 5 day wedding!