Excavating Identity from a Near-forgotten History: Go-Between Girl by Andrea Gunraj

It starts with the cover: a grey-scale image of a “coolie belle,” hand on hip, staring you straight in the eyes, sprouting amongst a crowded city skyline illustrated in shades of pink (designed by Talia Abramson). It’s an arresting image; the Indian woman’s gaze defiant and self-possessed. It’s an image lifted from 19^th century portraits that were part of the colonial project to create postcards that objectified and exoticized subjects as propaganda to support the colonization of the Caribbean, “to stoke fervour, entice travellers, and titillate onlookers in the most predictable white-focused, male-centric ways” (198). And yet so many of these portraits captured people—women, in particular—who defied objectification, their gazes near-inscrutable, looking far past the colonial photographer. Go-Between Girl, by Andrea Gunraj, is a memoir told across a collection of essays that examines what it means to be the descendent of the racialized indentured class. In this specific case, after the abolition of slavery, people from India and China were transported (some by force, coercion, kidnapping and some possibly choosing to escape, or adventure) to labour in the Caribbean for nominal pay that still bound them to their masters. In this collection, Gunraj examines the nuances of what it means to have grown up as part of Toronto’s Indo-Caribbean diaspora after generations of her ancestors had migrated across multiple continents, from India to Guyana, where cultural identity simultaneously crumbled and adapted with each move. But the telling is not so easy when there are so many erasures across oceans; Gunraj has no story of her own direct line, but has heard “hazy” stories about “a pair of young Indian boys tricked onto a boat by a white man,” (14) and taken to British Guiana who became the great grandparents of her cousins. And so the “go-between” refers to an identity that exists in a liminal space. Together these essays consider what to make when liminal identities are compounded: the Indian who didn’t return to their homeland; the next generation that became Indo-Caribbean; the following generation’s immigration to North America or the UK; and now the position of a second-generation Canadian. The ‘go-betweenness’ of identity is captured in that hyphen spanning across time and space.

In these essays, there is depth and breadth to each facet of identity, explored in wide-ranging topics: the myth of the model minority, mental health, grief, white feminism in the world of feminist non-profits, relationships, aesthetics, cousins, and food. Each piece feels nested, where a portrait of the author’s experiences and sensibilities are built from accretion and movement. Each builds from the previous pieces in repeated images or motifs, picking up threads previously laid down. As a “go-between girl” this seems the most comprehensive way for Gunraj to construct memoir. It is a vital mirroring of the ways in which our personal experiences of family and childhood are nested in the power dynamics of broader collective tides, whether we’re aware of it or not. And so, the strength of these essays is in the way that Gunraj frames her personal story and anecdotes with historical events and socio-political observations.

For Gunraj, the intention behind these essays is to humanize those who have been overlooked, unwritten, and misremembered by History. An example is the recounting of an incident in 1872 “at British Guiana’s Devonshire Castle plantation,” when a crowd of workers walked into town, having been promised an opportunity to air their grievances. Instead, they were immediately turned away by armed constables at the door:

	   I see them slowing at the road turning into the estate. They cannot
	simply return to the fields, swallowed by the cane, never to be heard
	from again. I see narrowing eyes. Tightened grips on staves. They 
	choose to stand up. They will block the way of the overseers and
	magistrates into the plantation. They will hold their own court where
	they stand. They will make themselves heard. (32)

Here, research is delivered in human terms. Throughout, there are far-reaching references to literature and art, and Gunraj’s rigorous research is fleshed out with evocative and lyrical imaginings of the people who lived under history’s thumb. There is a passage dedicated to richly imagining the lives of people who converged in Calcutta, and also Macau—people from vastly different circumstances who found themselves about to cross an ocean. Imagined here because many of their own accounts have been lost. This is a poetic work of non-fiction that only a fiction writer could produce. Gunraj’s previous novels The Lost Sister (Vagrant Press, 2019) and The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha (Knopf Canada, 2009) are both centred around Guyanese girls who are missing from their own stories. But Gunraj also turns her view inward, writing of her own deeply personal experiences: “I couldn’t have been older than twelve at the time. Did I truly think my mother wasn’t getting what she needed from the doctors? How could I have known something wasn’t right if it was all I’d ever seen? Did I really sense something amiss?” (50). Full disclosure, I am also Indo-Guyanese and I can say that it’s not just the stories of our ancestors that get lost. I grew up outside of Toronto in the 1980s, which was a time when the intimate stories of our inner lives were never spoken aloud. The legacy of lost history just ripples onward, and it’s the people we live with who become unknowable.

Go-Between Girl opens and closes with the recognition of the Chinese indentured labourers who built the railways across pacific Canada and the US, on land that had already seen the genocide of the Indigenous: 

Maybe reclamation can be the uncomplicated awareness that we are more 
than our allotted function in the nexus of the enslaved, the indentured and coerced, and the overseer tethered on Indigenous land. Maybe it can be our insistence that
we are far more than our labour—and the distillation of human to labour is 
always most deadly for those most devalued, those most othered and ignored 
and unloved.” (3)

In the essay “Better Lives” Gunraj considers why her parents immigrated to Canada, and notes that the personal drive for a better life for one’s self and family can also extend to strangers: that no one is free until we’re all free, “We want something good, together” (116). And so this memoir-in-essays is not just relevant for someone like me, who is seeing a multi-faceted version of myself said outright in a rare instance, but all of our histories are entangled, and that “Perhaps we all need to grow our understanding of being liminal people together” (269). 

Nadia Ragbar

Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor (Invisible Publishing, 2025) is her first novel.