Désir Cannibale: Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s Notebook of No Return

Abstract

This article considers the practice of Guadeloupe-based Indo-Caribbean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary. Her ongoing project Notebook of No Return, as with her other works, conveys her complex subjectivity, forsaking both mournful and celebratory narratives of Indians living in the Caribbean after Indentureship, and foregrounding the fast-moving, ever-evolving, and rootless character of our existence. Sinnapah Mary creates visual images which both assert the presence of an underrepresented people and reveal the spaces in which pleasure and violence are simultaneously generated and entwined. I argue that Sinnapah Mary’s representation of the Indo-Caribbean body—in relationship to and continuous with those of animals, and as animalistic—provides a provocative and promising agenda for Indo-Caribbean life after Indentureship.