Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 2. November 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
Survival As Compassion: Gender, Silence, And Ethical Relationality in Olive Senior’s Arrival of the Snake Woman
--- Auritra Munshi
Abstract:
This present paper seeks to showcase
the experience of indentured Indian women in the Caribbean by means of the
ethical lens of compassion, and
thereby underscoring Olive Senior’s short story “Arrival of the Snake
Woman.” Emphasizing upon the character of Miss Coolie, the paper
highlights that compassion, rather than overt rebellion, evokes as a powerful
mode of survival, relational ethics, and postcolonial agency. Set against the
historical trauma of kala pani, indenture, racial antagonism, and
patriarchal surveillance, the narrative brings out as to how compassion acts as
a quiet but transformative force. Miss Coolie’s embodied care practices, her
silent endurance, her healing labour, and her refusal to inflict harm even in
the face of hostility form a politics of ethical presence. By bringing in
postcolonial theory, feminist ethics, and diaspora studies in the analysis, the
paper attempts to re-configure compassion not merely as weakness but as a
subversive counter-ethics to colonial violence, racial hatred, and masculinist
domination. More importantly, the paper pinpoints as to how Miss Coolie
emanates as a figure whose compassion reconfigures community, memory, and
belonging, and thus referring to an alternative archive of Indo-Caribbean
women’s histories.
Key Words: Compassion, Indentured diaspora,
Gendered ethics, Cultural hybridity, Postcolonial care
Introduction: Compassion and the
Invisible Woman of Indenture
“The Indian woman is invisible
because no novelist has yet been able to regard her existence in the West
Indies and give voice to the peculiarities and perceptions of that particular existence”
— Espinet
(430)
The historical invisibility of the
indentured Indian woman in Caribbean literature does hardly indicate a matter
of narrative absence. It refers to a profound ethical failure which is unable
totrace her humanity beyond labour, sexuality, or cultural otherness. Colonial
archives register the coolie woman as a body to be controlled, disciplined, or
exploited, while nationalist narratives often ignored her affective labour and
ethical presence. What is erased in both cases is compassion. It reflects quiet, sustaining force by means of which
these women endured displacement, loss, and violence.
Olive Senior’s “Arrival of the Snake
Woman”(1989) enters powerfully in this erasure by revealing Miss Coolie
not as an epitome of tragic figure or heroic rebel, but as an ethically rooted
subject whose survival is deeply entrenched in compassion. Born in 1941 in
rural Jamaica, Senior had a prolong association with marginal lives, colonial
histories, and suppressed memories. Her collection Arrival of the
Snake-Woman and Other Stories (1989) brings out a literary ethics that
accentuates upon silence, care, and relationality as meaningful forms of
agency. Set against the historical backdrop of kala pani—the oceanic
crossing that dissociated indentured Indians from caste, kinship, and homeland.
And the story brings to the fore the psychic and cultural trauma of forced
migration. Yet Senior restrains narrating this trauma solely through suffering.
Instead, she showcases as to how compassion has been a path of survival in a
hostile colonial society, which is marked by racial antagonism, missionary
coercion, and patriarchal control.
Miss Coolie’s story develops within
a Jamaican Creole community that views her with suspicion and hostility. She is
racialised, sexualised, and condemned as a “heathen,” yet she does not respond
with aggression or withdrawal. Her response is ethical rather than
confrontational. By nourishing healing practices, domestic care, culinary
hybridity, and spiritual attentiveness to land and body, Miss Coolie generates
what may be called a compassionate
counter-world. It indicates a fragile yet resilient space of care within
violence. This paper points to the fact that compassion in Senior’s
narrative is not sentimental but political. It gives a jab to the colonial
rationality, racial hierarchy, and patriarchal authority by refusing their
terms. Miss Coolie’s silence, far from connoting passivity, works as an ethical
stance. It is in fact an alternative language of endurance, care, and
relational belonging.
Compassion under Colonial Eyes:
Racial Difference and Ethical Vulnerability
Colonial
societies were constructed through what Frantz Fanon defines as a “Manichean
order,” by separating humanity into rigid hierarchies of value. Within this
structure, non-white women who were especially indentured Indian women, were
rendered doubly vulnerable. Their bodies were scrutinised, disciplined, and
spoken for, while their ethical interiority remained invisible. In “Arrival
of the Snake Woman,” this violence of representation is quite evident in
the naming of the protagonist. She is never granted an individual name; she is
simply “Miss Coolie.” The term collapses ethnicity, class, and labour into a
single racialised identity, bringing out what Stuart Hall terms a regime of
representation that fixes difference rather than understands it.
The label “snake woman” further
accentuates this dehumanization:
“That is how they does call them…
they move their hip when they walk just like snake… these thin little
clothes-wrap… yu can see every line of their body” (Senior 492).
This delineation resonates with
Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism in which the non-Western woman has been an
object of fantasy, danger, and desire. However, what is striking in Senior’s
narrative is that Miss Coolie never internalises this hatred. Her response to
objectification is not self-negation but ethical restraint. Rather than
retaliating against the community’s cruelty, she goes on to cook, heal, and
care—even for those who reject her. Compassion here is not submission, it is
rather a refusal to allow colonial violence to dictate moral conduct. In this
sense, Miss Coolie’s vulnerability has been a site of ethical strength.
Gender, Silence, and the Ethics of
Care
Miss Coolie’s gets married to
SonSon, who is a man having two existing wives. It might initially appear to
confirm patriarchal exploitation. SonSon values her for her labour and silence:
“She asked for nothing, was silent
and smiling all the while” (Senior 496).
However, reassessing this silence
merely as oppression is to neglect its ethical complexity. As feminist
theorists have argued, silence can function as a survival strategy, especially
for women whose speech is routinely dismissed or punished. Miss Coolie’s
silence does not indicate absence of thought or feeling. It refers toethical containment which means a
refusal to escalate violence in an already volatile environment.
Her care work such as feeding,
cleaning, healing have been an alternative moral economy. Racial resentment and
masculine dominance makes a vehement impact upon the society in which Miss
Coolie leads her life. Her compassion is generated not only for her husband and
child but also for the land itself, through herbal knowledge and ecological
attentiveness. This attaches with the indigenous and subaltern traditions of
care that resists colonial extractivism.
Religion, Conversion, and Compassionate
Pragmatism
The pressure on Miss Coolie to
convert to Christianity brings out how colonial compassion was often
instrumentalised. Missionary zeal presented itself as moral salvation while
functioning as social control. Conversion was tied to inheritance, legitimacy,
and social acceptance:
“If she were not converted… she and
her children would be disinherited” (Senior 490).
Miss Coolie’s eventual conversion is
not a spiritual surrender but a compassionate pragmatism. She prioritizes
survival over martyrdom, future over purity. Such decision reveals what Gayatri
Spivak termsstrategic essentialism. It refers to the tactical
negotiation of identity within oppressive structures.More importantly, Miss
Coolie does not abandon her ethical core. Her compassion remains intact. It
guides her actions even as she navigates imposed identities. Conversion has
been a means to protect her child, not a renunciation of self.
Maternal Compassion and Postcolonial
Futurity
Miss Coolie’s most explicit
articulation of hope emerges in her dream for her son: “One day my son will go to law school and practice” (Senior
498).
This aspiration epitomises a
compassionate futurity which is seldom motivated by revenge or resentment. It
is rather driven by a desire for dignity, education, and belonging. Her son,
who is a racially mixed and culturally hybrid, unfurls what scholars such as
Shalini Puri defines as the radical potential of hybridity. Miss Coolie by
means of her maternal compassion creates a world which is beyond racial binaries.
Her vision is instrumental in showing her protest against both colonial
hierarchies and postcolonial exclusions. Thus, it denotes that care and ethical
imagination are vital tools to conduce social transformation.
Narrative Memory and Compassionate Witnessing
Ishmael
is the narrator of the story. The way he competently narrates the story, it
invariably attracts the attention of the readers to the narration. And his
recollection of Miss Coolie is replete with curiosity, misunderstanding, and
belated recognition. His partial knowledge unveils the broader epistemic gaps
which is aligned with indentured women’s histories. In-fact, the process of
ruminating itself has been an ethical gesture. Senior’s narrative thus
functions as compassionate witnessing. By reconstructing Miss Coolie’s life
through fragments, silences, and gestures, the story resists totalising
knowledge and honours ethical opacity. Compassion here extends to storytelling
itself, allowing the subaltern woman to exist without being fully possessed by
narrative authority.
Conclusion: Compassion as
Postcolonial Ethics
In-fine,
it may be said that Arrival of the Snake Woman reimagines survival
hardly as domination but as compassion under coercion. Miss Coolie’s refusal of
hatred, sustaining life disdaining violence are indicative of her militancy
towards colonial and patriarchal imaginaries. Her silence is indeed a strategy
that hardly reveals her absence but ethical presence; her care is not
submission to the will of authority or patriarchy but resistance. By
reconfiguring the coolie woman with the help of compassion, Olive Senior
exposes a powerful postcolonial ethics. It refers to care, endurance, and
relationality as transformative forces. Miss Coolie is not only an embodiment
of a historical figure of indenture but as a contemporary symbol of displaced
women worldwide, whose compassion continues to resist dehumanisation.
Migration, xenophobia, and gendered precarity are the marker of global world
wherein Miss Coolie’s story brings to the fore that compassion is not weakness;
it is a quiet, enduring force which is capable of reframing history from the
margins.
Works Cited
Espinet, Ramabai. The Swinging Bridge.
HarperCollins, 2003.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated
by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004.
Hall, Stuart. “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’” Representation:
Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall,
Sage, 1997, pp. 223–290.
Puri, Shalini. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social
Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. Palgrave Macmillan,
2004.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books,
1978.
Senior, Olive. Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other
Stories. Heinemann Caribbean, 1989.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Subaltern Studies:
Deconstructing Historiography.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics,
Routledge, 1988, pp. 197–221.
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Bio:
Dr. Auritra
Munshi is
an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Raiganj University, West
Bengal. His research interests include Diaspora and Migration Studies as well
as Subaltern Studies. He is the co-editor of Border and Bordering:
Politics, Poetics, Precariousness (ibidem/Columbia University Press,
2021). His book chapter, “Marriage and Man-Woman Relationship in Coolie Diaspora,”
appeared in Kala Pani Crossings, Gender and Diaspora: Indian Perspectives
(Routledge, 2024), edited by Judith Misrahi-Barak et al. Dr. Munshi’s
monograph, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Works in Transition: Towards a New Space,
was published by ibidem/Columbia University Press in 2024. He also translated Kazi
Abdul Wadud: An Autobiography, published by ILSR, Kolkata (2025). He received a Minor Research Project titled Retrieval
Narratives in Kala Pani Crossings: A Study of Literary Representations,
sanctioned by Raiganj University on 26 September 2022 and duly submitted to the
University authorities. He is currently working on a forthcoming book project, Baul
in Performance: Strategic Essentialism, Resistance, and Ethical Sociality,
under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.
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