The Tell-Tale Poetry of the Woman Girmitiya: Analysing Torabully’s ‘Coupeuses D’Azur’

The tell-tale poetry in Khal Torabully’s ‘Coupeuses D’Azur’ (2014) is driven by the paradoxical ways in which the woman girmitiya I-persona engages with her girmitiya stories in the poetry. The literature around narrative poetry has been concerned with how to analyse poetry (Heiden. Narrative 22(2):269–283, 2014). This chapter proposes to use the two contradictory poetry approaches of poetic and narrative trajectories (Gammelgaard. Narrative 22(2):203–218, 2014) to analyse the tell-tale poetry of ‘Coupeuses D’Azur’, which resembles epic poetry in free verses. It, therefore, connects the female I-persona girmitiya narrative with the poetic verses associated with her. It also traces the tell-tale poetry of the female girmitiya in Torabully’s ‘Coupeuses D’Azur’ with the view of providing an outlook on the female girmitiya stories in the following two ways: the latter’s private yet collective stories and her stories in narrative segment presentation. Addressing these two salient features of the tell-tale poetry of the female girmitiya contributes to the cultural memory in narrative poetry of female girmitiya literature studies. These two features are claimed in this chapter to provide distinctive value to the specificity of Torabully’s ‘Coupeuses D’Azur’.