weren’t asking them to, they didn’t pose alone, but surrounded by kin. With these family portraits, women weren’t simply sexualized objects but individuals with relationships, revealed through the cradling of a toddler, a hand touching a shoulder, or a bridal bouquet grasped.

The poet Mahadai Das was known in intellectual and artistic circles in New York and Chicago in the 1980s, but she was from a small place well off the literary map: Guyana, the former British plantation colony along South America’s northeastern coastline. That obscure, troubled nook reclaimed her after heart trouble derailed her doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago. Through letters since lost, word reached Brooklyn that for a dark time back in her country, a car was her home. The daughter of arice farmer who was accepted as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Das had traveled from the world’s margins to its most powerful metropolis and back.

Her journey out had been unorthodox. She had been both beauty queen (crowned Miss Diwali at seventeen at a Hindu festival in Georgetown, Guyana) and paramilitary volunteer (she donned fatigues and farmed cotton in service to a new nation reimagining itself as a “cooperative socialist republic”). Like me, Das was an Indian woman born in the West Indies, a granddaughter of indentured women. Her work explores themes of mortality, thwarted love, migration, postcolonial patriotism. Throughout flash images of the female body: bejeweled, uniformed, laboring, diseased, childless, desiring and desirable, as her own body had once been and much as the bodies of “coolie” women