Indo-Caribbean literature has been gaining momentum over the past thirty years, creating a body of literature that most often bypasses the traditional vertical and national power relations between the former colonizing centre and the former colonized periphery. One can think of such writers as Cyril and David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Ramabai Espinet, Peter Kempadoo, Arnold Itwaru, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Shani Mootoo, VS Naipaul, Raj Kumari Singh, Ryhaan Shah, Jan Shinebourne, among others, and more recently Gaiutra Bahadur. These writers have written a variety of fiction and non-fiction narratives (poems, novels, short stories, essays) that foreground the odysseys, tribulations and ordeals of the people who crossed the black waters in the 19th century. In this paper presentation I would like to focus on two narratives written by descendants of these indentured labourers: Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge (2003) brings out the life of her great-grandmother Gainder who voyaged from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1879, and Gaiutra Bahadur’s essay Coolie Woman: an Odyssey of Indenture (2013) researches Sujaria’s journey from Calcutta to British Guiana in 1903. Taking a transnational and ‘transcolonial’ perspective is the only possible approach when dealing with Caribbean intersections in the Americas and beyond, in the transatlantic and indoceanic worlds. I will use what Shih and Lionnet in Minor Transnationalism (2005) call ‘transcolonial’ relations, which denote ‘the shared, though differentiated experience of colonialism and neocolonialism (by the same colonizer or by different colonizers), a site of trauma, constituting the shadowy side of the transnational’ (11). Bringing together The Swinging Bridge and Coolie Woman will enable a better understanding of the complex network of geographical and historical intersections, as well as generational and generic crossings. These narratives of two women writers who retrace the steps of their ancestors intersect in many subtle and varied ways. Not least because, in Cyril Dabydeen’s words in a review about Coolie Woman, they both endeavour to ‘foster awareness’ of their history. The translations Gainder and Sujaria performed from their native India to their adopted Trinidad and British Guiana find unsettling and complex echoes in the translations that are reconstructed and reimagined by Ramabai and Gaiutra from Canada and the USA. Listening to such echoes is indispensable in the present world.