#BTColumn – Identity: a quandary for the Caribbean

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Dr. Peter Laurie

So who are we?

Every now and then we who live in the Caribbean archipelago ask ourselves this question. It’s not that we don’t have an answer; we just give differing answers, at different times.

Identity is a murky issue. Every person is a bunch of shifting, overlapping, and often conflicting identities: gender, colour, ethnicity, class, religion, nationality, sexual orientation and so on. Interestingly, it’s often not we who define ourselves, but others who define us.

There are few places on earth where the question of identity is as complex and consequential as in the Caribbean. Complex, because of the diverse historical processes that have gone into shaping our identity and consequential, because how we define ourselves affects the role we play in a globalised world. We can either be passive, divided victims of history, defensively turning inward, or we can self-confidently take on the world, secure in our creative genius.

Most of our ancestors, except for the indigenous inhabitants, came from somewhere else, usually in conditions not of their own choosing. They were all uprooted or uprooted themselves from other continents and found themselves living in strange lands, cheek by jowl, with other uprooted people.

Add to this universal immigrant experience the fact that the region where we reside is the theatre of some of the most traumatic events in the history of inhumanity: genocide, wars of conquest, colonialism, mass enslavement, indentured labour, racism, oppression and so on. So it’s not surprising we find ourselves entangled in a long history of flux and affliction.
Even today, the Caribbean remains a strategic site for great power rivalry.

All this too often leads us to succumb to self-doubt, which finds its most degenerate expression in self-mockery and self-loathing. Witness the bitter irony of one of our greatest novelists, Nobel Prize-winner V. S. Naipaul, observing that, “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.”

But then, mind you, much of our history was an exercise by the colonial powers in engendering precisely such feelings
of futility.

The Empire ruled not only by depriving its subjects of actual power but also, more importantly, by inculcating deep feelings of powerlessness and inferiority. Hence, the perennial relevance of Bob Marley’s plea: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves . . .”

Despite all this, Caribbean people are extraordinarily creative, not to mention resilient and tough. Our intellectual achievements, our literature and arts are some of the
finest in the world.

The explanation for this paradox is simple: our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength.

The very instability, fragility and fragmentation of our history and geography have made us flexible, nimble, and creative.

The extraordinary diversity and intermingling of our varied cultural heritages has led to the fertile process of creolisation, in which cultural interaction forges a new identity that enables us to absorb, subvert and transform foreign influences, bending them innovatively to our own ends. This applies to religion, language, music, dance, food and other aspects of our culture.

Examples: we created the steel pan, the premier musical instrument of the twentieth century, from a discarded imported oil drum; we made a European pre-Lenten religious festival into a world-famous carnival art form; and we took a quintessential English game, cricket, absorbed it, and transformed it into a magnificent performance art in which we dominated the world for over two decades.

Let’s not even mention kaiso, zouk, son, compa and reggae. One moral of this story is that we should never, either from feelings of insecurity or a misplaced sense of nationalism, turn our backs on the outside world. It’s our creolised identity that makes us a global force to be reckoned with.

And let’s be clear, ‘creolised’ is not a bland blend of ingredients or ‘melting pot’. Instead, the diverse elements in creolisation are brought into a binding relationship with each other in a constantly evolving process.

The Martinican novelist and poet, Edouard Glissant, used an illuminating metaphor for creolisation: it is like the rhizome, an enmeshed horizontal root system, rather than a vertical tap root.

Yet, we in the Caribbean, in our search for an authentic source of identity, too often resort to ethnicity as the fall-back tap root of our identity. This is dangerous in a multi-ethnic Caribbean since it divides us.

Worse still, it is illusory.

As Stuart Hall, the brilliant Jamaican-British cultural studies pioneer observed, “Identity is not given once and for all by something transmitted in the genes we carry in the colour of our skin, but is shaped and transformed historically and culturally.”

The colonial powers stereotyped us for their own purposes. So, in trying to understand how, for example, enslavement and indentureship helped shape our identity, we should not fall into the trap of ethnicity, but should ensure that this re-evaluation of our history is undertaken so as to show its relevance to all Caribbean people, not just the ethnic groups concerned.

For example, the resuscitation of our long suppressed African cultural heritage is not, as too often it is treated, a matter of concern only to those whose ancestors came from Africa, but is of importance to all Caribbean people, whatever their origins, because it helps us understand a major force that shaped us. The same approach should be taken to our Asian, European, Middle Eastern and other cultural heritages.

Too often analysts of creolisation make the anthropological and political mistake to assume that Indo-Caribbean peoples somehow remained outside and untouched by the process of creolisation.

No one in the Caribbean escapes creolisation. In fact, the Indo-Caribbean people created their own innovative cultural responses (e.g. tassa) within the oppressive framework of indenture. The colonial powers, however, the better to exploit us, deliberately drove wedges between Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean groups, a bitter legacy that continues to this day.

But lest we forget, it’s not just history that shapes us, but geography too. The Caribbean Sea divides and unites us; sustains us physically (the blue economy) and nourishes us spiritually.

Derek Walcott reminds us that The Sea is History, and Kamau Brathwaite that The Unity is Submarine.

As Frank Collymore put it so eloquently in his wonderful poem, Hymn to the Sea:

By sunlight, starlight, moonlight, darkness,

I must always be remembering the sea.

Not only life and sustenance; visions too,

Are born of the sea: the patterning of her rhythm

Finds echoes within the musing mind.

I must always be remembering the sea.

Our Caribbean cultural identity is not a fixed essence. It’s a fragile, fragmented, inherently unstable, but extraordinarily powerful work in progress; a culture in the making, continuously evolving, always shape-shifting.

That is what, despite all our challenges, gives us hope.

Dr. Peter Laurie is a retired permanent secretary and head of the Foreign Service who once served as Barbados’ Ambassador to the United States.