#BTColumn – The Barbadian identity

The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Ralph Jemmott

One day in Irvine Hall at the UWI Mona, a student suddenly stopped me as I was on my way to the dining room. He said to me, “You’re a Barbadian, right?” I affirmed that I was, to which he replied “I thought so, you all, you Barbadians are different.”

I did not want to miss lunch and rushed off to the dining hall as it was very near to closing time. That encounter has always bothered me.

Over the years, I’ve wondered, what did he mean by “different” and in what ways, good or bad, did he view Barbadians as “different”. The way he said it seemed complimentary. Since then I have pondered the idea of Barbadian exceptionalism.

Historians warn about attributing certain characteristics to national populations, yet they themselves do it all the time. In V.H.H. Green’s ‘Renaissance and Reformation’, the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century is explained in part, by two fatal national flaws.

One was an antipathy for manual labour and even more, a tendency to procrastinate, expressed in the word, ‘manana.’ How can you attribute procrastination to a whole nation of people?

Prime Minister Mottley often talks about, “the kind of people that we are.” Those words, to the extent that they mean anything, are an exhortation to our sense of resilience and oneness.

We see identity through the prism of our own experience. Is she referring to the Barbadians of my youth or the Barbadian of today? One perceives that there is quite a difference.

As one writer has asserted, we tend to romanticise the past because its pain is no longer with us and we somehow survived its trials.

Most of my generation grew up poor, but unless we were abjectly poor, we didn’t know we were poor or realised the struggles our parents were confronting to provide food, clothes and shelter.

A friend once told me that he was an unhappy child. He remains a very unhappy man today. I told him that I had a happy childhood. Enough food to never go consistently hungry, lots of boyhood friends to play with in the gap and proximity to the Roxy Cinema where I could escape reality for a couple of hours every week  in the company of my favourite Hollywood stars including, Audie Murphy, Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Gary Cooper and beauties like Deborah Kerr and Elizabeth Taylor.

My Barbados then, was relatively communitarian. The village that raised a child was not a total myth. On my mother’s side, I had a very extended family which provided a sense of safety. When my mother went into Bridgetown she could ask the neighbours to “have an eye out for the children”.

Anyone in the village could chastise you for misconduct, small or large. Along with that came a lot of ‘maliciousness,’ and Eagle Hall had its fair share of miscreant and sexual inverts. There has always been a high level of sexual promiscuity in Barbadian society at all levels. There were a few well publicised murders.

My mother was in the bad habit of reading the crime pages aloud. Up to this day I can recall the two perpetrators of the chid murder in St. Lucy, a Burton Springer and Mc Ivor Greaves. I think the childhood fear of the infamous ‘out-man’ started around that time.

Barbados today, the kind of people that we are now, is a very different place and we are a very different people. In spite of the church going, Barbados has become a secular society in which the sacred-reverential values have been sacrificed for the material, the hedonistic and the profane. Culture is not static and it is not monolithic. Sometime in the 1970’s Barbados changed.

The draw bridge was lowered and we became influenced by the wider world with all its attractions and its pitfalls. A set of worrisome pathologies began to haunt Barbadian society. Drug selling and drug use, increasing violence and gun crime, drive-by shootings. Un-thought of back in the day.

In 1966 a nation was born, but a society was not formed. Laws were made but not enforced because beyond the platitudinous rhetoric about “the kind of people that we are,” we never seemed to care about the kind of people we were becoming or wanted to become.

We exchanged the Protestant Anglicised culture for a culture much of which is not edifying. While Lee Yuan Hew was fashioning a Singaporean model based on “soft authoritarian” and Confuscian values, we opted for the North Atlantic liberal notion of the neutral secular state.

I think I am right in saying that Mottley herself admitted that it is difficult to impose order on an ex-plantation, post-colonial society. Thanks to COVID-19 we may be facing a dystopian future. Our response to the challenges we face could prove what kind of people we really are. Some time ago, a columnist, either Peter Laurie or Oliver Jackman wrote that what held Barbados together was trust. The level of trust is regarded as a key indicator of the state of social wellbeing.

It is my perception that social trust in Barbados has declined. I become very concerned when I see a stranger at my gate and have not given anyone a lift in the car for years. One also has to be careful with transactions that involve money. The kind of people that were are or the society that we were?

As we face a looming health, economic and psycho-social crisis, one’s greatest fear is that the ethos that made us a worthy people, the better angels of our collective nature has been irrevocably dissolved. What if anything can we salvage and how?     

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.