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 and fluid issue. Every person is a bunch of shifting, overlapping, and often conflicting identities: gender, colour, ethnicity, class, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. Some are more important than others, but all derive their significance from a social context. For example, very few people identify, as a priority, their being left-handed or blue-eyed, largely because these traits are rarely of great social significance. Interestingly, it’s often not we who define ourselves, but others who try to define us. The point is that there is no essential identity. Identity is an evolving process of becoming rather than a state of being.
For example, the Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who lives part of the time in the US, observed that when she is in the US she is identified as black (colour); when she is in Africa outside of her homeland, as Nigerian (nationality); and when she is in Nigeria, as an Igbo (ethnicity), the ethnic group (some 40 million) to which she belongs. She identifies herself as a feminist and a human being. One comment she made was quite illustrative: she hoped that feminism would become obsolete because women would then have achieved full and true equality with men.
The brilliant British-Jamaican novelist Zadie Smith argues that “the self can never be totally defined or pinned down; a human is a being whose boundaries are uncertain, whose language is never pure, whose world is in no way ‘self-evident’.” She concludes that “love is what makes freedom meaningful, what gives the ever-shifting self a certain mission in life. Love is what compels us to accept the simple gift of a flower, and the rights and dignity of our neighbour.”
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.
Long after the sun has set on colonial empires, external commentators still have ingrained responses to attempts by Caribbean peoples to assert their own identity, so that when Barbados decides that after some fifty years of having the head of state of the UK as our head of state, it will now choose a Barbadian as its head of state, this is interpreted by sections of the international media as Barbados bowing to Chinese pressure. This preposterous piece of nonsense seems predicated on the idea that small Caribbean countries are unable to determine their own destiny and must forever be a protectorate of one great power or another.
I won’t even mention Haiti and Cuba, whose greatest affronts to the Empire were to assert their independence. God knows, they have paid the price.
Or take another contemporary example of the EU ‘blacklisting’ Caribbean jurisdictions for failing to adhere to unilaterally imposed standards that their own member countries openly flout. This is not just bullying; it’s arrogant racist bullying.
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 philosophically stupid, socially and politically dangerous, and culturally illusory, as the great C.L.R James frequently warned.
It is philosophically stupid not because ethnicity is not part of our identity but because it is not an essential part of our identity..
It is dangerous because in a multi-ethnic Caribbean it divides us.
And 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.”
Given our turbulent history, however, this temptation is understandable since it was on the basis of our ethnicity/colour/race that the colonial powers oppressed us. So in trying to understand how the forces of history like enslavement and indenture helped shape us, we should not fall into the trap of a fixed identity of ethnicity, but should acknowledge that this is an enterprise of 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 cultural force that shaped all of us.
We should take a similar approach to our Asian, European, Middle Eastern and other cultural heritages.
The other important point to make is that while creolisation is usually applied to Caribbean people of African and European descent, it is an anthropological and a strategic political error to assume that Indo-Caribbean peoples somehow remained outside and untouched by creolisation, i.e. as unassimilable. The fact is that the Indo-Caribbean people created their own innovative cultural responses (eg 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.
Incidentally, when will we stop using the quaint colonial terms ‘West Indian’ and ‘East Indian’?
But lest we forget, it’s not just history that shapes us, but ecology too. Our habitat — landscape and seascape — has had and continues to have a profound influence in shaping our identity. 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.
To sum up, our Caribbean cultural identity is not a fixed essence. Neither is it a melting pot as in the aspirational slogan ‘all o’ we is one’ . 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.