Tears across the Caribbean Sea
A reflection on the mutuality of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States and the Caribbean
This morning I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. My 11 month old daughter was asleep next to me so as I muffled my sobs so as to not to wake her, I let the tears fall down my face and allowed my cell phone to slip from my hands. You see, after finally getting my daughter to accept the sleep that she had been fighting for over an hour before, I sat with her on the bed and wanting a moment for myself, I picked up my phone and of course ended up on Facebook. A quick scroll through the homepage would however land me on a video of Elijah McClain in a store, paying for an item(s), giving a quirky little bow to the person behind the counter of the store and then walking away…to his death. I had avoided such videos of McClain, so too of other videos of Black men and women who met death at the hands of law enforcement because I felt that I was never mentally and emotionally able and ready to view such. But my eyes could not look away from McClain. I slowly scrolled away from the video and I ended up on a screenshot of the front page of one of my home country’s newspapers. Amid widespread peaceful and non-peaceful protests in Trinidad (protests in reaction to what appears to be the extra-judicial execution of three Afro-Trinidadian men by members of the Trinidad and Tobago police force), on the front page of that newspaper was a picture of three armed police officers seemingly arresting an Afro-Trinidadian man. The man is laying in the street, the three officers have subdued him and one officer has his knee on this man’s neck. A fourth officer stands nearby and observes. This is when the tears came.
Amid George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25th, 2020, persons around the world joined with Black and brown people in America in solidarity of what they saw as Black lives and the lives of the marginalized not mattering or as Noble Philip describes the lives of the “nobodies.” Speaking specifically on what transpired in Trinidad on June 30th, Philip (2020) describes “nobodies” as those
…who have bodies to work but they have no value. They consume our goods, attend to us in the grocery stores and gas stations but to us they are faceless and nameless. A cipher.
Now Philip is not calling these men and women “nobodies.” Instead here is a description of how society views their bodies in systems that were systematically and intentionally designed to empower white supremacy here in the United States and one whose “racially divisive colonial” legacy (Liburd, 2020) we still live today in Caribbean spaces. As marches against systemic racism, violence and injustice meted out to Black and brown bodies convened in all 50 states in the US, a small group in Trinidad joined in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). This small group of protestors gathered in the Queens Park Savannah (a stone’s throw away from the United States Embassy) to not only show their solidarity with BLM but to also speak about the interconnectedness of the movement to the lives of Afro-descended people in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course not everyone understood this solidarity or could see any interconnectedness. For some it was matter of “why they following the Americans?,” or “why they don’t march when people get murdered here?” (by the way they do, but you know…). Of course there was no recalling of the Trinidad’s own Black Power Revolution in 1970 (50 year anniversary this year), or Trinidadian Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) who is said to have coined the term Black Power, or Jamaican Marcus Garvey who was an early proponent of Black Nationalism, or American Malcolm X whose mother was a Grenadian immigrant and a Garveyite, or Guyanese Walter Rodney who in The Groundings with my Brothers discussed why Black Power was relevant to the West Indies.
As Dr. Natasha Kay Mortley (2020) reminded us, this is a global problem. She states,
We are all Black people no matter where we are located. We all had our ancestors raped, pillaged and dragged from their home, tossed below deck like sardines in a tin, brutality breathing down their necks. They could not breathe…We still find it hard to breathe in 2020.
…and I get it. You see the Black/white binary does not exist in the same ways and if at all in Trinidad and Tobago as it does in the American space. Rogers (2001) has even discussed what he has seen as a less developed sense of racial group consciousness by Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the US mainly due to a lack of collective memory of systemic racism such as was solidified during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era in the US and; Afro-Caribbeans lack of access and experience with African American social and institutional networks. Some may say that there is instead a African/Indian binary in Trinidad, one that is very much steeped in socio-economic class and the legacies of British colonialism which sought to keep the freed African and the indentured Indian laborer as separate and competing groups.
But understandings of Blackness (read as Africanness in the Caribbean space) and whiteness remain salient given the legacies of colonialism which constructed whiteness (read as Europeanness) as superior, privileged, beautiful and Blackness as denigrated, ugly, criminal. I still remember the case of a little girl with dreadlocks who was removed from a prestigious, private Catholic school located in Port of Spain, Trinidad. If that is not anti-Blackness, then what is? So when the majority Afro-descended persons who not so coincidentally happen to be marginalized rage because the police and even wider Trinidad and Tobago society see the areas where they live as ghettos and their lives and bodies as just “incidental to law and order” and available to be met unquestionably by state sanctioned violence because they live in “hotspots” and all engage in criminal activity, we must take a sober look at ourselves. What is this rooted in? Are not these “nobodies” actually ‘somebodies?’
I know I write from a privileged space — depending on how you look at it — from my bed in Brooklyn, New York. My property was not damaged in the protests in Port of Spain, Trinidad; I was not stuck in traffic as some of the enraged used their anger in roundabout ways to cause a crisis in the city’s capital. But if I am not thinking about my Black body and its meanings in Trinidad (and I will never ever have to think about it in the ways that those in these spaces have to; simply put for instance my Trinidad address will never discount me from a job or attending a particular school there), I constantly think about it here in the United States. So I find myself pulled between these two places.
I teach a class on Caribbeanization and Caribbean migration to the United States and my students and I interrogate concepts such as “transnational practices” defined by Basch (2001) as
…the way migrants sustain multistranded social relations, along family, economic, and political lines, that link their societies of origin and settlement (Foner 2001, 7).
In this way, Basch (2001) argues that the migrant creates ““transnational social fields” that cross geographies, cultural, and political borders” (Foner 2001, 7). We also learn about transnational migrant circuits which according to Rouse as cited in Austerlitz (1998, 44) refers to how networks between home and host societies “coalesce into…single communit[ies] spread across a variety of sites.”
That’s the thing. As a Black, Dougla, Trinidadian, Caribbean immigrant in the United States, I live in Basch’s social field… I am s p r e a d across these two sites. So when I cry for Black lives, I cry for Black lives home and abroad. When I cry, my tears cross borders. When I cry, my tears fill the Caribbean sea from the north coast of Trinidad to the east coast of the United States.
Joel Jacobs was looking forward to celebrating his birthday.
Elijah McClain loved to play the violin for rescue animals.
Black Lives Matter
References:
Austerlitz, Paul. 1998. “From Transplant to Transnational Circuit: Merengue in New York.” In Island Sounds in the Global City. Caribbean popular music and identity in New York City, edited by Ray Allen and Lois Wilcken. New York: The New York Folklore Society and the Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College. 44–60
Foner, N. 2001. Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Liburd, Lasana. 2020. “Jacobs, Clinton, Diamond, the TTPS, Chee Mooke and the REAL Morvant victims.” Wired 868. Accessible at: https://wired868.com/2020/06/30/joel-jacob-israel-clinton-noel-diamond-chee-mooke-and-the-real-morvant-victims/
Mortey, Natasha Kay. 2020. “This is a Global Problem.” Accessible at: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-natasha-kay-mortley-294377107_this-is-a-global-problem-activity-6675772734619848706-Cbuc
Philip, Noble. 2020. “Noble: The Nobodies; ‘invisible to all, scorned by all’ — Morvant vs the world.” Wired 868. Accessible at: https://wired868.com/2020/06/30/noble-the-nobodies-invisible-to-all-scorned-by-all-morvant-vs-the-world/
Rogers, Reuel. 2001. “Black Like Who?” Afro-Caribbean Immigrants, African Americans and the Politics of Group Identity.” In Islands in the City. West Indian Migration to California Press. 163–192.
