The Caribbean
Artifact One
One of our key concerns this semester has been the concept of hybridity: how do you create something new out of the blend of colonizer and colonized? For today’s Taíno Indians, this question touches close to home. Disease, exploitation, and mass deaths have severely reduced the Taíno population, and intermarriage with Europeans and Africans has ensured that the population that remains is no longer “pure” Taíno. The question then arises: what does it mean to be Taíno? Is it just genetics? Or something deeper?
For Yvonne Storde, quoted in the article, if genetics is all that matters then the Taíno identity is irrelevant: “I probably have Taíno genes. We all do….We have to live with it.” But for people like Jorge Estevez and Francisco Ramirez, belonging to the Taíno is more than DNA. Rather, the survival of the people depends on the survival of their culture: of artifacts, names, and knowledges not merely remembered but also practiced and lived. For modern-day Taíno, then, tribal identity is more about preserving a tradition and a history, a way of interacting with the world. As a result, when Roberto Borrero says he’s excited “that there’s a lot of youth coming into this and challenging the status quo,” it’s not as strange as it might first seem. How do young people voluntarily come into a tribal identity — isn’t that something one is given at birth? Not if identity is cultural. These youths’ decision to “come into this” is a decision to turn to a particular tradition and walk into the future with it (or, perhaps more accurately, in it). I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha’s insistence that both colonized nor colonizer are already fractured; the Taíno’s survival represents their acceptance of this fact and their desire to continue forging their identity nonetheless.
Artifact Two
I wonder if the rise of ISIS fighters coming from Trinidad is an application of Fanon’s concept of violent resistance to colonial translation. Cottee writes in the article that the island’s economic and social troubles “may explain why Islam, with its call to end corruption and oppression and to return to a simpler, more just society, appeals to so many….But this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why so many Trinis have been captivated by the brutal and hallucinatory Islam of ISIS.” However, after reading Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, especially “Negus,” it doesn’t seem unthinkable that Trinis would regard Western colonial powers as the source of those troubles. And though I don’t imagine most Trinis have read Fanon, the straightforwardness of violence is a perennially appealing response to colonial oppression. Even Brathwaite reverts to violent imagery in “Negus,” revealing his desire to “raze the colony” and “blind your God.” Brathwaite is speaking about linguistic violence rather than physical violence, but perhaps ISIS appeals to those for whom linguistic violence is not enough.
When we think about Fanon-style violent resistance, we typically picture local or national rebellions of the sort Balram fantasizes about in The White Tiger. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why a desire for violent resistance shouldn’t take the form of an international insurgence based on ideology rather than geography. After all, in Fanon’s view, that which is most oppressed by colonialism is the mind. Islam on Trinidad has been long associated with the colonized (whether Indian indentured servants or black converts from Christianity); the fight in Syria and Iraq, although geographically far from home, is ideologically against a common colonial enemy (that is, the West generally). ISIS’ brand of militant Islam seems to fit these postcolonial tensions quite well.
None of this explains why Trinidad specifically should have such a high rate of ISIS fighters coming from its shores, as opposed to the other former colonies in the Caribbean. This question deserves a good deal more attention.
Artifact Three
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars….
For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.
Port of Spain, Walcott says, is “a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions,” a city “racially various” and filled with “a cacophony of accents,” a city in which “children find it increasingly futile to trace their genealogy.” A fragmented vase, he argues, inculcates better and truer love than a vase that was never broken in the first place. In other words, Walcott pictures Caribbean colonization — and its resulting cultural fragmentation — as a fortunate fall, a historical tragedy that has blossomed into the present. The Ramleela is not a mournful echo of an Indian past but a true and vibrant celebration. The Caribbean city is not “unfinished” and “unrealized” but “satisfied with its own scale.” The winter-less Caribbean islands are not frivolous juvenilia but rather a different sort of life, of seriousness. “Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped.” If the shell of colonialism is slimy and cracked and crusted with barnacles, in the Caribbean it has given birth to Venus, and it is this love of new life that — “in spite of History” — Walcott sees as his poetic theme.
This is a fitting place to end my scrapbook, I think. There are no easy answers to postcolonial problems. But even in the wake of colonialism’s debauch, there remains goodness and beauty and truth, and because of this we search for answers in hope.
