In this land of many peoples and people of many ancestries, how do people see their ethnic heritage? How do they practice it, ignore it, or celebrate it?
On the occasion of our 54th year of independence from Britain, Guardian feature writer Shereen Ali spoke to T&T citizens of different backgrounds to ask how they see issues such as ethnicity, race and in some cases, their own uniquely diverse heritages. People, in their own words, helped paint a picture of an ever-changing, complex twin-island nation of many different ancestral influences.
Today and tomorrow, in part three of seven, we hear from people of African ancestry.
Nigel A Campbell writes about music. He lives (and observes reality) in the Caribbean on the island of Trinidad.
When you have to fill in a form asking you your race, what do you put?
Black. Amazingly, it’s a common thing when filling out forms in the USA. I was surprised to see this kind of question on a government website: The Artist Registry. The exact query was “Ethnicity” and it was mandatory. I asked why, and got some answer that related to the fact that this was part of the then Ministry of the Arts and Multiculturalism. I guess someone was doing a quota survey to see which “ethnicity” was getting more of the people’s money.
How do you see your ethnic roots & heritage? Is it important to how you define yourself, or is it irrelevant, an accident of birth?
I guess I am the ultimate Caribbean man. My father was born in Jamaica, my mother was born in St Kitts, they both came here as young children and grew up here. I was born in Trinidad after they met in England and returned the year before I was born. I was not an accident! I am the child of migrants.
Trinidad before and now is a migrant’s paradise. The idea that Caribbean people are migrants moving from island to island or from island to metropolis (or even from island to where the opportunity was regionally—Costa Rica, Panama, Harlem, Trinidad—is intriguing, and as such it makes more sense to say we have a Caribbean heritage as opposed to a Trinidadian heritage. (America has this knack of lumping us together as Caribbean-American, and we conform easily. Governments separate us; you need a passport to go to Grenada!)
All our blood is mixed. That old time wish for inclusion—“I have a bit of Scottish in me”—is overturned. You know the Derek Walcott line: “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.”
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I learned last year that my family tree has all colours and shades descended from a common Jamaican great-grandmother. They have also all migrated from Jamaica to as far as Australia. That’s my Caribbean family. I still Black and my second cousin is a Chinese-Jamaican author working in Britain. I have her three books.
Do you celebrate your ethnic heritage, ignore it as irrelevant, or have mixed feelings about it?
I think I am the ultimate Caribbean man. I am also Black. You can see it.
I have considered at an earlier age and now, the consequence of our annual celebration of the anniversary of the passage and coming into effect of “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves.” The Act has a long name. We here consider the first part of the act, but that latter part, compensation, is somehow ignored in the festivities. I can’t ignore that. The form of our celebration is a retreat to memory which is now folk parading in Javanese design fabric that may reflect certain aspects of Africanness made in China sold in the US to Syrians who sell it here for an immense profit! Who not in the mix?
Reparations are serious. Celebrating Haiti’s Independence is serious. A parade is celebratory. My space in this world is serious. Carnival is my celebration. J’ouvert is my celebration. And that is serious!
Do you think race is important in T&T? Do you think different ethnicities have different values?
Race, like nationality, is important in T&T because politicians say so. If I am to believe the Mariel Brown’s film Inward Hunger, the father of the nation didn’t have that in his radar when he was devising new nationhood for this soon-to-be former colony. Then, politics became real. Loss of the Federal elections, tricky and serpentine negotiations at Marlborough House, and a successive lack of intelligent leadership since those halcyon days have led us to a point where race can’t be ignored. It’s now the ticket to winning elections; fear and bigotry.
But let’s be real, the amount of mixtures we have, people don’t care about race when their “blood take the person.” Our differences are more nurture than nature, how we are socialised more than DNA.
And the sad thing in this country, given our past, is that we recognise two races, and neither of them is white. Just 60 years ago, it was as black and white as Black and White. Then, like now, it is about power and only one can be in power. Sad.
VS Naipaul wrote in 1970, “In the islands, black identity is a sentimental trap, obscuring the issues. What is needed is access to a society, larger in every sense, where people will be allowed to grow.” In 2016, the brain drain statistics suggest that more people have just gone—to countries where you can be shot by police for driving black—than rather be trapped in sentimentality. I guess one can also acquiesce (to) power.
How long have you/your family had roots here (best estimate)?
My parents came here as children, so I would say about 80 years ago. Before that, the Caribbean was their wonderland/wanderland.
What do you like and dislike about T&T culture?
There is a positive about living a “relaxed” lifestyle as we seem to do in T&T; we should never die from stress, although the statistics don’t seem to bear that out. But that “relaxation” can become laziness, of spirit, of mind as well as body, and that can drag us down. Reasoning and logical thinking, to some is hard work, so we suffer. Picong is our signifier—our ability to see the faults in everyone and say it. You have to love that. Carnival is our great equaliser, class is the divider. That, and the win of the NAR in 1986. Possibilities went up in smoke because of power.
Do you know about the beliefs and lifestyles of T&T people of different ethnic heritages from your own?
I am a listener and an observer. Everything is new. Going to secondary school in the 1970s, we had a different outlook than those who went in the 80s and 90s. By then, local history was a narrative that fit an agenda, socialising with “people of different ethnic heritage” could get you off a ten-days, depending on where you live. I know what I know, but I am aware of what some others think of us here in Trinidad. I met someone, born and raised outside who live here now, that was fascinated by our intelligence. The person could not reconcile that there were stereotypes about Caribbean people that were not true, because they never thought it important to take the time to listen. We are deemed unimportant because our ideas don’t make a significant difference. Art and literature may save us ignominy.
I lived abroad, Toronto and Washington, DC, for two periods in my life, at university in the 1980s, and later when I had my child in the late 1990s-early 2000s. There is a palpable difference in how we integrate or choose not to with the “foreigner” in their country. I guess the same applies here in reverse to my foreign friend. Ultimately, though, how we as Trinis eat, how we party, how we make love is different, and I know about that.
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But let’s be real, the amount of mixtures we have, people don’t care about race when their “blood take the person.” Our differences are more nurture than nature, how we are socialised more than DNA. And the sad thing in this country, given our past, is that we recognise two races, and neither of them is white. Just 60 years ago, it was as black and white as Black and White. Then, like now, it is about power and only one can be in power. Sad.
• Tomorrow in Part Two, we speak to playwright and director Rawle Gibbons and UWI student Asa Hodge.