More than 50 years later, the second quote above can be easily translated as the eat-ah-food philosophy, which may perhaps be even more pervasive now. It illustrates that it is not a new circumstance. There seems to be a tension between the first quote (possibility/capability) and the second (sad reality).
The failure of Haiti to emerge as a regional power almost reflects the failure of the West Indian project, reasons notwithstanding. I believe the absence of a defined regional identity has led to a profound lack of a sense of belonging. This has developed because people feel that they are not an integral part of a system or environment because of their negative personal experience in that system or their fear that the experience will be negative. Alfred Adler described the need to belong and to feel significant as the basic goal of human life. Without it, fulfillment and wellbeing are not possible.
I would argue that this lack of a sense of belonging, or at least the dilution of that belonging, is central to the many psycho-social problems we face in the region. One of the more obvious is a lack of trust in our institutions, and the failure of these indigenous institutions to generate that consistent and persistent trust is also a function of the lack of belonging that their members feel. So there is little institutional memory, little regard for history and minimal cooperation between connected organizations, such as LIAT and Caribbean Airlines; The UWI and UTT or the University of Guyana.
The prohibitive cost of air travel between the islands and how convoluted it can be at times are concrete examples of this problem. At a recent regional conference in Grenada, some regional participants had to fly to Grenada via Miami, invoking dismay and suspicion from the US immigration officials.
There is also fragmented and insular loyalty, and even that, only when things go well. All of this after TA Marryshow in Grenada founded a newspaper called The West Indian in the early twentieth century. He and Andrew Cipriani organized a regional conference in 1932 and wrote a constitution for a West Indian federation. This might be considered the birth of a West Indian nationalism, and was driven by a desire to have the West Indian people connected through a formal institutional framework. It has not happened (yet). As George Lamming described it, the antagonistic weight of the past as an inhibiting menace has ensured the unviability of the union.
The late Norman Girvan described several projects of indigenous construction that were attempts to generate a sense of identity as a means of nurturing that sense of belonging. Identity is critical to engender a sense of belonging which then allows one to invest in work that increases the stock of what you feel you belong to and identify with. Professor Girvan suggested that the concept of the Caribbean gained currency in the latter half of the nineteenth century because of the need of the United States, then an emerging power, to define and establish its backyard.
This suggests that even the idea of a Caribbean or even a West Indies may not have been born as a nascent and autochthonous ideal. What do the mass of people identify with? Do they see themselves as nationalists or regionalists or both? The same Girvan identified with both and did not see any contradiction. In an ideal world, he would be right, but nationalist interests do sometimes trump regional ones, as one of the major fears of Caribbean free travel is local loss of jobs to cheaper labour from elsewhere.
Of course, the ongoing issue between the Dominican Republic and Haiti continues to generate some regional comment but no diplomatic or other solutions. Sir Arthur Lewis had envisaged a regional enterprise and manufacturing sector that would enhance international competitiveness. We would then be necessarily interested in the welfare, both social and economic, of our Caribbean neighbours/partners. The other critical concern remains with whether the institutions that survive can defend Caribbeanness.
When The UWI campuses had exclusive programmes located at their multiple sites, it ensured a cross-Caribbean pollination. The demand for places and the related economics have necessitated campuses meeting the needs of their populations but at the expense of young Caribbean people losing that opportunity to learn about and live with each other.
Champions of Pan Africanism from the Caribbean, Henry Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore and CLR James, saw African independence as a means to liberate the rest of the diaspora, but inadvertently may have damaged the integrity of a Caribbean identity as it became subsumed into a larger African one.
Black Stalin’s “one race from the same place” (Caribbean Unity 1979) was interpreted by some to be excluding the Indian diaspora in the region. It is interesting that the documentary Fire in Babylon chronicling the West Indian cricket team’s years of world supremacy clothed their success in a narrative of African Caribbean nationalism and pride invoking both Pan Africanism and West Indian nationalism.
The Cuban army victory over the South African army in Angola and South West Africa also stands tall as an example of regional capacity. Race and ethnicity and the perceptions thereof are therefore a critical part of this discussion. However it is framed, the central pillar of any regional process must be a definition and acknowledgment of a Caribbean psychology and philosophy. It begs an important question though: do all the ethnicities and cultures inhabiting the region have the same cultural imperatives of action and purpose? Should they? Does the space they want to belong to, look and feel the same? Can we allow for difference in a way that would reinforce connectedness rather than internal divisiveness?
However the lack of that identity/belonging axis expresses itself, we may be inviting new colonizers, perhaps under the guise of economic and technical assistance and the likely suspects seem to be the Chinese.
Without the philosophical anchor of identity and belonging, what Herman Broch calls a value vacuum, a breakdown of social values is created. Of course, many things seek to fill that vacuum and this may explain why the Caribbean is the region with the second highest homicide rate in the world (second only to Central America). Is it also because of a lack of connectedness to a greater whole and a lack of a sense of belonging and community? We are struggling as independent states with similar health and social problems. It would be interesting to quantify the number of intra-Caribbean migrants living in the various islands and how many families have multi-island components.
The issue is that our minds, particularly now in the global world, have gone beyond the shores of our existence. We are living advanced and displaced mental lives in backward societies being reinforced by the lack of self-knowledge. We therefore, think of ourselves in the third person, not the first, and have predominantly external loci of control. Our leadership is more preoccupied with power and authority and how they are seen than by what they do.
We have been described as one of the most over-governed regions in the world, and similarly dubbed countries are also havens for corruption and reflect divisive rather than unifying agendas. They have not presented or articulated choices about our futures that represent how we will navigate this uncharted sea of the rest of this century with environmental issues, migration issues and changing demographics, i.e aging societies are going to fundamentally change the way we live. Our children have inherited this insularity and see themselves as belonging to individual entities rather than any collective whole. There are no attempts to gestate a West Indian, far less a Caribbean identity within Caribbean communities. Perhaps even that desire for a sense of belonging is misapplied; maybe we really do not believe it is our land. Just like our plantation economy history, we think our destiny also is not in our hands.
Professor Gerard Hutchinson is Head of Psychiatry at the Department of Clinical Medical Sciences, The UWI, Faculty of Medical Sciences, St. Augustine. The first part of this article can be read here http://sta.uwi.edu/uwiToday/archive/june_2015/article13.asp
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