SUNDAY 2ND AUGUST, 2015 – UWI TODAY
13
THE END OF THE WEST INDIES – PART 2
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 theWest 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 viaMiami,
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
On the outside looking out
Our minds have gone beyond the shores of existence
B y G e r a r d H u t c h i n s o n
West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people in the Haitian revolution.
Is there a West Indian personality? Is there a West Indian nation? What is it? What does it lack? What must it have?
The West Indian middle class keeps far from these questions. The job, the fridge, the trip abroad, preferably under government auspices,
these seem to be the beginning and end of their preoccupations.
—CLR James, “Party Politics in the West Indies” (1962)
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 SylvesterWilliams, 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 PanAfricanismandWest Indian nationalism.
The Cuban army victory over the SouthAfrican army in
Angola and SouthWest 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 aWest 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
