Define Caribbean

By Bukka Rennie
April 12, 2003

Is there in fact a Caribbean civilisation! Have we, meaning all the people who came to exist and continue to exist here, whether first as nomads crossing over the ice-caps of the Arctic regions and then down into the warmer climes of the continent and the archipelago, and later, much later, whether we came as masters, or were brought as slaves and indentured servants, have we forged anything of social significance?

Have we, over time, created a specific and unique landscape different to everything else that may exist on this planet?

Are we a people different in nature and character precisely because we are bounded by specific history and geography?

The answer is undoubtedly, yes.

No matter how we came, the important thing and the end results of that "coming" is that we came with ourselves and enwrapped in that corporeality of ourselves is the manifestation of the thousands of years of seeking meaning to and for ourselves in very old worlds.

It is precisely because of the power of this reality which we embodied when we came why we were able to survive and to assimilate and to re-define and re-design ourselves so readily in the New World.

Everyone came with a story and a view of the universe which placed him/her at the centre of all purpose. And so much of that story and view of the universe is quite similar in each case.

It is as much fallacy to say that all that was ever created here after the decimation and genocide of the First People was the forging of Afro-Saxons and Indo-Saxons as it is to say the opposite. For we just as well took the culture and language and ways of the European masters and forged it to suit our own way of seeing, doing and behaving. The end result is what can be defined as totally ours, nobody else's.

Caribbean civilisation represents a creative meeting of the Old and New Worlds, it represents a freshness rather than a staleness of rigidly-defined social structures and provides us that freedom to move, to be whatever and to become whatever, to be ever in that creative whirlpool of constant flux.

Of course the other side of the coin that serves to generate tension is that we as a people and the Caribbean as a particular geo-political landscape was the very first social product of the globalisation process in which capital as socio-economic force sought to move people and commodities around the world according to the dictates of profit accumulation and generation.

The antagonistic contradiction between being even now a product of globalised capitalist commodity production - remember the "slave" was at one time the premier Caribbean commodity - and being a region that is unfettered by debilitating structures of tradition, is what gives the Caribbean and Caribbean people their power.

Now, where does the Caribbean begin? Where does it end? Some talk about the Caribbean as being only of the approximately six million English-speaking inhabitants of the Commonwealth Caribbean. But the culture, the common history and the perspective and the dealings of people at the bottom suggest that the Caribbean is much more.

It is alluded that in fact the Caribbean as a geo-political entity involves much more and stretches from Cuba in the North to the French-speaking departments and the Spanish and Dutch-speaking to the South, an estimation of some 30 million people, which in reality should be the size of market to which we should be aspiring.

Caricom recently has been seeking to expand its horizons and this must be encouraged just as much as we encourage the bill to allow free movement of skilled personnel throughout the Caricom States and later on the design to create a single currency.

The point is that this Caribbean entity is not an idle dream, it is a subterranean, stygian reality that begs to be formalised, given the rise of trading blocs around the world and the present efforts to put together a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Our intelligentsia at all levels should join the struggle to make this Caribbean entity a fact rather than describe it as "chimera", as one recent editorial did.

We will be forced to come back to this subject over and over again, given the rather negative and anti-historic position being now expressed by both the Jamaica and Barbadian leaderships.

Imagine after all that has transpired here in this region, people are still daring to ask what will political unity bring and are describing Caribbean unity as "a song with no lyrics".

We will have much to say in time about both the "singers" and that "song".