At the last Conference of Heads of Government of
the Caribbean Community matters relating to
migration came up for discussion during Retreat. The
Heads of Government considered several aspects of
the issue, which was guided by a prepared paper,
which included a section on The Caribbean Diaspora.
The youngest winner of the Guyana Prize for
Literature, UWI-CARICOM Youth Consultant, Mr. Ruel
Johnson offers a perspective on The Diaspora.
The Diaspora
by
Ruel Johnson
(The
youngest winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature,
he is currently a journalist)
History
The word, “diaspora” looms large in Caribbean
history. It is entwined among the variegated roots
of our origins, wraps itself like a liana around the
solid if somewhat gnarled trunk of our common
growth, and as some of our people branch off to a
multiplicity of destinations, it blossoms,
fructifies, and plants the seeds of our culture in
whatever new lands they choose to inhabit.
We are, essentially – and to a great degree,
uniquely – societies or a society composed primarily
of diasporas. Our common Caribbean ancestors arrived
here in what may termed within the context of a
larger history as only very recently; from Africa,
Asia and Europe, in addition to those indigenous to
the landscape.
Caribbean identity today is enmeshed between two
diasporic events. The first was due to the
globalized nature of the sugar trade, which brought
slaves and indentured labourers to these shores. All
of our ancestors, except the Amerindians, came to
these lands with identities that were located
elsewhere. Under the necessarily repressive
plantation system, the blunt force trauma of
exploitation and subjugation, the cultural memories
of our ancestors were eroded or corrupted. St.
Lucian poet and Nobel Prize for Literature Laureate,
Derek Walcott sums up this psychological damage more
than ably in his poem Laventille, which he
dedicated to V.S. Naipaul, Trinidadian Nobel
Literature Prize Laureate. In the closing stanzas of
the poem, Walcott writes:
“Something inside is laid wide like a
wound,
some open passage that has cleft the brain,
some deep, amnesiac blow. We left
somewhere a life that we never found
customs and gods that are not born again,
some crib, some grille of light
clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld
us from that world below us and beyond,
and in its swaddling cerements we’re still
bound.”
Naipaul himself has treated what Walcott calls a
“deep, amnesiac blow”, repeatedly in both his
fiction and non-fiction works, especially within his
An Area of Darkness, which explores the patches of
nothingness within his own cultural identity. As the
writer says in his Nobel Lecture,
“…[O]ur ancestral faith receded, became
mysterious, not pertinent to our day-to-day
life. We made no inquiries about India or about
the families people had left behind. When our
ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to
know, it was too late.”
It may be argued that this loss of identity was
essential in setting the stage for the tenuous
cultural alchemy that was to follow, with its
elements of racial pride, metissage (or
miscegenation, as some would dub it),
assimilation, conflict and cooperation.
Today
Today, the forges of history have given us our own
distinguishable, if as yet nebulous, Caribbean
cultural dynamic. And as a new paradigm of
globalization is upon us, our peoples have been
leaving their homelands, some in search of El Dorado
of metropolitan wealth, some for higher learning,
some for the sheer adventure of it.
What then are the differences between these two
migrations, that of past and that of the present?
For one, the Caribbean people of today, whose
ancestors came from many diasporas, are leaving as
one. Despite the presence of some ethnocentric
‘Caribbean’ organizations around the world, the vast
majority of Caribbean immigrants to countries like
Canada, the US and the U.K. (and, it should be
added, countries less known for accommodating
Caribbean migrants), identify themselves first with
their homeland, and with to the Caribbean region as
a whole.
Another aspect in which the diaspora of today
differs from the diaspora of yesterday is with the
actual connection to home. While our ancestors
suffered from a profound cultural loss because of
the strictures of plantation life and the very real
distance away from home, the Caribbean Diaspora of
today have not only the benefit of social freedom,
but also that of a world made virtually smaller by
the advent of advanced communications technologies,
the Internet in particular. In a book published in
2000, entitled The Internet: An Ethnographic
Approach, authors Daniel Miller and Don Slater,
argue that the cyberspace has created a virtual
community in which Trinidadians at home and in the
Diaspora are able to relate and interact within an
environment that is for all intents and purposes,
almost indistinguishable from traditional
interaction. Caribbean people in the Diaspora are
avoiding that “deep, amnesiac blow” by keeping
themselves up to date with their culture and
traditions by reaching out more and more to families
and friends online.
The final and perhaps most significant difference
between the people who came and those who either
have left or are in the process of leaving, is their
level of education. The original immigrants to the
Caribbean were the dispossessed of their home
countries, unskilled labourers here to work
grinding, manual jobs, but jobs which nevertheless
built up the economic stature of the colonial
powers. The migrants who are leaving the Caribbean
today are well educated, ambitious and savvy. As
internationally syndicated columnist and Director
for the Caribbean Council for Europe, David Jessop,
wrote in an article entitled “The Caribbean
Diaspora” (23-Mar-2003), “[t]he Caribbean’s most
significant export is its people. Immigration
requirements today make for a system in which the
best and brightest of our people are gobbled by the
machinery of metropolitan centres.
In a study commissioned by the Canadian
Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) Dr. Manuel
Orozco, writes in his “Executive Summary” that:
“Central America and the Caribbean are
experiencing the economic and social effects of new
transnational actors, namely an emerging diaspora.
These diasporas constitute important factors
integrating their countries of origin in the
hemisphere’s economy…The economic and business
contributions of Central American and Caribbean
citizens living in Canada and the United States are
immense and signal a new type of relationship, not
only in labour mobility, but also in trade and
investment.”
Orozco went on to illustrate that persons within
the diaspora of these countries contribute
financially to their home economies to the tune of
some ten billion US dollars annually. And that only
accounts of course for the measurable amount
transmitted through remittance services like Western
Union. It does not factor in money physically
carried by relatives on holiday, nor gifts sent by
‘barrel’ or brought to the region by hand.
At a symposium entitled the Jamaican Diaspora –
Reciprocal Relations – The Way Forward, held Rabbi
Robert Kaplan made the argument that the Caribbean
migrants in the United States, and elsewhere, can
take example from the Jewish lobby in that country,
wherein organizations like the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wield considerable,
some say inordinate, influence on American domestic
and foreign policy, particularly when dealing with
the Jewish nation of Israel.
Another example of special interest lobbying that
one may look at is that of the Cuban population in
America and their political influence, especially in
the state of Florida.
As David Jessop wrote in the fore-mentioned
article,
”The Caribbean has an army already in the field
that, if suitably mobilised and informed, can change
policy. It also has economic muscle through
investors, those that it trades with and the
region's many influential friends. It is time the
region made use of these strengths rather than
continuing to plead its weaknesses.”
That may not be as simple a task as Jessop makes
it out to be. Compared with the lobbies, say, of
Israel and Cuba, the Caribbean citizens in the US,
or more specifically the CARICOM citizens, do not
suppose that they collectively possess a
historically unifying cause in which to believe in;
whereas the Jews have the fevered vision of the
protection of Zion, and the Cubans have their hatred
of the Castro regime, Caribbean citizens in the
Diaspora have yet see a cause to champion such as
the upholding of the status quo of the now defunct
Lomé Agreement which had provided a haven for many
small island economies up until the US government’s
opposition to it.
There is yet another area in which the Caribbean
can harness the tremendous potential of its
Diaspora. The UWI-CARICOM Project came up, in
October of 2002, with a project proposal for the
establishment of a regional organization that would
be geared to tap into the resources that can be
offered by skilled retired and semi-retired
Caribbean immigrants living in the Diaspora. The
organization, labeled in the document as the
Caribbean Executive Services Agency (CARES), would
be modeled on the Canadian Executive Service
Organisation (CESO) and the US-based International
Executive Corps (IESC), the difference being of
course, that it would be a regionally initiated and
controlled body. With the CSM established in January
2006, and the expectation is that the Single Economy
would be in place by 2008, an organization such as
this one, if put in place, would prove invaluable in
building the capacity of our fledgling Single
Market.
Conclusion
Whatever the options, it is clear that we must start
finding ways to start integrating the Diaspora into
our overall vision of integration. Jamaican P.M.,
the Honourable P.J Patterson, in his CARICOM 30th
Anniversary Lecture, in October last year, put
forward the idea superbly when he said,
“I assert that the job of building the kind of
Caribbean Society we desire is not restricted to
those who are physically located within the
geographic confines of the Caribbean Sea.
The “people” boundaries of CARICOM are not
confined to the physical boundaries of our regional
homelands. The living boundaries of CARICOM are to
be found wherever CARICOM nationals or their progeny
reside and work.”
The title of that lecture was “CARICOM Beyond
Thirty: Connecting With The Diaspora”. If we are to
more than just survive within the impending global
economy, if we are to have a strong voice ready to
roar our cause from deep within the belly of the
beast as it were, we need, urgently to start
connecting with the Diaspora.
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