Celebrating a national identity

Fifty-four years as a person is a long time, a working adult would be starting to wrap up their financial business in preparation for retirement. Fifty-four years as a nation? We’re not even out of diapers yet. Developing our identity as an independent people takes time, it is a process that can’t be rushed. Just like an infant, personality identity is formed in the early years. What is the identity of this infant nation Trinidad and Tobago going to be? Are we going to be all about partying, having a good time, corruption and fraud, or are we going to stand for something more substantial? Where do our values lie as individuals and collectively as a people?

The first line of our national anthem, states as a people we are

‘Forged from the love of liberty’. As any jeweller or welder can tell you, forging is a difficult process. It takes a lot of pressure and intense heat to melt metal to mold it into the desired form. It is a great metaphor for the pressure and stress and difficulties we are experiencing in Trinidad and Tobago today. As a people we are under real pressure. You have to have real guts and tenacity to make it in Trinidad and Tobago today, even working day and night is no guarantee to get ahead. It is because even though it is difficult, it is preferable to make your own decisions (ergo the love of liberty bit). Freedom brings responsibility and it is even more difficult in the current global climate. How on Earth are we as a state supposed to manage the economy, national security and everything else (which incidentally are subject to forces beyond our control), while working toward the development and growth of our nation and people? Talk about asking for the impossible!!

Independence does not mean life automatically becomes nice, it just means you are free to make your own decisions, and just like any young adult living on their own can tell you, these are often very bad decisions with long term consequences. As a country and as a people we have often made bad decisions -- some have been very bad -- and we have to pay the price for our bad choices.

I’d rather make my own bad choices than have someone else impose their bad decisions on me. With time and experience, we will do better (hopefully). While we are going through the pressures of growing up as a people and as we are molded and shaped into what we will become, it can go either way. Trinidad and Tobago can develop into something amazingly beautiful, or we can become a cautionary tale of how something with so much potential can go so wrong.

So Trinidad and Tobago we are not a people without challenges, how we treat with and resolve these challenges is what will determine the kind of people we become in the end. Nation building is to all intents and purposes a Sisyphean task, but it is one we must do nonetheless. Due to a brief flirtation with International Relations while a university student, I have developed an admiration of countries that have bootstrapped themselves out of great hardship. It makes me think that if it was possible for others in worse circumstances to achieve so much, that we too have hope to reach lofty heights, if we can get it together and focus and work toward our goal. I’m not saying Utopia but we can do much better.

While it is good to learn from other more developed nations, you just can’t buy and ship a national identity to your skybox (I’m sure if we could, we would have done it already). Independence is a time we should examine what it really means to be from Trinidad and Tobago. There must be more to us than Carnival, good looking women and delicious food! If that is all there is to our Trini identity, how are we different from Brazil or the Dominican Republic?

I think rather than asking how we feel this Independence Day, the question we should be asking ourselves is “Trinidad and Tobago, 54 years have gone. Who are you?”