We must know our history

As the Director of the Black Agenda Project, David Muhammad, pointed out: “Especially since our nation is the most diverse in the Caribbean, there must be consideration and awareness for every heritage, identity, and ethnicity.

Therefore, any oversight would immediately disqualify the relevance of any such text.” And the Maha Sabha’s Sat Maharaj added: “we are being erased from the history of our nation.” Coincidentally, I was attending a conference on modernism in Amsterdam as this matter flared up on social media. In this city, the marks of Dutch colonial authority in the Caribbean remain visible, both in its multi ethnicity and in its vibrancy.

At this conference we were also debating ideas of exclusion and inclusion of Asian and African cultures, and in particular the visibility of disaporic cultures.

According to panellists, participants in a conference in Bandung in 1955 highlighted the fact that narratives of modernism and modernity centred exclusively on Europe and America. Yet, Africa and Asia deeply influenced the art of the 20th century. What is more, there has been deep transcultural exchange to the point where a new term, “planetary,” could be used to describe modernism.

One speaker noted that the Caribbean has been engaged in a transcultural process ever since the beginning of colonialism with the importation of enslaved peoples and the introduction of indentureship. Africans, Europeans and peoples of Asian descent had to make accommodations and society reflects these shifts.

According to one panellist Trinidad is a microcosm of such processes and writers at the early part of the century sought to record and examine the impact on society. Seepersad Naipaul, father of V. S. Naipaul, was used as a signal example. He reflected the interweaving of cultures originating in far different places, and the creation of new forms.

Trinidad’s culture has been described by Derek Walcott as “a babel, like heaven.” It is certainly a microcosm of the world in many senses. The interchanges and interconnections that exist within modern culture and society are everywhere evident in our society, both in terms of the arts that we call modernist and the fact that our writers and artists have sought to create something new out of this mixture.

Many of our writers have also examined how the memory of original cultures including Amerindian culture have remained imbedded in our collective psyche and become transformed into something distinctly Caribbean.

Wilson Harris the Guyanese writer and philosopher analyses limbo as an art form born of the journey from Africa to the Caribbean and the cramped conditions endured by the slaves, but also sees it as a spatial image of the Asian gods as well as of Christianity. He says we have to use these acts of performance as gateways to memory.

Caribbean history with its several ruptures demands an act of determined remembering and repossessing.

Further, at the heart of the heated debate about the exclusion of Emancipation Day and Arrival Day is the fear of devaluing ourselves.

As my friend the writer Niala Maharaj says, “The world does not take sufficient cognisance of the profound contribution of African peoples to the shape and rhythm of modern culture, notably in music, fashion and sport. Yet the icons of recent times are Obama, Bolt, Mandela and Mohammed Ali.

These men drew heavily on their sense of the dignity of their heritage and have redefined the physical and spiritual concept of homo sapiens.” Without a sense of where we came from, we c a n n o t move with assurance and value into the future.