Cross-cultural Trini mix and trauma of the past

What Antoine-Dunne may have taken to or taken away from the conference is that, inter alia, the Caribbean in general, and Trinidad specifically, engaged in a transcultural process and exchanges since the beginning of colonialism and that “everybody has to make accommodations and society reflects these shifts,” and the interchanges and interconnections exist everywhere within modern culture and writers and artists have sought to create something new out of the mixture.

A couple of tiny observations.

Antoine-Dunne’s descriptions of Trinidad culture as a microcosm of global cross-cultural exchanges, referencing S Naipaul, Walcott and the Guyanese writer Harris through their eyes, may be insufficient basis for the claim without reference and validation of a framework standard for assessing transcultural interchanges and interconnections.

If we believe that modern transcultural exchange has become “planetary,” but the memory of original cultures including Amerindian culture has remained in our collective psyche, transforming the region into something distinctly Caribbean, which of these two standards is the operating standard in the context of a validating assessment? In the 1600s, the Dutch developed a social formula known as modern capitalism, which proved to be transferable and ultimately deadly to all social formulas (Taylor, Dutch Hegemony and Contemporary Globalisation, 2002).

Whose culture and values create the validating assessment when working out regional consequences of ideas of exclusion and inclusion of Asian and African cultures and their visibility in monarchist, imperialist Amsterdam? More to the point, which culture and values create the operating standard which makes us uniquely Caribbean? In answering the question it needs stating that from near extinction of First Peoples to 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade and loss of philosophical traditions, identity and self, the memory of good as well as bad cultural experiences and expressions, shaped and imbedded in collective psyches, may not necessarily be distinctly or uniquely (authentically) Caribbean.

And so, a centuries-old colonial system of the forced abandonment of fathers to their children and families, the recolouring of skin tones and of choice and changes in goods and services, do these identifiable markers of cross-cultural adaptation make us uniquely Caribbean, relative to the consequences of imperialism in other parts of the world? A long time ago, a philosopher of note stated that actions inspired by motives that spring from the periphery of the self, while denying its essential aspects, amounts to self-betrayal, self-alienation and annihilation.

The 18th century philosopher also suggested that the emergence of a competitive public sphere compromises one’s ability to look inward because competitive relations require role-playing in the extreme, which in turn causes not only self-alienation but ultimately injustice, inequality and the destruction of moral understanding.

The pertinent question arises: how authentic is the intergenerational cross-cultural mix of Trinidadians caused by trauma of the past?

KATHLEEN PINDER via email