In pursuit of a true identity

It’s, I suppose, only natural that whenever “Indian Arrival Day” or “African Emancipation Day” comes around, a number of controversies re the question of “ethnic identities” seem to be spawned — even if sporadically — with what appears to me to be more heat than light. Now far be it from me to seem to be trivalising what to a substantial number of people are very serious issues. Now I hate to bring our late Prime Minister Dr Eric Williams into our current petty squabbles, but “. . . it ain’t me who start it.” What I understand Dr Williams to be saying is that we should not allow obsession with our ancestral homes to obtrude upon and/or be inimical to our commitment to the development of our comfort with our current “Mother Trinidad and Tobago.” To show how absurd partisan politics is (in this neck of the woods), take the controversial “Trinity Cross” issue for example.

After Basdeo Panday had ample opportunity, not to mention motive, to settle it once and for all, he avoided the issue. Patrick Manning promised to deal with it when he finds out why Panday avoided it. Characteristically, Panday now jumps on the band wagon of an “Indian National Awards” scheme. You think it easy with political “twirly and twisty.”! With the recent visit of Nelson Mandela to our shores, it is only to be expected that “African consciousness” would be heightened in certain quarters and some would be prepared to shout from the hilltops and even the valleys — no pun intended — that, “Black is beautiful and it’s beautiful to be black.” Having said this, the question of the quest for identity of one sort or another will, I suppose, continue to be a complex as well as a contentious one. It’s been said that people are strengthened by a knowledge and appreciation of their cultures. And, I might add, the word “culture” is used here in its broadest, if not fully definable, sense.

Now especially where there has been a cultural hiatus of one sort or another, there appears to be something of an imperative to attempt that nostalgic journey down memory lane — presumably in the expectation that, “Memory retrieved could result in paradise reclaimed.” In the case of societies where history has decreed that diverse strands of humanity — with their different cultural backgrounds, affinities and, indeed, aspirations — occupy the same geographical, though not psychological, space, it’s incumbent on the different strands to develop a healthy respect for the different “cultural baggages,” thereby allowing the unforced evolutionary process to, in time, result in a mutually acceptable “modus vivendi” and a “melding” rather than a “melting” of “cultural attributes.” In an earlier article, I alluded to the case of African-American journalist Keith B Richburg who spent three years travelling in Africa seeking answers to “the chaos sweeping the continent of his ancestors.”

To cut a long story short, Richburg appeared to have experienced some sort of “cultural shock,” which led him to affirm that he was not a “hyphenated-American,” and to, insensitively, ask: “Is this my country and are they my people?” Naturally, he drew the ire of the Afrocentrics. Voicing a somewhat different perspective, the charismatic African-American minister Rev Leon Sullivan cried out at an “African-American-Summit” to encourage investment in Africa, “This is a call for African-Americans to wake up and help your homeland (Africa) as the Poles help Poland, the Irish help Ireland and the Jews help Israel.” Rev Sullivan further admonished: “It is time that African-Americans stop just talking about black pride, black power, and shaking their fists . . . It is time to get together to help ourselves, to help at home and to help in Africa. We complain too much.”

This “black identity and identification with Mother Africa” probably goes as far back as Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier,” who was stolen from Africa and has been striving for survival since. Today, Buffalo Soldier is no longer “. . . a fugitive on the run . . . a lonely pilgrim without a vision, a wanderer in time and space.” There still appears to be that void and darkness of the slave experience. At the simplest level, “I dream I was in Africa — hunting lion and tiger.” It’s also understandable that the quest for an African utopia must be a corollary to refurbishing a besmirched and tainted image, reclaiming an erstwhile dignity and locating the “African psyche” outside the ambit of self-diminution and self-contempt. There appears to be a need in the so-called African Diaspora to reverse the tormented feelings of inferiority that have been, wittingly or otherwise, associated with things that are identifiably African.

This pursuit of “an African identity” has been seen by some as a way of “dealing with the memories without being consumed by them.” Maya Angelou, the black American poet, averred that, “We cannot unlike the wrenching pain of the experience of slavery.” She also alluded to people — the descendants of slaves — “filled with self-loathing and doubt.” The shackles may be off but, psychologically, some still remain as, “caged birds.” Perhaps Bob Marley sang more wisely than he knew when he sang, “Only you can emancipate yourself from mental slavery.” Marley’s exhortation is akin to the local version, to wit, “Children of the darkness, come out into the light.”

That quest for an African identity or, more precisely, a “black identity” involves not so much a question of colour per se or “return to ancestral roots” but is arguably more in the nature of “a spiritual recrudescence.” Throughout the long, cold winter of servitude, the African slaves had only their spiritual and cultural blankets to wrap themselves with, while they dreamt of freedom as that faint light at the end of the long dark tunnel. The notion that the slaves were primitive people or savages was simply a grossly mistaken and deliberate fabrication to convey the view that the slaves were without culture or value systems, in a nefarious attempt to justify man’s inhumanity to man.