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BY TIM HECTOR

THIS IS ONE OF A TWO PART PIECE WRITTEN BY TIM HECTOR. I FOUND OUT A FEW NEW THINGS ABOUT CARIBBEAN CULTURE I NEVER KNEW FROM THIS PIECE.

FOR INSTANCE TWO WERE TWO INVENTIONS MADE IN THE CARIBBEAN IN THE 20TH CENTURY. MOST OF US KNOW OF ONE, THE PAN. BUT ALSO THERE IS THE INVENTION OF A MODERN LANGUAGE IN THE CARIBBEAN IN THE 20TH CENTURY, PAPAMEINTO.

IN MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF IT , THIS PIECE GIVES A GENERAL IDEA ABOUT US AS A CARIBBEAN PEOPLE AS WHO WE ARE AND RAISES POINTS ABOUT STEPS WE NEED TO TAKE TO SURVIVE AS A PEOPLE OR RATHER A CIVILIZATION IN THE FACE IMPERIAL POWERS. THESE STEPS FOCUSES AROUND GENDER RIGHTS-THE PROBLEM OF MACHO CARIBBEAN CULTURE, ECONOMICS-OUR DISPLACEMENT FROM THE RETRACTING COLONIAL POWERS, AND NATIONAL INSULARISM-THE POLITICS PEOPLE PLAY FOR THEIR OWN PETTY GAIN WHICH CONTINUES TO DETRACTS FROM REGIONALLY NATIONALISM WHICH COULD PROVIDE THE PEOPLES OF THE REGION A BETTER CHANCE OF SURVIVING IMPERIALISM AND GLOBALIZATION. THEN AGAIN MAY BE I MISSED THE POINT ITS TRYING TO MAKE.

I WILL SPLIT THIS INTO 4 POSTS.

PART1

March 9, 2001


Ralph Gonsalves and the new idea of a Caribbean Civilisation

There is little doubt that Dr Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines, a man shaped by being poor and Portuguese; a thinker shaped by the struggles in Jamaica (the Rodney affair); shaped too by his work and activism in Barbados as a University lecturer - Barbados being probably the best organised black society anywhere – shaped as well by his sojourn in Africa again as a University lecturer; is one of the best minds operating in the politics of the Caribbean. Or, for that matter, one of the best minds anywhere.

Dr Gonsalves is, in himself, among the best representatives of world civilisation. To wide reading and extensive knowledge he brings the insight of a criminal lawyer, and is possessed to a very high degree of what can only be deemed, the democratic ethos. To Ralph Gonsalves Parliamentary Democracy is not the last word in democratic development, as those would have us believe that history has ended.

The end result of all that, is that Ralph Gonsalves brings something new to Caribbean politics. That something new I will not keep you waiting for.

It is the belief that these islands, stretching from the Bahamas in the North to the Guyanas in the South, are not a mere geographical archipelago. Are not just a series of nation states and colonies. They are not mere variations on a cultural theme, but they represent a distinct and distinctive civilisation. Not Occidental, but a part of it. Not Oriental, but a part of it. Not African, but a part of it. And not just an amalgam of all three in some exotic admixture. To Ralph Gonsalves all the currents of world civilisation have met in this chain of islands, all using modern languages – sometimes creating their own, the only modern language created in the 20th century, papiamento, and too creating the only modern musical instrument of the 20th century, the pan, while producing leading personalities in all fields of human endeavour – and so demanding a new human solution to overcome its current impasse.

For Ralph Gonsalves multiculturalism is not some newfangled phenomenon, to be worked out. It is a way of Caribbean being, definitive and distinctly so, at once native and natural.

This then, in and of itself, posits the Caribbean, a group of small islands, numbering only 30 million, at the very epicentre of world civilisation. But, as a distinct civilisation. This goes well beyond nationalism, and in particular, the petty nationalism, in which the very Caribbean is now mired, Cuba excepted, these past 30 years.

This Ralph Gonsalves view of the Caribbean as a distinctly new civilisation, is a large claim. It lends itself to large perspectives. Perspectives, light years ahead of really existing Caribbean politics, tinkering with roads, filling pot-holes, dispensing patronage as jobs without work, and awash in a sea of drugs and money laundering as a conduit between Europe and America. With all territories structurally adjusted, as a result of a modern people living in a very backward island economies.

A salient factor to the Ralph Gonsalves personality, is that to wide reading and deep study, this grandson of Portuguese indentured labourers, brings the passion of an activist, Albert Camus’, l’homme engage. Not for Ralph Gonsalves the mere knowledge of the great scholar, detached in an ivory tower pontificating in popish infallibility; not just the criminal lawyer in Magistrate and High Court involved in the interstices of the underclass and the special knowledge that this brings. But a man armed with a body of knowledge, facing reality with sober senses, hammering with might and main, at the obscurantist structures and modes of thought which preclude change.

Notable too, is that one of the lenses in Ralph Gonsalves’ frame of Caribbean and global reference, is a cricket lens, and thus the ennobling, and enduring universal values of sport. Through cricket, unlike most western intellectuals, Ralph Gonsalves does not see sport as part of the circuses provided by the political elite to divert the masses from the struggle for bread and justice, into accommodation with oppressive structures of being. But instead, Ralph Gonsalves sees sport as a vital ingredient in re-engineering the very old way of being. Being and Time, in a particular geographical space – the Caribbean – are the preoccupations of Dr Ralph Gonsalves, political leader, in the small Caribbean nation-state of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

It is now time to hear from Ralph Gonsalves himself, in a marvellous new book entitled quite aptly: The Politics of Our Caribbean Civilisation.

PART 2

Early on and quoting Elias Cannetti, a European Nobel Laureate, Ralph says he has learnt not to take flights of fancy "in expeditions to faraway places" that "camouflages motives". On the contrary he recognises the situation of humankind today "is so serious that we have to turn to what is closest and most concrete."

Therefore says Ralph Gonsalves he has had an "increasingly skeptical approach, to put it mildly, to certain generally accepted categories of analysis and even to particular academic disciplines in their orthodox clothing". Therefore too, does Ralph Gonsalves reject "pure economics", holding to the line of Heilbroner that economics must come to regard itself as more akin "with the imprecise knowledge of political psychological and anthropological insights than with the precise knowledge of the physical sciences."

Endowed with this sense of realism, before Ralph Gonsalves gets into a definition of our Caribbean civilisation he carefully notes this: "Both the State and society must invest in changing negative gender positions on women. This investment necessarily involves, among other things, appropriate public education [obviously freed from patriarchal gender bias], a sea change in cultural practices in the hierarchical gender relations in the private domain, support institutional mechanisms, the elimination of domestic violence, increased participation by women in politics [hindered from participation by the same hierarchical gender relations and the apportioning of gender roles in the domestic sphere], and enhanced economic independence for women. The exercise of altering gender relations in private demands [the public and private] support and participation of both men and women primarily in the family and in viable community systems."

Ralph Gonsalves it must be remembered is not stopping at equal pay for equal work. He wants to change gender relations in the macho Caribbean in the public and private domain. This is, without doubt, a revolution in gender relations.

To tell the truth, I sat bolt upright when Ralph stated as well, that a big Caribbean purpose and his purposes involve "the elimination of domestic violence." That is, he was not prepared merely to legislate in favour of battered women. He is prepared to tackle head-on the root causes of domestic violence, that is, the particular history, with its deposit of patriarchal gender relations, and overturn them publicly and privately, to ensure the elimination of domestic violence. And, a new order. It is the most thorough-going assault on the foundations of the old order I have seen.

PART 3

I want to move you from there to another of the rarest nuggets in Caribbean thought, concisely and precisely expressed by Ralph Gonsalves. He says in defining the Caribbean civilisation this:

"We, in the Caribbean – Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch – occupy a particular geographic space, which has often been more influential in determining our being than our history; we know that the possibilities contained in both our geography and history jostle, in their manifold contradictions and interconnections, with their limitations."

I suspect that several doctoral dissertations could be written on that single paragraph and Ralph’s conception of the space-time continuum with "its manifold contradictions". Not least of which is the contradiction of a modern people living in a backward economy. This fact, in my opinion, is the most distinguishing feature of the Caribbean today.

To be brief the Caribbean, unlike all other peoples, were born in modern industry. Here there is no mediaeval hangover. No wild, wild west to conquer. But modern industry, the sugar industry, using steam power and the steam engine. In short, the application of science to production, making a secondary product from agricultural raw materials. The organisation of labour, though in the form of slavery, was modern, in that it was modern mass production, involving a mass of workers, in field and factory in co-operative (though forced) labour.

That modern industrial production necessarily implied the use of modern languages, English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Simultaneously, the organisers and organised in this modern industry were alien. They had to, of necessity, humanise this particular landscape and seascape and it is that humanisation process, mainly as slaves or indentured labourers, which is distinctive about what Ralph Gonsalves appropriately calls, Caribbean civilisation.

Unlike Ralph though, the distinguishing feature for me of this civilisation is not the sum of our achievements in art, medicine, literature, etc, etc, but Carnival. Carnival represents the Caribbean person’s attitude to money. He or she would purchase a costume, with hard earned money, usually in a hard guava crop, enjoying themselves to the max for two whole days, then back to the grind. In the end, abandoning costume by the side of the road, it having served its purpose – the individual in the collective enjoyment of Carnival. Carnival Lloyd Best postulated is the central rite of Caribbean civilisation. I concur.

More than that, Carnival is the Caribbean persons philosophical statement about freedom. Not as you would think, in its gay abandon, its imbibing of spirits in moderation or excess; not just as the important pursuit of happiness. But in its widest possible sense.

A Caribbean Carnival involves people from all strata of society either making Mas or watching Mas. This Mas involves and includes, not only things and episodes from our particular life, Ole Mas. But a concrete attempt to incorporate into the human personality all the previous history of mankind as distilled through the creative imagination. Hence we have in Carnival, pre-historic ‘mud people’, even Neanderthals, scenes from the Bible, other civilisations Aztecs, Mayans, Romans, Orientals, Mexicans, with a potpourri of devils, witches, ghosts from the museum of antiquity and mythology. And this whole panorama of civilisations, dancing to a Caribbean beat. A song and a beat each year contrived out of the collective imagination by an artist, and known as the Road March, with all the creative expressions in dance, and an infinity of role playing, overlaid with satire against the high and mighty. All of which, we invent annually. This incorporation of the best in the past in the Caribbean personality is under siege by cheap Hollywoodian gaudiness, tinsel in skimpy, signifying nothing.

However if Freedom is the incorporation into the human personality of the whole history of humankind, then nothing, just nothing, allows spectator and ‘mas player to participate in this incorporation, on a mass scale, as does the Caribbean Carnival.

Not unnaturally it is spreading to all parts of the globe in its specific Caribbean character, as humankind feels the increasing need to bond in mass celebration and creation, other than the in Party of a few. I leave that there to return to Ralph.

Ralph says that "the Caribbean, metaphorically, has emerged, as roughly containing the songs of the Caribs [and Arawaks], the rhythm of Africa, the chords of Asia, the melody of Europe, and the lyrics of the Caribbean itself." It is a marvellous formulation.

But Ralph is larger even in his definition of what constitutes a Caribbean civilisation.

"A civilisation" he says "is not to be assessed merely through the outstanding achievement of individuals within it. But clearly an abundance of individual excellence in various fields of human endeavour is an indicator of the progress of civilisation. The Nobel Laureate Sir Arthur Lewis, George Beckford and Havelock Brewster in Literature, the novelist George Lamming, Wilson Harris and V.S. Naipaul; the esteemed medical practitioners Sir Harry Anamanthudo, Professor Mickey Waldron, Sir George Alleyne and Cecil Cyrus; the famed entrepreneurs Butch Stewart, the Goddards and the Matalons, the international cricketers Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Garfield Sobers and Sir Vivian Richards; the distinguished intellectuals CLR James, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Lloyd Best and Edourd Glissant; the historians Elsa Goveia, Douglas Hall, Woodville Marshall and Hilary Beckles; the educators Sir Philip Sherlock, Elsie Payne and Lopey; the lawyers Sir Hugh Wooding, Sir Henry Forde; F.O.C Harris, Telford Georges, Sir Vincent Flossiac and Alec Hughes; the athletes Donald Quarrie, Alberto Juantorena, Haysley Crawford and Merlene Ottey; the political leaders Grantley Adams, the Manleys, Errol Barrow, Cheddi Jagan, Eric Williams, Robert Bradshaw and Fidel Castro; the singers Bob Marley, Mighty Sparrow, Beckett and Gabby, the creative artists of all kinds; Edna Manley, E. Mannette, Tanny Peters, Louise Bennett, Olive Levin and Blazer Williams; the poets Edward "Kamau" Braithwaite, Nicolas Guillen, Aimé Césaire; the large number of individuals of distinction in the fields of engineering, architecture, music, painting, drama, science, technology, nursing, journalism, social work, and a host of others too numerous to mention."

Obviously an even more elaborate list could be drawn up, including Fernando Ortiz, the father of Caribbean Scholarship; the world’s best known man of action, Ché Guevarra; the first Nobel Laureate of the Caribbean St John Perse; and too Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Lorna Goodison and Edwidge Danticat, to add only a few more; and not excluding Marcus Garvey and Shirley Chisholm, Lord Short Shirt or Arrow or Kareem Abdul Jabbar or for that matter Patrick Ewing. Not to speak of the baseballers, or even Juan Bosch. And Ralph should have said the incomparable Fidel Castro.

However Ralph is careful to note that the "true measure of a civilisation is not in the individual efforts of distinguished persons, but in the community of solidarity of the people as a whole in the process of nation building, the ordinary workers in agriculture, industry, fisheries, and tourism; the professionalism and extra efforts of health personnel … the day to day travails of women in keeping their families together and guiding their off-spring, the struggles of the poor in addressing their housing needs [A House for Mr Biswas], with or without state aid; the daily grind of ordinary folk in their quest for greater democratic controls on the state administration and for justice…."

To my mind, it is that struggle of the ordinary people to create a civil society based on organs independent of State Power, which will lead to the elimination of the modern concentration of authority in the State. It is this civil society, which will distinguish Caribbean civilisation.

PART 4


There is though another point of departure or difference between Ralph and I. Yes, in the Caribbean a people have been freed, and have created significantly, but a community has not been formed. Neither a community of interests, save in Cuba, nor a settled community in social development.

However Ralph may want to find entrepreneurs of note, an entrepreneurial class has not emerged and will not emerge in the Caribbean. It is the working class that has to become the entrepreneurial class, and thus creating out of potential an actually new civilisation. But Ralph is not unaware of the problem.

For Ralph says: "Since the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism around 1980 or thereabouts, Caribbean intellectuals, by and large, have abandoned their quest for overarching theories or models to facilitate development and have embraced sterile technocratic formulae produced in the school of "structural adjustment" of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In the process, they have negated their own Caribbeanness and have looked askance at our history including our region’s rich intellectual history."

The petit bourgeois cannot become bourgeois.

And not just the intelligentsia has collapsed "As a consequence" says Ralph, "at a time of the increasing marginalisation of the Caribbean internationally and an enthronement of the political economy of inertia regionally, there are no signposts planted by the Caribbean intelligentsia to guide the clearing of the overgrown thickets in the society and economy." The administrative middle strata and the intelligentsia are no longer a force for meaningful social change with justice, if they ever were.

The intellectuals, the technocrats have collapsed in the "political economy of inertia." Because there is no community of interests, impelling and propelling them to create and configure, even in the mind, new arrangements of society based on knowledge – science. As a special category intellectuals are moribund. They are trapped "in the political economy of inertia". Therefore only women, farmers, fishermen and the working people can impel and propel Caribbean society and civilisation forward – or else barbarism.

But say one, say two. One of the great epics of this period in history is Cuba’s amazing recovery from the collapse of the Soviet Union to which its trade and economy were bound, and this was accomplished too, in the teeth of the tightening bite of the longest trade blockade in history, imposed by the mightiest power in the long sojourn of man beneath the stars. The Cuban working people saved the Cuban Revolution from a collapse, which looked inevitable to all the pundits.

Lloyd Best too, strikes the same theme as Ralph Gonsalves. Lloyd Best put it this way: "Perhaps the most pathetic force in the modern Caribbean has been the educated elite, brought confidently up not only on Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, but also on Smith, Ricardo and Marx [he should have added Sam Wilson] and unable to break out. Our own case here, here in this unique region, needs an organic interpretation to suit a people who were introduced into the economy and into international trade under quite exceptional conditions of fragmentation and exclusion - well described by Edouard Glissant and Tim Hector."

I am quite grateful to Lloyd Best for placing me in so distinguished a company of Caribbean thinkers. But I beg to disagree.

Intellectuals, be it Voltaire or Diderot, Lenin or Trotsky, Raymond Williams or E.P. Thompson, as intellectuals, do not move society. People do. People, en masse, do.

What I mean specifically in the Caribbean context is this. Though we began in modern industry – the sugar industry – the process of industrialisation, the application of science to mass production by organised labour, has been halted, twisted, distorted, turned in on itself by a nationalist movement which whelped nation-states, in virtual pig-stys of Cold War corruption and then internal political corruption. It produced common market, without goods to market. It produced regional integration with ever increasing disintegration. It speaks integration, in season, while it daily pursues the politics and policy of fragmentation. It screams sovereignty, the more it lapses into and holds fast to dependency like a tar-baby.

It is led by political parties, which do not even educate the leaders. The leaders despise all ideas. Nothing is studied. Nothing serious is discussed in these parties. The parties are wooden mindless. Trapped in reading minutes, matters arising and any other business tomfoolery. They are mindless in the extreme.

Therefore the people are miseducated. They are fed a diet of adversarial politics, which divides the working class against itself. Or racialism, each oppressed race making the other the culprit, is the order of the day.

Thus, then and therefore our society lives on inherited prejudices. Self-contempt is rampant. Self-belief, belief in our own capacities, is undermined. "Partnership is leakyship" our own people proclaim. A Regional State – the necessity of the moment, becomes a pipe-dream. Each island becomes an insular kingdom. Divine right kings rule in totalitarian control of the media.

The miseducation of the people by parties, which do not educate themselves, either at the leadership level or at the membership level, means that society turns in on itself. Partnership is leakyship is the social doctrine in such circumstances.

Yet now more than ever the people of the Caribbean, needs partnerships across the region. It is a matter of necessity that we co-operate and collaborate, in self-managed community enterprises across the region. More than ever we need an educated working class, participating in the organisation of production and living not so much by the wage, but sharing in the profits. The top-down, command system in production must be abolished. And the people self-organised in their communities as civil society take command of politics and economics.

Otherwise we will decay into crime and drugs cynicism and corruption – ultimately into barbarism, not a Caribbean Civilisation.

It is to be hoped that Ralph Gonsalves will himself, and according to his own formulation, decisively end this state of politics. As he himself put it: "Dialectically, the state apparatus which has fed the current ruling politicians will in time bury them." "But," says Dr Ralph Gonsalves, "we the people must not be interred with them.

"The alternative is political integration" of that Ralph Gonsalves is more than certain. But how to get there?

TO BE CONTINUED

I will comment on this when I get back from CCC.