Wednesday, 5 July 2023

Slow birth of a Nation

Almost every day now emerges confirmation that had some form of collective deliberation and action not existed among our small, brittle states, we would have had to urgently apply every hue and shade from our vast creative palette to design an appropriate response to matters now emergent globally in measures of life and death.

It is true our Caribbean has not always engaged fraternity with untrammeled self-esteem and courage, and the patchwork quilt we have contrived is too often viewed from the messy underside. But there has been an unfolding design best examined by eyes acting unapologetically on behalf of minds … and hearts.

For what we have before us is in fact a home. A house of many mansions. Our space. And, for the vast majority of us, our past, our present, and our future. For us, for me, the decision has been to stay and to hopefully help construct a single space beyond boundaries marked by flags and solemn pledges that often fade and become backdrops to landscapes of the large and strong and boisterous.

Nobody ever said it would be easy, and we've actually been at this much longer than the fifty years the buntings for which drape our troubled islands this short week. We in fact came formally to a semblance of this through colonial ambition, sometime before the seductive call of individual and collective self-determination.

In 1966, CLR James surmised that the imperialists had indeed “poisoned and corrupted that sense of self-confidence and political dynamic needed for any people about to embark on the uncharted seas of independence and nationhood.”

Then, as he addressed a Montreal audience, CLR turned dramatically to the words of George Lamming: “Free is how you is from the start, an’ when it look different you got to move, just move, an’ when you movin’ say that it is a natural freedom that make you move.”

By then, we had already spurned the hopeful mold of federation (1958-1962) and begun to temper our passions to the rudiments of a Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) - today mostly and anachronistically remembered as an annual platform for emerging sporting excellence, and not for unrealised, lofty ambition on trade and commerce and fraternal relations that faltered and fell in 1972.

So it was in 1973, even as the then European Economic Community (EEC) was finding second breath with the admission of the UK, Ireland, and Denmark, something called the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) was inaugurated.

Today it is one of the oldest surviving integration movements in the developing world. Some commentators do not apparently count the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) established in 1967.

We observe 50 at a time when partnerships are in states of sharp realignment. Foes are becoming friends and friends now turn to foes. The enemies of some enemies are now our friends, and the friends of enemies our foes.

It is, in a sense, the timeless, spaceless digitalisation of engagement, as opposed to past analogical relations - tending more and more in the direction of cohesion for solutions; in many instances in the face of fragmentation. It might well be that things have always been like this, but these are perilous times during which there is no promise to survive.

In small spaces such as ours, after all, the option to disappear or to depart is always before us like a tattered menu. There are flags on these islands and coastal states that flutter restlessly. Feet, like awkward moko-jumbies, which often stomp to one side and then the next. And often, there is a stumbling, then a fall. And the outstretched hands aren’t always clawless and kind.

Aimé Césaire is mandatory reading on such matters – not the hopelessness of the return to his native (colonised) land, but his instructions for survival.

At the end of it all, fifty – half a century – means very little on its own. Again, CLR: “I believe that there is taking place today in the Caribbean, one of the most exciting and unusual developments in the modern world – the formation of a new nation.”

He must have known that for the purpose of survival, we can and should not have it any other way.

Postscript: I don’t think any Caricom anniversary celebration is complete without mention of the journalists who, over the years, made sure that official events sometimes staged in cynical secrecy were dissected and interpreted on behalf of Caribbean media audiences.

Here are some I have worked with and can vouch for their valuable contributions: Torchbearers: Rickey Singh, Dr Canute James, Peter Richards, Hugh Croskill, Andy Johnson, and Bert Wilkinson. There are many more. But these are my top picks.

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