Where are ‘we’?

The 56th Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) Annual General Assembly rolled seamlessly into the XV edition of CARIFESTA in Barbados last week. The WhatsApp group created for CBU delegates morphed into a prolific platform for CARIFESTA advisories and impressions.

Some of us stayed on to capture early glimpses of the regional spectacle, while others caught the action online.

This sounds like no big thing, right? Yes, because it happens all the time. Those who have been following the work of the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) – now headquartered in Guyana - and Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) – based in Jamaica – should be aware that for most media folks the Caribbean paradigm flows naturally from the work we do.

As an autonomous project of the MIC, the Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network (CIJN) has been on the CBU winners’ roll over the past few years. Our teams span the region and work together as a single unit.

CIJN awardees at CBU XV

This is not just about showing off – which is okay by me – but making a point about the expression of Caribbean regional cohesion through means outside of the formal institutional arrangements expressed through Caricom and others.

So, after posting some photos from the CARIFESTA parade of nations on social media, a friend and colleague asked me: “Wey we?” – meaning she had not seen any shots representative of her country’s contingent. “We are in all the shots,” was my cryptic response … in the hope she’d know what I meant by that. A laughing emoji followed.

However, sceptically invoking the question of “we” - after so many years of collective effort, triumphs, and shortcomings - does not automatically represent failure, even as there is promotion of a notion of collective will and responsibility.

I was, within hours of that exchange, to argue during an online discussion on human rights, constitutions and elections in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago that formulations of integration are often devoid of a sense of cultural sensitivity. This includes interpretations and versions of the philosophical menus on offer.

When I spoke of fish broth, cowheel soup, pelau and cook up – Surinamese public intellectual/human rights activist Sharda Ganga reminded us that we are still able to identify the discrete ingredients of cook up (and all the other dishes, I quietly mused).

“Where in all this are WE?”, in this context, is thus not an entirely unreasonable question – the three countries under review (Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname) being the broader subject, but CBU and CARIFESTA and Caricom and ACM and MIC included by implication.

We know the old “melting pot” and “tossed salad” conundrums well, but so often forget the pelau and cook up concoctions. Yes, I am negotiating a most circuitous route to today’s question about engagement and disengagement of a collective future.

In conversation with Julius, and later Franka and Peter, I bored them yet again with questions of “self-esteem” and “self-confidence” in engaging the present and fashioning the future. This space has endlessly cited CLR James and Lloyd Best, but there are several others who framed the same questions in different ways.

Casual, uninformed dismissal of the communal, regional approach to individual problem-solving is thus both hurtful and harmful. If “we” have not now realised that we have nowhere to go alone as small, vulnerable, but resilient and creative nations, we have learnt nothing.

Even so, our formal and informal arrangements all contemplate disagreement and even injurious battle. It’s what happens with family. We have been here before in 1972 with recognition of Cuba, and the Grenadian tragedy of 1983. There were sharp divisions regarding Aristide’s ouster in 2004, and there are Caricom countries with diplomatic relations with China, and a few others with Taiwan.

Some of us even stop speaking with each other from time to time. When PetroCaribe was launched in 2005, Trinidad and Tobago (for obvious reasons) and Barbados were unenthusiastic, with the others arguing that far-reaching engagement was the result of enlightened self-interest.

Some in Trinidad and Tobago and in the region meanwhile saw the accord with Venezuela as a betrayal of sorts, especially since there were implications for Caricom arrangements built into the PetroCaribe agreement.

Even then, there were numerous bilaterals and multilaterals that remained in place involving Venezuela and Caribbean countries. For instance, T&T’s relations with this troubled neighbour are not restricted to oil and gas collaborations, and Venezuela’s persistent Essequibo claims had not disappeared when Guyana signed the PDVSA Energy Cooperation Agreement in 2014.

So, we argue at times even to the point of defamatory and degrading assertion. Today, you see, is me, the next day is you. But at the end of it all this is really about all ah “we” – whether we like it or not.