Sometime ago, one David Mason of La Romaine wrote the editor thus, "The political analysts, journalists and misguided politicians seem hell-bent on perpetuating the categories of 'Indo' and 'Afro' Trinidadians." He asked, "Why are they continuing to slavishly ape our North American brothers who are far more deprived than us?" He continued, "I've never heard of an Indo-Guyanese (oh yeah?), a Sino- Jamaican or an Afro-Barbadian. Something must be done to outlaw these odious terms 'Afro' and 'Indo' in our society. How will we categorise our growing number of beautiful douglas?" One political leader referred to "the blacks and the browns." Can't help with how he arrived at the "classification," but rest assured that the minds of politicians and political analysts move in mysterious ways.
Well, fasten your belt Mr Mason and "doh dig nutten" because some "experts" simply have to assign you to one of the arbitrary "tribes," and you've had it. Calypsonian Dougla, whose calypso sobriquet depicted his ethnic mix, had fun at his own expense when in the calypso idiom he sang that he would be in "a monkey pants" if they suddenly decided to send "Indians" back to India and "Africans" back to Africa. He claimed that he was neither one nor the other, half of one and half of the other. It's been a long time since the dougla nomenclature carried a pejorative connotation. To keep in step with ethnic miscegenation, perhaps it's time that the douglas settle their position in the so-called "ethnic stratification" by self-styled "ethnic analysts."
For politically convenient (opposite) reasons it suits both sides of the opposite political aisles to promote the myth that Eric Williams was something of a "local African tribal chieftain." The Black Power crowd and other self-styled political analysts sought to label the likes of Williams and Lewis as "Afro-Saxons," no doubt intended as a pejorative appellation. Predictably, Williams ignored them and Arthur Lewis interpreted it as the folly of those who couldn't recognise what it meant to be able "to compete with the best at the international level." Black Stalin may have sung more wisely than he knew when he suggested that "Sufferers doh know nutten 'bout race/ Doh care who come from which place/ What they care 'bout is where the next meal coming from."
Political aspirants and other fame and fortune hunters like to "push de dotish head of promised power to the people" until the promised political land has been reached, and, to borrow David Rudder's words, we begin to wonder whether "the ragamuffin monarchy and the parasitic oligarchy" are not embedded in the political DNA and must it always be that "the political voice is the voice of Jacob but the hand is the hand of Esau? The late Lloyd Best was apparently fond of making broad generalisations-whether for effect or not, I can't say. But I wonder whether it was one of them when he is reported to have said that T&T is the only country he knows of where every group feels that it is second class. I wonder whether it means that first class is equally open to every group so inclined.
At one time the best political gospel, according to the Lloyd, was that the political centre of gravity of power needed to be shifted nearer to the geographical centre of the country. Towards the end, he admitted that the efforts consummated in the so-called "party of parties" had pre-callapsed." Something that could easily have been predicted, given the essential negative credentials and prior track records of the major players involved. By some quirk of political fortuity, that defies explanation, a political tornado materialised out of the blue and pelted two Humpty Dumpties off their imaginary walls, leaving them covered beneath the ensuing rubble and hoping that "all the king's horses and all the king's men" could put their political careers back together again.
The space thereby created allowed a coalition of sorts to emerge from virtually nowhere. Naturally, to borrow Lloyd Best's phrasing, they'd prefer to imagine that "they'd stormed the portals of history." A miasma of missteps not withstanding. Some might question whether we can come to grips with the inevitable ethnic faultiness, real or simply perceived, whether we're up to the task of keeping a coherent society intact with its own distinct national identity with the different filaments of humanity comfortable in the national space enjoying mutual appreciation of the cultural expressions and affinities of each other. I'm not unaware that one of our national watchwords is "tolerance," which I suspect alludes to "race relations." However, I am also of the view that "tolerance" should be considered a minimum bar as it's quite obvious that one can tolerate things, people and situations that one utterly abhors. The word "production" in the watchwords should really be "productivity."
No one should deny another having reservations about retreating into cultural cul-de-sacs. There are those who aver that this is inimical to a wholesome national spirit. There are, I hazard the guess, societies more mature that ours that may not be immune from fissiparous tendencies. The answer could be a genuine respect for the uniqueness of individual identities against the all-encompassing background of a larger evolving confluence of individual cultural streams where the Ganges meets the Nile. My own half-baked, possibly unleavened, notion is that many an ethnic and/or cultural tension may be simply symptomatic of perceived or real inequitable distribution of the "national pie."
THOUGHTS
• It's been a long time since the dougla nomenclature carried a pejorative connotation. To keep in step with ethnic miscegenation, perhaps it's time that the douglas settle their position in the so-called "ethnic stratification" by self-styled "ethnic analysts."