Kali­fa Clyne

The Unit­ed States is now do­ing what Britain has al­ready done to the Caribbean-a sort of coloni­sa­tion-and this time its be­ing man­i­fest­ed in pol­i­tics. This was the view of Guyanese po­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor Frank Bir­bals­ingh as he spoke dur­ing a dis­cus­sion of na­tion­al in­ter­ests.

The dis­cus­sion, led by his­to­ri­an Brid­get Br­ere­ton and in­clud­ing for­mer Be­lizean at­tor­ney gen­er­al God­frey Smith, took place yes­ter­day dur­ing the 2012 Bo­cas Lit Fest at the Na­tion­al Li­brary in Port-of-Spain. "In Guyanese elec­tions decades ago the Amer­i­cans said no to Ched­di Ja­gan," said Bir­bals­ingh.

He added that the Caribbean na­tion­al­i­ty was built on the plan­ta­tion struc­ture. "The Caribbean is dif­fer­ent from oth­er colonies where forces would just wipe out the in­dige­nous peo­ple and in­hab­it the land. "The Caribbean was colonised by a com­bi­na­tion of two tech­niques, first the in­dige­nous were wiped out, then oth­er peo­ple were brought to the is­lands," Bir­bals­ingh said.

He said the re­gion was forced to in­vent its own his­to­ry from the in­her­it­ed frag­ments of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. "There was great dif­fi­cul­ty in cre­at­ing a new na­tion out of those frag­ments but the main dif­fi­cul­ty was eth­nic­i­ty. "In­di­ans and Africans came with their own cul­ture but Chris­tian­i­ty and west­ern cul­ture were im­posed on the peo­ple," he said.

Br­ere­ton of­fered the view that the na­tion­al nar­ra­tive of the peo­ple of T&T changed af­ter in­de­pen­dence in 1962 and be­came fo­cused on an an­ti-colo­nial his­to­ry. "The in­de­pen­dence nar­ra­tive cre­at­ed by Er­ic Williams tends to ig­nore in­ter­nal dif­fer­ences and was in­tro­duced to T&T when Williams pub­lished A His­to­ry of T&T as a gift to the na­tion," Br­ere­ton said.

She called the "in­de­pen­dence nar­ra­tive" an "an­ti-colo­nial and afro-Cre­ole" view. She added that post-in­de­pen­dence the afro-Cre­ole nar­ra­tive be­come the dom­i­nant one in the coun­try. "This forced the ques­tion of whose cul­ture took prece­dence and who were seen as more Tri­ni," she said. Br­ere­ton said since then new nar­ra­tives have been put for­ward to in­clude oth­er cul­tures and To­ba­go and old­er nar­ra­tives such as class and gen­der have sur­vived.