In her seminal work Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (2001), Viranjini P Munasinghe used two familiar dishes to describe competing ideas of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity in T&T.
In callaloo, the ingredients are cooked together until they produce one distinct flavour. In a tossed salad, the ingredients share the same bowl but each retains its own taste and identity.
For years, we proudly described T&T as a callaloo nation. We boasted about our mixture of races, religions and cultures. Yet, recent events suggest that some of us are becoming less comfortable with the mixing. Increasingly, some people are guarding culture as racial property, as “this belongs to us, that belongs to you” and neither should cross the boundary.
The recent controversy surrounding the University of T&T’s African Emancipation Day programme is a clear example.
The programme, “UHURU: Celebrating Freedom,” included tassa and classical Indian dance. Some people saw their inclusion as disrespectful to African Emancipation and even described it as cultural appropriation. Others viewed it as an expression of the multicultural country that Emancipation helped to make possible.
Let me be clear, African Emancipation Day must remain centred on the enslavement, resistance, emancipation and continuing struggles of African people.
Similarly, Indian Arrival Day must centre on the history and experiences of Indian indentured labourers and their descendants. Every community has the right to preserve and commemorate its history without having that history diluted or displaced.
But the presence of tassa or Indian dance within a national institution’s Emancipation programme raises a different question. If these performances were inserted without explanation or context, then the organisers should explain their purpose.
However, the mere presence of one Trinbagonian culture in the commemoration of another is not automatically an insult. Nor is sharing a stage necessarily cultural appropriation.
Appreciation, participation and solidarity are not the same as taking another people’s culture, stripping it of meaning and claiming it as one’s own.
Our cultures have never developed in sealed compartments. African and Indian people lived within the same colonial society and built lives in the same villages and towns. Their histories were different, but neither community developed behind a wall.
Calypso, soca, chutney, tassa and steelpan have crossed musical boundaries. Chutney soca exists because musicians refused to keep culture racially pure.
Our food, language, and festivals tell the same story: distinct traditions constantly meeting and influencing one another. At the beginning of some national functions, a Christian priest, Hindu pundit and Muslim imam may be invited to offer prayers, without diminishing one another. We understand that each faith retains its identity while contributing to a shared national moment. Why should it be any different in other celebrations?
The challenge is not to make every ingredient taste the same. Unity does not mean giving up our culture or forgetting where we came from.
We can be proud of our African, Indian, Indigenous, Chinese, European, Syrian or Lebanese ancestry. But pride in our ancestry must never be used to separate us or make others feel that they do not belong.
Many of us seem to forget that whatever our roots, our nationality is Trinbagonian. T&T is not simply a place where different groups happen to live alongside one another. It is our country and our shared home. No group owns it more than another; it belongs to all of us.
Dr Eric Williams warned that there could be no Mother India or Mother Africa for us. “The only Mother we recognise is Mother Trinidad and Tobago, and a Mother cannot discriminate between her children.”
Those words do not ask us to forget where our ancestors came from. No, they are a reminder that ancestry cannot be allowed to override citizenship or divide the country into competing racial possessions. When will we understand this?
The racial fighting we are seeing from all sides is unnecessary, dangerous and quite frankly, disgusting. Our history and culture should give us pride and belonging, not have us attacking each other. Perhaps this is the time to live our national watchwords: Discipline, Production and Tolerance. We need the discipline to resist the politics of division, a commitment to work together to develop T&T and the tolerance to respect our differences without feeling threatened by them.
So, maybe T&T does not have to choose between callaloo and tossed salad. Maybe we can preserve the distinctive flavours of our histories while recognising that we share the same future.
What we must reject is the idea that unity threatens cultural identity or that recognising one culture somehow diminishes another. Setting African and Indian culture against each other is a dangerous road and, if we travel too far along it, there may be no easy way back.
Our Coat of Arms gives us the direction we need, “Together we aspire, together we achieve.”
