Blakness : purity or hybridity in Trinidad-and-Tobago ?

Eric Williams famously pointed out that the choice before his people was between Mother Africa and Mother India on the one hand and Mother Trinidad and Tobago on the other. The problem was that to many East Indians and blacks Trinidad and Tobago was not a kindly mother. The West Indian colonies were created as places where profit was wrung out of forced labor. It is not surprising that those who were so wrung found no reason to give the land of their birth any affection.

  Nor is it surprising that the ancestral homeland should acquire all the qualities of motherhood, albeit at a distance. Mother India and Mother Africa were certainly more sympathetic than Mother West Indies, which was, more often than not, tormentor rather than nurturer. Constructing a West Indian identity, a Jamaican, a Trinidadian, a Guyanese, or a Barbadian, not to ignore any of the other territories, confronted the problem of how to make the native land attractive to the natives.

  Black nationalism does not face this problem, nor, presumably do other ideologies, such as Islamism or Hindutva, that focus on a single, overarching identity that transcends locality and economic condition. The black nationalist has a vision of Africa that, while having little or nothing to do with contemporary Africa, provides a sense of rootedness and identity." Africa in this view functions as a root source of blackness; that is to say, it provides a sense of identity and national belonging for black people. Black people are defined as all persons who can claim African descent. This, of course, has a dual effect. It strips brown people of their identity, and it locates hybridity within blackness. It does this, however, by subordinating other identities to the African; this inverts the prac rice of some brown West Indians, such as Stuart Hall's mother, of subordinating African identity to European." This is to say that, whereas the doctrine of white supremacy marginalized the African, the doctrine of black nationalism marginalizes the non-African making the West Indies an extension of Africa. This obviously runs into the problem of non-African people, but these can either be dismissed as minorities or incorpo rated into blackness willy-nilly.

  The latter move requires that blackness be seen in a peculiar way, both as purity and hybridity, both as being rooted in Africa and incorporating the non-African into its warm, motherly embrace. To some degree this is simply the North American conception of blackness, produced by a different history from the West Indian, being pushed in a blackface form of American cultural imperialism. Afrocentrism certainly overcomes the problem of racial identity. It does not, however, deal effectively with the fact that West Indian historical experience diverged from the African nor with the fact that African continuities form a part of the West Indian whole, not all of it, nor are they solely constitutive of it.

  The idea of an identity rooted in Africa possesses a certain fundamental attractiveness. So does the idea of Africa as a true home. Creolization becomes, in this view, a process in which different African experiences were blended into a whole as a means of resistance to European colonial rule and slavery. This is a view point as partial as the white supremacist belief that Africans (and, to a degree, East Indians) were a tabula rasa to be inscribed with the superior political and moral beliefs of Europe. Partial, that is to say, both in the original sense of partisan and in the sense of incomplete. It cannot be denied that a majority of West Indians are wholly or partially of recent African origin. It equally cannot be denied that they have for centuries been shaped by the experiences of enslavement to and colonial rule by Europeans. Identification of and with African roots is undoubtedly important for the self confidence that Nettleford saw as missing in the early era of independence. But it is not only the possession of black nationalists or of Afrocentrists. The emergence of Creole nationalism also involved recognition of these roots. For example, it was a brown middle class Jamaican, Vera Bell, who linked the uprising of 1938 to slavery in her poem "Ancestor on the Auction Block" and consid ered her connection to that enslaved ancestor to be a command to engage in what we would today call nation-building."

  Eric Williams, the quintessential Creole nationalist, was the first West Indian leader to pay an official visit to Africa, to the occa sional bemusement of the African leaders who hosted him." It was Norman Manley who sent Rastafarians on a to Africa to explore the possibility of black Jamaicans returning to the land from which their forebears had been seized.

  It is not surprising either that black nationalists should seek to build pride by emphasizing Africa, or that Creole national ists should seek to build connections to Africa. What is interest ing is how African roots are interpreted in different ways. The black nationalist and Afrocentrist approach makes the Caribbean an extension of Africa and decrees the blackness of the major ity of the people, with non-black ancestry subsumed into black ness. The Creole nationalist approach makes the Caribbean a new place, neither African nor European nor Asian but drawing on all three to form its identity; drawing on its roots but clearly distinct from them.'