Lamming Toasts W.I Oneness of Spirit

01, Feb 2000
Gone are the heady days when they sought to empower the people of the region in a process to directly contest the established status quo in order to affect change in Caribbean reality.

Today, our Caribbean intellectual giants have come together in spirit to produce two historic documents "On The Canvas of The World" and "Enterprise of the Indies" as testimony of that journey of self-engagement.

The two documents, published by the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies and edited by noted Caribbean novelist, George Lamming, were launched at the Tapia House, Tunapuna, on January 20.

It was a Thursday night, like any other Thursday night, according to Winston Riley who chaired the proceedings, when people of like minds usually got together at the very same venue to, as he said, "plumb our own depths" and engage in discourse of their own discoveries. The launch of the documents Riley saw as a continuance of that engagement and exercise.

Lloyd Best, as emotional as never before, felt that the process had now entered a new stage, a stage in which Caribbean people are forced to assume responsibility for their own past, even including the mistakes that they themselves did not make, a stage at which they can no longer make excuses as they exchange "the terrors of slavery and indenture for the horrors of freedom".

Best dismissed, as he has always dismissed, what he described as "portmanteau philosophy" in which one professes to possess all the answers. Instead, he opted for the kind of "parley" that began in 1958 with the launch of the Federation and has not stopped to date.

This process, he felt, allows for the revealing, mostly by accident, of what he called "secrets of home" that will force people to discover themselves and on that basis work out a new relationship different to the relationship of hegemony that is so typical in the region.

Lamming flew in for the launch and came directly from the airport. In his contribution he read his Editor's Note to the "Enterprise of the Indies" stressing his quotation therein from Pere Jean Baptiste Labat, a priest of the Dominican Order who toured the Caribbean in the 18th century.

Labat wrote that Caribbean peoples are "all together, in the same boat, sailing in the same uncertain sea, citizenship and race unimportant", and that "it is no accident that the sea which separates your lands makes no difference to the rhythm of your body..."

As usual, he described development, in his editorial, as a process that can only be of one's own making, placing thereby the onus in the hands of the Caribbean people themselves.

But he was very optimistic and gladdened by the fact that, in the course of putting the documents together, he had to deal with many different people of diverse expertise and involvements, of different languages and racial origins, yet each and everyone felt and knew exactly what was required. That he said was testimony indeed that the "spirit of continuity of Caribbean civilisation is very much alive."

Messages from Rex Nettleford (Jamaica) and Mia Mottley of the Barbados Government were read by renowned dramatist Errol Jones.

In the case of the latter, an offer was made to sponsor another launch of the documents in Barbados at the convenience of the organisers.

Tributes were paid to a number of stalwarts of the Tapia House Group for their past and ongoing contribution to the work.

Marion O'Callaghan and Marcia Riley, who helped with Unesco sponsorship, in their contributions both expressed desire to see the documents used in the teachers' training colleges and in all the schools in the Caribbean.