Seeing different

March 19, 2001

Seems like everybody wants to fight. Seems like everybody gearing up to fight. Listen to the words of key people in authority. Their words are nothing short of efforts to mobilise en masse.

But for what must one fight? Are we to fight merely to keep people other than ourselves in the corridors of power merely because they look like us in terms of physical features? Or shall we seek once and for all to empower ourselves in structures that we ourselves control so that there shall be no one, no clique, no caste, no group, no class ever again above us in authority?

We need to delve deeper to comprehend our situation. We need to look more keenly at the history of our landscape, at our people, at our sense of self and at our deep-seated fears and dreams.

We are a civilisation born of a proletarian consciousness, we all came here as marginalised labour, and we possessed nothing but our labour power, which we cherished and exchanged for subsistence, and our only purpose ever since was and still is freedom and empowerment and the process of creating whole selves, creating a new humanity. That is the historic mission of the Caribbean.

Earl Lovelace, our much celebrated writer, has stated and restated the case most eloquently through his key characters in the piece of supposed fiction called Salt. "This land cannot countenance bondage," Bongo affirms in Salt.

Man cannot be alienated from the land around him and be marginalised in his own environment and yet be said to be free. There has to be despite all formal education a relationship to "the dignity of ownership". It is that dignity of ownership and sense of belonging that brings the wholesomeness that we all seek and crave.

Bongo in Salt understands instinctively but he cannot bring himself to beg for anything, to beg for land, he shall not even organise to seize land either by violence or fraud, ie squat. Some land must be given to him for what he has contributed from ever since. To him it is the only honourable thing that can suffice given the situation.

And Florence, the young beauty in Salt, answers Bongo's predicament by recognising that this "was a place that granted you only what you were willing to claim..."

While May, another character in Salt, would say of Nixon that he was "always a man bigger than he really could afford to be...", that same Nixon being the man who would accept no charity, no hand-out and who would tell the white overseer: "Let me work for the work!"

These are the men whose bigness was forged by the landscape and the relationships therein that moulded them. Subsistence could not nourish them, only the dignity of the work to which they belonged could. Lovelace says that men like these "have no cure" and would never accept any form of bondage of anyone in their environment.

And likewise Lochan, the Indian cricketer, also came, in the novel Salt, to discover that he "had to bat for something bigger, no matter who he batting for," and "the best way to help his own people he had to bat for batting..." Meaning that it was the art and the craft involved in the creative processes that would uplift all and sundry within the landscape. The key then to freedom is creative universality.

For what then are we to fight? Lovelace surmises in Salt that people have a vested interest in their fears, a vested interest in their victimhood, just as we all still do today, but everyone for the betterment of society must struggle consciously to surmount their victimhood and their sensibility of it .

And it matters not that we may appear stupid in the course of these endeavours and confrontations to establish the wholesomeness of "self", for as Bongo told Alford George in Salt: "From time begin, people have always done each other wrong, not because one fella is so much more wicked than the next, but because to be stupid is the principal part of what it is to be human..."