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What “Caribbean” can mean
By Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in the Guyana Arts Journal, volume 2, number 2, March 2006
What does “Caribbean” mean? What a vast weight of confusion and
possibility and debate those four little syllables have to bear. Is
“Caribbean” a geographical region defined by proximity to a body of
water, by insularity (in the literal sense), by lines of latitude? Is
it a group of nations and proto-nations defined by a common history or
culture, or by political links? Is it an aspiration, an attitude, an
illusion? Is its meaning determined by presence or absence? Has it an
antonym?
This is a knot of questions unlikely ever to be completely unravelled;
scholars and politicians and ordinary people will be picking away for
foreseeable decades. And these are questions that snag through the
pattern of my professional life, not abstractions but practical
worries, tightropes to cross and tripwires to vault. I edit a magazine
called Caribbean Beat. The
question of “Caribbeanness” is one I confront every day.
***
Some overcast afternoon, perhaps last June, I sit down at my laptop to
write a six-hundred-word introduction to a feature headlined “Cover
stories” that will appear in the September/October 2005 issue of Caribbean Beat. That edition will
be a sort of milestone: the magazine’s 75th since its launch more than
thirteen years before, and we have decided to mark this “anniversary”
with a variation on the standard cover gallery with which magazines
often show off their longevity. I have asked six other members of the
editorial staff each to choose from the 74 covers we’ve previously
published images that are particularly meaningful — “perhaps a
favourite cover, perhaps one with a revealing story attached, perhaps
one that was simply unforgettable” — and to tell the stories of those
images, suggest what they say about the magazine, what they say about
the Caribbean, the pocket of the world we are supposed to be covering.
My hope is that these images and stories can be assembled into, as I
put it then, “a sort of collective meditation on who we are, what we
do, and why we do it”.
The cover images we choose in the end include portraits of the
Martinican film director Euzhan Palcy, of the Guyana-born writer Oonya
Kempadoo, of Trinidad and Tobago’s Miss Universe 1998, Wendy
Fitzwilliam, of an unnamed Carnival masquerader in a costume from Peter
Minshall’s band Red, and a
“triptych” of portraits of the always controversial Jamaican dancehall
artists Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, and Buju Banton; shots of a classic
1950s car in Old Havana and of a young batsman standing at the crease;
and a delicate illustration of an Indian dancer by Trinidadian artist
Shalini Seereeram that may be the most popular cover we’ve ever
published. Many of them colourful and bright, many of them depicting
“beautiful and strong” faces; and, perhaps tellingly, not a single
image of a beach.
I begin my six-hundred-word introduction in the usual editor’s-note
prose:
From the
beginning, the magazine has tried to do two things: to show the
Caribbean as it really is, from the perspective of Caribbean people;
and to celebrate the best that the region is, our most brilliant
achievers and proudest moments.
In a Caribbean magazine — especially a Caribbean
inflight magazine — people expect to read about holiday destinations
and to see images of beaches, turquoise water, coconut trees. We’ve
certainly featured lots of those; they’re an undeniable part of our
lives and our landscapes. But the Caribbean is far more complicated
than that. These islands stretching between two continents are home to
a sometimes bewildering, always fascinating mix of peoples and cultures
and languages and ideas, combining and colliding to create something
new and unique. Over the years, we’ve reported on almost every aspect
of Caribbean life — music and art, sport and science, festivals and
fashion and cuisine — always trying to reflect the richness and
unexpectedness of this place and its people.
I conclude with this three-sentence manifesto:
In its own way, Caribbean Beat has always been
engaged in trying to define what the Caribbean is, what “Caribbean”
does and can mean. The definition is always changing, and so are we.
But the great goal remains the same: to understand ourselves, in our
own terms, and to share that understanding with the world.
Brave, ambitious words — especially to describe a magazine whose
ostensible purpose, after all, is to entertain airplane passengers for
the duration of their transmarine flight. Frankly, no one expects much
from an inflight magazine, except for lavishly illustrated travel
features, perhaps with the relief of the occasional celebrity
puff-piece. The fact that Caribbean
Beat tries to do something more seems to surprise some new
readers. Our editorial staff is accustomed by now to hearing that ours
is the “best” inflight magazine one reader or another has encountered
in years of frequent flying. “It’s certainly the most cerebral inflight
magazine I’ve read,” a British book editor once told me.
Naturally I am always grateful for compliments like these, but at the
same time they prompt misgivings. I would rather that readers did not
look at what we do through the “inflight” lens; I myself generally
describe Beat as an arts and
culture magazine. Distribution via BWIA seatpockets is crucial to our
business plan, yes: Beat is
supported entirely by advertising, and guaranteed distribution of
seventy thousand copies per issue is a major factor in our ad sales.
(BWIA in more way than one keeps the magazine aloft.)
And the airline logo perched above our masthead does inevitably set
some limits on our editorial freedom: we cannot cover political figures
or questions, or controversial subjects that might rouse animosity
against the airline. To some, these might seem unacceptable strictures,
and I do sometimes feel cornered by the requirement to produce a
(resolutely upbeat — no pun) magazine suitable for “family” reading,
i.e. containing nothing that minors should not read or see. Over the
years, we’ve got away with printing reproductions of artworks depicting
tasteful nudes in profiles of artists like Jamaicans Barrington Watson
and Laura Facey, but a photo-essay on dancehall, including shots of
dancers in skimpy outfits and enthusiastically provocative poses,
caused some consternation at Sunjet House, BWIA’s corporate
headquarters. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, cabin crews had a hard time
keeping this issue stocked, because so many passengers took the
magazines home.) We routinely and gently excise risqué language
from interviews, but once we got away with some mild swear-words when
we ran a piece on the Trinidadian soap opera series Westwood Park, which included a
racy sample of dialogue from one episode. And we always caution our
writers to avoid mention of politics as far as possible, though
sometimes it’s hard to predict where politics will pop up. I once got a
letter of complaint from a Guyanese politician who was annoyed that we
ran a short piece on the first Carifesta in 1972 — all of four hundred
words long, an extended caption to a photograph — and neglected to
mention Forbes Burnham.
On the other hand — just as the formal restrictions of the sonnet or
villanelle paradoxically free a poet to make fresh, unpredictable
choices — Caribbean Beat’s
alliance with BWIA, while delineating strict editorial boundaries,
frees us from the not inconsiderable anxiety of finding and keeping an
audience. Our seatpocket snuggery precludes some topics of
investigation, but simultaneously guarantees a diverse readership (in
the Caribbean, everybody flies BWIA sooner or later) and allows us to
engage in a kind of serious cultural coverage otherwise scarce in the
regional media.
And precisely because there are so few general interest and genuinely
regional periodicals in the anglophone Caribbean, Caribbean Beat is far more visible,
plays a far bigger cultural role, than an inflight magazine could be or
could play in another part of the world. We have a small cluster of
scholarly and literary journals, often with institutional affiliations;
another small cluster of lifestyle magazines disclosing secrets of
fashion, and flirting with entrée
into the living- and bedrooms of the wealthy; and two or three
newspapers wield some kind of clout beyond national shores. Connect
these three nodes, and Beat
perhaps is suspended near the centre of the resulting triangle.
You could argue that Beat is
just another example of the Caribbean’s creative improvisation, of
taking whatever materials circumstances provide, however unpromising
they might seem, and inventing something unexpected and unique. Hence
traditional Caribbean cuisine transforms the dirt-cheap rations of the
sugar plantation — the trotters and tails of various beasts, salted cod
and mackerel shipped from colder parts of the British Empire — into
rich and succulent feasts; and budding musicians in Trinidad during the
Second World War turned cast-off metal barrels into musical instruments
that, within half a generation, were capable of rendering the most
complex harmonies of Bach or Mozart. Lloyd Best has written: “Pan
turned literally to the dustbin and emerged as the essential metaphor
for transforming nothing into something, the magic of creation. It
translates into making music wherever you go, with whatever you find.
The ultimate capacity to invent”.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Derek Walcott famously summoned
up the image of a vase assembled from the fragments of many broken
vessels to describe the Caribbean’s hybrid culture; “the love that
reassembles the fragments” is our acceptance of our glorious impurity,
and “the glue that fits the pieces” is the power of our imagination,
glimpsing affinities and continuities among history’s jagged edges,
beauty (or its possibility) in the cultural flotsam washed up on these
New World shores. I am boldfaced enough to think that Caribbean Beat stands in that
tradition, looking at the Caribbean with clear but hopeful eyes,
preferring to focus on joys and triumphs, on the lovely, strange
symmetries of Walcott’s vase, not its chips and cracks.
***
Brave, ambitious; but some Monday morning I arrive at my office, sit
down at a desk heaped with papers, books, notepads, and must set in
train the series of mundane steps that will lead, ultimately, to the
publication of a new issue of the magazine. Caribbean Beat has a long lead time, which
means that it is usually six months between our first planning meeting
for a particular issue and its appearance in BWIA seatpockets and
subscribers’ postboxes in the Caribbean and elsewhere — for though our
subscription list is not enormous, the magazine does make its way to
some surprisingly remote corners of the world. And from an editor’s
day-to-day perspective, the questions that truly matter are not the
grand, impossible ones about cultural identity and history and
self-definition, but the smaller and perhaps possible ones like: how
many pages must I fill this time? Why hasn’t writer A replied to my
emails? Can we afford writer B? Will writer C turn in her copy on time?
Has anyone ever photographed X? We’ve covered Y before; can we find a
fresh angle? Z has fallen through and we go to press in less than a
week; how do we fill the space? How have three pages of marked-up
galleys gone missing?
I sometimes wonder if our readers guess how great an influence
practical matters like budgets and deadlines and print schedules have
on the content of the magazine. I am, of course, wincingly aware of
this, and when I look at the printed magazine what I inevitably see are
its flaws and failures: errors that might have been caught had there
been another day for fact-checking or proof-reading; stories that might
have been more interesting, more memorable, had the writer or editor
been able to go over them once more; or the ghosts of stories we wanted
to print but could not pull together in time, photos we wanted to run
but could not clear the rights for. I imagine this is true of any
magazine editor anywhere, though the editor of a big international
magazine with a staff of dozens and a budget of hundreds of thousands
perhaps does not feel so much at the mercy of such worries.
My consolations are, first, the thought that a magazine, by its
periodical nature, is a permanent work in progress; each new issue is a
chance to address the deficiencies of the last, to start afresh; and
however satisfying a single story may be, a magazine’s true strengths
are cumulative (but so are its true weaknesses). And, second, the
knowledge that, at its best, Caribbean
Beat has real documentary value, telling the stories of
creative, ambitious men and women who in many ways and through many
media — art, music, literature, drama, sport, science — are shaping the
evolving concept of “Caribbeanness”.
***
It is a Wednesday afternoon in January, and, as I often do when I want
to know what the world thinks of us — and by “us” I mean the Caribbean
— I consult the great 21st-century oracle, Google. A nifty trick known
to arch-googlers like myself is the wildcard search: you supply the
beginning of a phrase and use an asterisk to tell the search engine to
fill in the blank — for example, the
Caribbean is *
From the tirelessly humming giga-servers in Mountain View, California,
comes a string of replies:
The Caribbean is
• best known for its magnificent sun drenched beaches surrounded by
turquoise waters
• a magestic [sic] and tropical land with a rich history and a bright
future
• hardly known for its food but you can expect to eat well in St Barts
and Anguilla
• richly layered, highly complex and a wonderful example of people’s
resistance
• famous for its legacy of Pirates
• accustomed to its turbulent weather drawing headlines
• dominated by the history of sugar
• popularly known as the place where the online gambling concept got
started
***
Is there such a thing as a Caribbean identity or spirit or culture,
shared by all the territories clustered around the Caribbean Sea,
regardless of language or political status? Yes, is the answer that
many of the region’s artists and thinkers and visionaries have given
and continue to give. But pinning down that identity, naming its
essence or essences, and using that knowledge to guide the Caribbean’s
young societies through the minefield of the modern world, these are
problems we are yet to solve (and one particularly intractable problem
is the very question of “we”, the practical ways in which Caribbean
citizens do or do not, may or may not, act as members of a community or
a culture that extends beyond the shores of individual islands).
And they are problems complicated by the fact that for great periods in
our respective or collective histories, the “Caribbean” (or “West
Indies” or “Antilles”) has been defined by outsiders looking in. Even
today — see the above evidence for what Google, the global mind, thinks
of us — the Caribbean as most of the world understands it is a tropical
paradise where long ago there were pirates and more recently Bob Marley
was born. Or else by insiders — Caribbean men and women — who were
trained and educated “outside”, at metropolitan universities, their
systems of investigation and comprehension derived from the historical
experiences of older, colder countries. Only in the last thirty or
forty years have thinkers begun to recognise the imperative for the
Caribbean to understand itself in its own terms, to look at itself
through eyes unblinkered by imported theories, define itself in a
language of its own invention. Lloyd Best’s seminal essay “Independent
Thought and Caribbean Freedom”, first published in 1967, may be the
definitive statement of the case:
[S]ocial change
in the Caribbean has to and can only begin in the minds of Caribbean
men. If we are to act for change, our philosophers and our theorists
have first to understand how we relate to ourselves and to the wider
world in which we live.
Forty years later, we are still depressingly far from achieving this
apparently simple, actually titanic ideal. But we are surely drawing
closer, and the basic work of knowing ourselves better can, I tell
myself, in very modest ways be advanced by a magazine like Caribbean Beat, despite all the
limits on what we can publish and how. Inevitably, we’ve thoughtlessly
perpetuated some stereotypes, committed some errors, overlooked much
that is vital, but I am genuinely proud of the occasional achievement
of telling our readers — both Caribbean and non- — something unexpected
yet true about the territories we cover.
And perhaps the range of those territories is worth remarking. Beat has always aimed to be a
pan-Caribbean magazine (a constant struggle for a small editorial staff
all based in Port of Spain, without the time to travel as much as we
ought), taking “Caribbean” in the widest possible geographic sense, to
include not just the islands strung between North and South America and
the historically “Caribbean” territories of Belize, Guyana, Suriname,
and French Guiana, but also those northern cities with major
concentrations of Caribbean immigrants. Some neighbourhoods of New
York, London, Toronto, Miami, are distinctly Caribbean places, and
since the term “Caribbean” is already so imprecise, why not circle
those (and other) cities on the map too? (And remember that half of
London is built on West Indian sugar capital, and New York started out
as a trading port valuable for its sea links to Bridgetown and Port
Royal.)
“Diaspora” is a word long fashionable among Caribbean scholars (as
“transnational” is now becoming), and of course in this context it
refers not just to citizens of the Caribbean — descended from Africa,
Asia, Europe, the Middle East, but cut off by history and geography
from those ancestral lands — but also to the Caribbean diaspora in the
rest of the world: Caribbean people and their descendants who for one
reason or another have left the islands of their birth, taking elements
of Caribbean culture into the wider world, creating new connections and
fusions. Louise Bennett invented the phrase “colonisation in reverse”
to describe the migration of the Windrush generation to Britain, and
perhaps we should also think of this phenomenon as a new form of
creolisation, as elements of an already hybrid Caribbean culture go
forth to negotiate with other (already hybrid) cultures to create new
and unpredictable hybrids.
Caribbean Beat’s coverage of
this Caribbean diaspora has always been, I think, one of our strengths
— no surprise, since BWIA aircraft are primary vehicles for
communicating with that diaspora, and what Caribbean person doesn’t
have a relative or friend who has left for the “cold”? So we run
stories about Carnival in Notting Hill and on Brooklyn’s Eastern
Parkway, about a reggae festival in California and a small publishing
house in Leeds that specialises in Caribbean books and a big art show
in London that includes works from the Caribbean, and we interview and
profile people like the writers Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, and
Andrea Levy, the golfer Stephen Ames, the classical conductor Kwame
Ryan, the entrepreneur Michael Lee-Chin, the artist Janine Antoni, the
actress and theatre director Yvonne Brewster, the scholar Stuart Hall,
who may no longer live (or never have lived) in the Caribbean or have
Caribbean passports, but who we still consider “ours” — and who are
actively changing the meaning — the breadth — of the word “Caribbean”.
A word that is both noun and adjective — and, at least for the
Trinidadian filmmaker Robert “Yao” Ramesar, almost a verb:
“Caribbeing”. Is it surprising then that “Caribbean” is so elusive of
definition? Constantly in motion, like a cloud, so that two people can
stare at it simultaneously and see two different shapes; and, like a
cloud, apparently solid from far off, disappearing into vapour up
close, impossible to grasp, yet we can feel how it changes the weather
as it passes. Can such a word, a sensible reader may ask, mean anything
at all? Yes, we say — artists
and thinkers and visionaries (and magazine editors) and ordinary
people. The word does mean
something, because we are its meaning. Sumus ergo sumus. We know
“Caribbean” means something, because we know we are “Caribbean”. And,
word by word, sentence by sentence, gesture by gesture, chord by chord,
Beat by Beat, we are trying to figure it
out. We are trying to understand ourselves.
***
I began with questions, and end with a personal account.
The older I get, the better I understand myself, the more I see of the
territories strung through and around this body of water, the more I
realise that (and how) I am a Caribbean person; and the complicated and
very real divisions of ethnicity, language, class, island, and nation
(whatever “nation” means!) that run through these territories do not
and cannot fundamentally threaten that notion of “Caribbeanness” that I
share with thousands — millions? — of people who I have no trouble
conceiving of as compatriots.
It may be true that the average individual living in this messy little
pocket of the world, eyes firmly on the basic goals of survival and
happiness, thinks of himself or herself foremost as Jamaican,
Kittitian, Vincentian, and so on. But enough of us accept and believe
in a bigger, genuinely, and distinctively Caribbean identity for the
word — the definition — the aspiration — to carry the weight of
validity and the charge of possibility.
And the path by which I have come to think, feel, and believe all this
has run directly through the magazine I edit. In the four years I have
spent working on Caribbean Beat,
my understanding of the place I am from, my roots and role and
responsibilities here, have changed in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes
radical. I was born thirteen years after Trinidad and Tobago’s
Independence, and a year before we became a republic, cutting our
formal ties with the British monarchy. I grew up thinking of myself
sometimes as Trinidadian, sometimes as a citizen of the world; but
Caribbean mostly (and merely) in the geographic sense. As Beat’s editor, I have had to learn
a great deal about places, phenomena, and people across the rest of the
region, widened my circle of contacts to include almost every Caribbean
territory. I have noticed sometimes surprising differences, but more
often even more surprising similarities between islands, cities, ways
of life separated by hundreds of miles of sea.
The breakthrough moment, perhaps, occurred on a trip to St. Lucia in
February 2004. Walking in Castries — a city I had never visited and
where I was about to get lost — I was struck by this thought: this
place is mine too. From that moment I have thought of myself as —
paraphrasing Ian McDonald — Trinidadian by birth, and Caribbean by
conviction, even if I am still trying to understand quite what that
means.