GU ~ Indo-Grenadian Culture pg5-Viechweg

Abolition, Indentureship and Creoleness: Reflections on the Indo-Grenadian Predicament

GRENADA UNCOVERED

Cont'd from pg 4

Towards a solution: Creoleness

An uncommon view of Grenada’s geo-cultural beauty

As a solution, Creolite (creoleness) seems to suggest a role for active agency and, distinct from spontaneous creolization, it is best defined in contrast to negritude, an earlier literary movement spearheaded by Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas in the 1930s. Negritude emphasized cultural, racial and historical ties to Africa. Negritude also helped in establishing racial pride, and in recouping the damaged postslavery psyche of blacks. But Negritude would not have addressed the plight of the Indo-Grenadian, who was also wounded by colonial hegemony. I think negritude sufficed as a blanket ‘Caribbean’ race phenomenon, only in so far that the Indians and others were assigned an ‘absent’ status. By describing Grenada only as a black country, to the exclusion of Indians and Grenadian whites, we are not doing justice to the complexity of our nation. Asserting blackness as the common descriptor of Grenadian people implies an antithesis of whiteness, which dualizes the arena of cultural contention, making the Indian an ‘absent’ entity. Beverely Ormerod, studying West Indian blacks who went back to Africa under the negritude influence, thinks:

Africans tended to consider West Indians as foreigners, judging them on their national origin, religion and customs, rather than their skin colour.” Ormerod. 2

Moreover, the defining characteristic, “blackness,” would never have accounted for the Indians, who did not see themselves in terms of color, but in terms of nationality, religion and caste. Martinican Edouard Glissant advanced the concept of Caribbeanness (Antillanite) as an alternative. In this view, the role of coolies (a pejorative for indentured servants), Aboriginal Caribs, and African ex-slaves were to be considered in syncretization. There is a language focus in Glissant’s Martinique, to remove the hegemonic French, and to replace it with Creole as the language of culture and literature. He seeks to valorize the role of Antillean Creole in literary, cultural and academic applications. But later adherents of Glissant like Chamoiseau, Confiant, and Bernabe described the concept of “creoleness” (creolite) as:

...the heterogeneous nature of West Indian Society, whose differences of ethnic origin

had been extended by the many mixtures between racial groups. 3

And, as she cites from an even earlier proponent, ReneMenil, a creolism in which he views French Caribbean culture as:

…neither African nor Chinese, nor Indian, nor even French, but ultimately West Indian. Ormerod 3

Altogether, creolite stresses the unique history and culture of the Caribbean as being rooted in the Caribbean, itself. Creolistes envisage a Caribbean motherland. Two other features of creoleness (Creolite) identified by Ormerod, that I see as bearing heavily on the make-up of Grenadian society are first, that “creole fiction should express the true experience and the collective voice…” and second, that “a revaluation of the metis, the person of mixed race,” be undertaken. The above two issues deal respectively with, a) the valorization of local fiction in expressing the true national voice and, b) a redefinition of the mixed race citizen, especially since the ethnic make-up of the metis is emblematic of the mixture implicit in the mixed experience of the Caribbean. The progressively constituted concept of creolite will ultimately produce, being more a process than a product, its own description of the creolized nation that bears mixed-race citizens. In Grenadian terms, douglah (half Indian/half African) are the most abundant of the metis populations. In fact it is possible that the Metis has outnumbered Indians. Does the metis enjoy dual cultural status? How do we guard against his ascendance to privilege, or to ridicule? These and other questions are ones with which the agents of creolite will have to grapple. I do believe that under Creolite, unlike Western hegemonies, there will not be an inferior status accorded the metis. Even in Jamaica the douglah is referred to, as a royal. Wilson Harris, speaking from his family experience, looks positively at the métis, in terms of a saving nemesis:

Saving nemesis may also be a peculiar expression, but it implies recuperative powers and vision within a scale of violence that is dismembering societies around the world. (Harris in Balutansky, 26)

Creoleness, to Harris who is a mixed-race Guyanese, was a positive experience because his cross-cultural experience was cherished, compared to other parts of the world where race mixing would have meant his ridicule or, him possibly being caught between warring cultures. The Caribbean’s general tendency of not perceiving Creole in terms of negativity is the legitimizing basis for a creolite that embraces us all. Somewhere on the ignoble, yet fortuitous, plantation meeting place of our cultures, we valued each other’s uniqueness and the way that that value was shown was in our embrace of the byproduct, the métis. To the majority culture, the métis symbolized the best of both worlds, not bastardization. Ultimately, and more importantly, the symbol of the Métis is applied to our mixed-up culture, which is now being recast as the best of all involved worlds.

I believe the European influenced, color stratification of Grenada did the Indian some injustice, in terms of classifying the mulatto métis as higher than the douglah métis. The lesson coming from the plantation was that the douglah was black while the mulatto was a white “other.” Continuing in the vein of symbolism, it means then that the low rating of the douglah corresponded to the inferior way in which Indian culture was regarded. With all these factors acting against them, it is not hard, then, to imagine why Indians eventually suffered cultural absorption into the larger African population. Regarding this matter, Wilson asks these questions: Does black hint at an involuntary association for many cultures? Does black reach beyond mere pigmentation along racial and tribal lines into densities and transparencies of tone, a layered wealth of tone—musical, rhythmic, poetic—in which diverse cultures may share?

Harris does not provide answers, but it occurs to me that black does hint at an involuntary association for many cultures especially when, in the Caribbean, we have emerged from a society strictly polarized into minority white dominion and majority black subservience. In such a polarizing society, minority Indian laborers were involuntarily identified with the majority culture of black laborers. I would answer the second question in the negative, because black did not hint at a description that allowed for a flourishing of subcultures within it. By the coming of indentures, Afro-Grenadians no longer had a sense of tribal difference, having already been homogenized into a distinct black culture. Indian indentures lost their cultural distinctiveness once they were related to the majority black culture mostly in terms of labor. In terms of culture, colonial prohibitions resulted in a gross under representation of Indian culture, leaving the Indian as outsider of Afro-Grenada’s unchecked trajectory towards cultural hegemony.

I do not believe at this juncture the African communities of the Caribbean, including Grenada, should support this form of black homogeneity, especially when we have become so keenly aware of the validity and independence of other cultures and colors. In contrast to the paradigm of global blackness, the view of creolite will mirror the saving nemesis that our ‘metissaged’ culture represents.

As a saving nemesis for the nation, the experience of creolite will have to be viewed in its heterogeneous intent. When Mahabir speaks of “a theoretical framework of cultural pluralism or a heterogeneous and differentiated social and cultural system…” we get an understanding of the course of heterogeneity that must be pursued. Heterogeneity is the key to the newer approach towards accomplishing a fuller cultural expression, and a more all-embracing definition of Grenadian nationhood. So, today, instead of merely recounting the story of our coming to Grenada, it is worthwhile to consider new strategies for advancing Indian-African relations into a reformulated Grenadian nationality. I know Grenada is part of an overall Caribbean experience, but because there seems to be so many layers of syncretized experiences circumscribed in this overall Caribbean experience, it seems necessary to first define ourselves locally, before we can effectively attempt to define a ‘Caribbean’ regional identity. Regarding this first step of local definition, I believe the experiences of the Indian and African in Grenada are best represented in the current context of identity studies, particularly as is being pursued through the evolving concept of creolite and other forms of post-colonial criticism. Before I continue with the mitigating possibilities of creolite and creolist heterogeneity for re-defining our culture, I first want to visit a little bit of history, as it pertains to the entire span of Grenadian creolization.

The mistaken ‘Indians,’ the indigenous Caribs, in a most brutal way, shared the Afro-Grenadians’ plight under colonialism. Caribs had a worldview and a culture of independence, which influenced their choices, prior to the coming of anyone else to

Grenada

. Undoubtedly, someday their contribution will have to be recognized beyond mere historical reference. I believe attention to the Indian question will cause deeper consideration for the Carib, whose contribution, too, cannot be dismissed. Reportedly, this is how a Carib complained to a Frenchman, regarding the first wave of creolization, as the French started to settle on Grenada in the middle of the seventeenth century:

Our people are becoming in a manner like yours, since they came to be acquainted with you; and we find it some difficulty to know ourselves, so different are we grown from what we were here-to-fore. (Kalinago man to M. du Montel 1665 (Davies 1666:250), in Honychurch)

From the Carib’s statement, we have a clue that the Carib openly lamented the demise of his culture, and must have carefully considered his options, before settling for open resistance and even martyrdom. Have the Caribs influenced or complicated the extent and quality of Grenadian creolization? Have Grenada’s successful uprisings in 1951 and 1979 been expressions of an insurgent Carib conscience still resident in Grenada’s culture? Take for example these haunting words, documented from an interview between Father Beaumont and a Grenadian Carib (Kalinago man) in 1660, in response to the state of his people as they faced extermination by the French:

What is to happen to the poor Carib? Is he to go and live in the sea with the fish?

(Kalinago man to Fr. Beaumont 1660, in Honychurch)

Lennox Honychurch, who did a wonderful study of Grenada’s Carib cosmology, thinks that these words “could also have been spoken by an enslaved African or an East Indian ndentured servant in the centuries which followed, for it expresses the psychosis of colonization and the process of creolization.”

There were yet other aspects of Grenadian creolization that cannot be overlooked. There was the fact that Grenadians were:

…descendants of the invaders and the invaded, the enslavers and the enslaved, whose

process of conflictual interaction laid the matrix of an emergent vernacular and existential

culture… (Wynter, 1)

Sylvia Wynter, here, is also looking at the myriad of power positions that I believe have complicated the creolization of language and culture. Then there is this observation by John Ford:

The African-European encounter has passed through a complex web of economic,

military, cultural and intimate domestic exchanges. 3

Ford, like Wynter, does not overlook the political, military and economic power relations that have added even more layers of complexity to the long history of Grenadian creolization. I believe that with the celebration of the end of the slave trade, we also need to give analytical consideration to the long history of confrontation and resistance underlying Caribbean culture. We have to focus on the approaches that will allow us to broaden and complicate the range of possible voices available in our culture, Carib, Indian, African, European and others.

But as the largest ethnic minority in Grenada, Indians require a special focus. There is a need for Indo-Grenadian cultural assertion, but there is also a need for the Afro-Grenadian to not be complacent about his ‘dominant’ cultural position over other Grenadian minorities, especially since his culture is still circumscribed in, and subordinated to, the values of English hegemony. While I agree with Ford about the fact that cultural negotiation does not occur in a democratic fashion, I believe, we can now be more pro-active, and less affected by the vicissitudes of history, as in the way that Indian culture was ‘mis-integrated’ into Grenada’s representation of nationality. I believe we can improve the negotiation process, if Afro-Grenadians are better informed of the basis and value of Indian cultural recognition. Bhabha, in praise of Frantz Fanon’s investigations of identity, thinks that Fanon’s insight:

…offers the master and slave a deeper reflection of their interpositions, as well as the

hope of a difficult, even dangerous, freedom: 63