Caribbean Culture Too Diverse To Be Labelled - CARICOM Today

2/10/2021 Caribbean culture too diverse to be labelled – CARICOM Today
Home  CARICOM 
Caribbean culture too diverse to be

labelled
By Michelle Nurse Last Updated Aug 13, 2015
A performance by the Jamaica Hertford Cultural Group at CARIFESTA IX in remembrance of Jamaican folklorist, poet
and cultural icon, Dr. Louise Bennet-Coverley (inset) (CARICOM le photo)
This is one in a series of articles, photographs and videos from our archives that we will share
over the next few weeks as we continue the countdown to CARIFESTA XII in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, 21-30 August. The pieces will showcase our multi-faceted cultural heritage, the faces
and the voices of our icons, our people.
https://today.caricom.org/2015/08/12/caribbean-culture-too-diverse-to-be-labelled/ 1/13
(By Miranda La Rose. First published in the September 5, 2008, edition of Stabroek News)
The awesome complexity of Caribbean life and culture, which

ranges from language and religion to artistic manifestation in
the literary, performing and visual arts, is more than “the binary
syndrome of Europe suggests,” University of the West Indies
Professor Rex Nettleford has said.
In a presentation at a symposium recently on the subject

‘Expressions of the mind: Philosophy and the Making of the
The late Prof Rex Nettleford Caribbean Nation’, Nettleford, a Jamaican, quoted Cuban
scholar Antonio Benitez Rojos as saying that “Caribbean-ness
is a system full of noise and opacity, a nonlinear and unpredictable system. In short a chaotic
system beyond the total reach of any speci c kind of knowledge or interpretation of the world.”
However, the Caribbean’s diversity is also a matter of the mind, which cultivates the spaces that
remain invalid, that is beyond the reach of oppression and oppressor. “That very mind also
constructs for the intellect and the imagination, a bastion of discreet identities as well as
quarries of very invaluable raw material that can be used to build the bridges across cultural
boundaries,” Nettleford said. He added that in moments of irrational self-assertion, this could
implode into the sort of xenophobia and myriad related obscenities, which caused the United
Nations to mount a world conference, albeit controversial as it turned out, on the topic in
September 2001, in Durban.
“CARIFESTA in asserting our Caribbean-ness is intended to challenge such obscenities,” he

said.
Presentation of totem by Suriname at the closing ceremony of CARIFESTA IX in Trinidad and Tobago (CARICOM File
Photo)
He noted that in the Caribbean so-called great traditions stand side by side and interact with
the little traditions. In this regard a folk song, a contemporary reggae tune or calypso could be
classical, contemporary modern and ethnic all at the same time. He gave as examples Bob
Marley’s “Redemption Songs”, Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross”, Peter Tosh’s “Jah is my
Keeper”, the Mighty Sparrow’s “Jean and Dinah” or “Congo Man”, Lord Kitchener’s “Sugar Boom
Boom”, Black Stallion’s “Caribbean” and David Rudder’s “High Mas” as classics in their genres.
Creole languages
Creole languages of the Caribbean are considered languages in their own right, he said, noting
that Jamaica boasts a dictionary of Creole from Cambridge University Press and Papiamento is
used along with formal Dutch for instruction in Curacao. Creole is the language used for news
broadcast sometimes in territories where the French once settled. These languages still have
cultural in uence. He also cited the poetry of St Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott; Aime
Cesaire of Martinique; Suriname’s poet, the late Martin Dobru; and Nicholas Guillen whose
poetry sings with the voice of Cuban Spanish and not Castillian.
Paul Keens Douglas
He said the distinct Caribbean culture also comes across in the lyrics of the calypsonians, the
rhyming quatrains of folklorist and poet Louise Bennett, or, of the story-telling humour of Paul
Keans Douglas.
These languages, which he described as “the vehicles of resistance, as ritual or history and
humour,” serve their myriad purposes alongside standard English, academy French,
metropolitan Spanish and standard Dutch, which the imperial still consider legitimate means of
formal or civilized communication in a Caribbean which is arguably the longest colonized
region on planet earth ever since Cristobal Colon, “otherwise known as Columbus, discovered
that he was discovered by native Americans of the Caribbean in 1492.”
He said that as with language so too is religion in the Caribbean cultural life. Religion, he said,
“is an expression of the biblical reminder that in God’s house there are many mansions.”
Religion
He said it was possible for a Caribbean citizen to be baptized as a Roman Catholic, an

Anglican, a Methodist or a Presbyterian and still nd grace and comfort in santeria, voodoo,
pocomania, obeah, revivalism, cumina, shango, cumfa or any other native born or religious
expression, in ways that are alien to other cultures.
Surinamese youths at CARIFESTA IX
“You choose your different means to survive,” he said adding that Hinduism, Islam, Orisha
worship and new age spiritualism are all legitimate religions today in what was once an
exclusive outpost of Christendom. He noted, too that in the Caribbean it is possible for an
Indian with indentured labour antecedents to be born into a Hindu family, educated in a
Christian school, usually Presbyterian, or Roman Catholic school and later get married to a
Muslim.
“Such cultural confusion does not necessarily result in schizophrenia which frequently serves
as a source for creative living,” he said, as this Caribbean reality was within the reach of most
ordinary beings in the region and accounted for the region’s textured diversity.
He said that this phenomenon or philosophy “may well be deeply culturally determined by the
historical and existential experiences of the life of contradictions, paradoxes and dialectical
relationships and one dominated by centuries of formal rules of engagement not one of one’s
own making.”
The magical also co-existed with the scienti c and he said it was a small wonder that to many
Caribbean people “science means higher science, rooted in the notion of the supernatural and
extra-sensory as much as in empirical experience as say in the practice of traditional medicine
based on the dialogue with nature’s plants, nature’s springs and the fertile soil.”
Nettleford said he felt Carifesta was meant to re ect this reality or philosophy but it did not
mean “chronic disorder.” However, he said, cynics would be quick to nd in it reason for
periodical displace of political mismanagement and as licence for lawlessness under the guise
of freedom and human rights and the incidents of military coups, but there were regulative
principles which underlay all of the experiences.
These regulative principles happily give cause to repetition and ritual evident in Caribbean arts
and cultural expressions, he said, stating that these in turn give to the peoples of the region a
sense of place even when they operate on the margin and nd cause to question the principles.
The pre-Lenten carnival is but one dominant paradox in the “festival art” in contemporary
Caribbean life. “It is used for conventional means of release, recreation and celebration
alongside the attraction for tourists whose US dollar or Euro is vital to the Caribbean economic
survival in these globalised times,” he said.
He said that many, including himself, believe that the region’s textured diversity was also
evident in carnival – pre-Lenten in origin and arguably the most de nitive of festival arts
nurtured throughout the plantations in the Americas from Havana, Port au France through Port-
of-Spain to Rio De Janeiro, as well as, all of the eastern Caribbean and New Orleans thrown in
between.
He said he believed it was the prime socio-cultural practice that best expresses the strategies
that the people of the Caribbean have for speaking at once about themselves and with the
world, history, tradition, nature and even with God.
Carnival
This he also feels this was the basis for the philosophy of the Caribbean self and to which that
Caribbean persona, individual and collective must relate and which CARIFESTAs were meant to
mirror.
He said the Caribbean Diaspora was itself a preserve of this cultural phenomenon and so
Brooklyn, New York, Boston and Miami, Toronto, Nottinghill in London and Rotterdam have
becomes centres of the Caribbean carnival. “Yet in the diaspora, West Indians battle for space
and the preservation of a Caribbean identity among migrants who reside in hostile host
communities which are struggling to save themselves from contaminants deemed alien to their
hallowed homogenous selves.”
Back in the Caribbean, he said, other festival arts exist as part of that same process of self-
discovery and the creation of a unifying space that bridges gaps within a society produced by
centuries of differentials based on place of origin, skin colour, class, gender and the more
modern differentials of political a liation and sexual orientation.
So there is the more recent crop over festival art drawing on the historical experience of the
sugar cane slavery in Barbados, which has revived and developed a time one celebration into a
major contemporary calendar event of national observance.
He said ‘Hosay’ serves to bring into the loop of Caribbean cultural life the Indians who entered
Caribbean society, after the abolition of slavery, as indentured labourers. He noted that they
were fully equipped with a cultural memory of Mohamedism and Hinduism, and the cross-
fertilisation process continued while the paradoxes of new encounters increased, deepening
the already enriched mixture even while tensions played with social and political relations. In
Jamaica, the Afro-West Indians often do the drumming while the Indo-West Indians do the
dancing. To an extent this applies in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
He said that the Indian spirit in the Jamaican pocomania speaks to the early integration of
Asian indentured labour into ex-slaves syncretised religious rituals which are themselves
products of cross-fertilisation.
Festivals
There are of other festivals, equivalent to the pre-Lenten carnival, which are rooted in the
encounter of Africa and Europe and others on foreign soil in the Americas. This includes the
Masquerade in the Leeward Islands, Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas under the name
Junkanoo and in Bermuda as ‘gumbay’, as well as in Cuba and Haiti. They all represent the
essence of cultural life and the indiscriminate fusion of European musical classical, as well as,
instruments of the most varied origins, which produce a new music.
The textured diversity of Caribbean culture, he said, was arguably the most signi cant clue to
understanding the dynamism and energy that characterises life in this region. He noted that it
stretches geographically from the Bahamas across the Greater Antilles proceeding for over
1,000 miles southwards along an archipelago comprising the Leeward and Windward Islands
with Barbados to the east then south to Trinidad and Tobago and the Netherland Antilles lying
north west of Venezuela and Colombia “which they insist is a Caribbean coastline”. The
Guianas on the South American mainland regard themselves as Caribbean as would much of
north-east Brazil for de nitively cultural reasons.
He said the Caribbean features in the great dramas of the Americas where new societies are
shaped new sense and sensibilities are honed and appropriate designs for social living are
crafted through the cross fertilisation of distant elements. This process has resulted in a
distinguishable and distinctive entity called Caribbean through an intensely cultural process.
This was the result of an encounter of Africa and Europe on foreign soil with the native
indigenous Americans and still later, arrivals from India and China and subsequently the Middle
East. They have resulted in a culture of texture and diversity held together by a dynamic
creativity, described as “creative chaos”, “stable disequilibrium”, or “cultural pluralism.”
Diversity
He said an apt description of the typical Caribbean person was “part African, part European,
part Asian, part Native American but totally Caribbean.”
The creative diversity, he said, was what de ned Caribbean life, and what the Francophone,
Spanish-speaking, Dutch-speaking Caribbean, the British Overseas Territories, the US
Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, have in common despite the differences in languages they
use and the political systems. They perceive themselves to have in common a full grasp of the
power of cultural action affording their inhabitants a sense of place and purpose.
Martinique and Guadeloupe, Curacao and St Maarten, Cuba and Santo Domingo, along with
Haiti and Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands as well as the British colonies of the
Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands identify
culturally with the independent nations from the Bahamas and Belize to Trinidad and Tobago.
Because of its diversity, he said the Caribbean has the capacity to build bridges not only among
classes and races of people from countries across the region but also between continents of
the world which are represented in the Caribbean through centuries of voluntary and
involuntary migration which is now continued via tourism, commercial transaction, and
professional contacts. The Caribbean has struggled for over ve centuries with mastering the
management of the complexity of such diversity, he posited.
Share this:
 Print  Twitter  Facebook  LinkedIn
Like this:
Like
Be the first to like this.
Dancers preparing to
perform a classical Indian
dance at the Guyana National
Stadium during CARIFESTA X
Caribbean’s religious diversity
CARIFESTA XIV tops agenda of ‘Journey Round Myself’:
celebrated at CARIFESTA X
Regional Cultural Committee CARIFESTA XIV Symposia Call for
August 7, 2015
Meeting Papers
In "CARICOM"
June 25, 2018 January 24, 2019
In "Associate Member States" In "Associate Member States"
Share this on WhatsApp
 CARIFESTA XII
0 Comments CARICOM Today 🔒 Disqus' Privacy Policy  Login
 Recommend t Tweet f Share Sort by Best
Start the discussion…
LOG IN WITH
OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?
Name
Be the first to comment.
✉ Subscribe d Add Disqus to your siteAdd DisqusAdd ⚠ Do Not Sell My Data
© 2021 - CARICOM Today. All Rights Reserved. Caribbean Community

Caribbean Culture Too Diverse To Be Labelled - CARICOM Today

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Caribbean Culture Too Diverse To Be Labelled - CARICOM Today

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

2/10/2021 Caribbean culture too diverse to be labelled – CARICOM Today

Caribbean culture too diverse to be

(By Miranda La Rose. First published in the September 5, 2008, edition of Stabroek News)

The awesome complexity of Caribbean life and culture, which

In a presentation at a symposium recently on the subject

“CARIFESTA in asserting our Caribbean-ness is intended to challenge such obscenities,” he

Paul Keens Douglas

He said it was possible for a Caribbean citizen to be baptized as a Roman Catholic, an

Surinamese youths at CARIFESTA IX

 Print  Twitter  Facebook  LinkedIn

Share this on WhatsApp

0 Comments CARICOM Today 🔒 Disqus' Privacy Policy  Login

 Recommend t Tweet f Share Sort by Best

Start the discussion…

Be the first to comment.

✉ Subscribe d Add Disqus to your siteAdd DisqusAdd ⚠ Do Not Sell My Data

© 2021 - CARICOM Today. All Rights Reserved. Caribbean Community

You might also like