GENDER, GENERATION AND MEMORY:

Remembering a Future Caribbean
by Alissa Trotz

My paternal grandmother died in 2003 at the age of 95. Some years earlier, she had begun to lose her short-term memory, although this did not diminish her ability to recall events in (what was for me) the distant past, complete with time of day, what she was wearing and doing, in absolutely astonishing and minute detail. There is a medical diagnosis for this condition, but in the context of what I want to offer tonight, I sometimes wonder whether my grandmother’s selective forgetting metaphorically indexed the fact that, in the dusk of her life, there was little that was memorable in the contemporary Caribbean.
This is a provocatively harsh opening, one that a glance at any Human Development Report – which notes that the Caribbean experience is one of political stability and relatively high social indicators - will challenge, but for Caribbean women and men like myself who came of age or were born in the decade of the 1980s and after, I say this deliberately in order to register that there is little of the anticipation and excitement that animated the pre-independence era. There is little sense of how popular discontent with the emerging political order’s refusal to effect a radical break from the colonial past was channeled collectively, and of the energy that infused a number of social and political experiments in the decade of the 1970s, culminating in the Grenadian revolution in 1979. A vibrant women’s movement came into its own during these years, drawing on the creative energies of those who had been nurtured by the promise of citizenship, only to find that the place of women in an independent Caribbean was anything but equal (feminist M. Jacqui Alexander refers to this as the betrayal of the promise which found expression in her Trinidad in the lines ‘Every creed and race finds an equal place’).
These times, which in different ways appeared to offer rich and radical hope of transformation for all across the region, seem lost now from the vantage point of a present caught up in the singular logic of neoliberal globalization (what several observers refer to as a new moment of global empire), in which democracy is linked to the free market, where commodification and consumerism extend into more and more aspects of our lives, where purchasing power is increasingly the criteria for citizenship, where a US led war of terror is carried out in the name of protecting these so-called freedoms, a war that has touched down in the Caribbean in holding pens in Guantanamo Bay. …

Outside of the formal political process, the regenerative potential of civil society has been dulled by what I would call NGO-speak, which has transformed it into a sanitized, depoliticized space dominated by the language of ‘stakeholders’ looking for ‘good governance’. Even the transgressive promise of the women’s movement has been blunted by the discovery, mainstreaming and neutralization of gender by the very same institutions that prop up economic and social policies that require the continued sacrifice of women’s labour…

These are the challenges that face activists today as we engage a new generation. I want to begin to think about this by suggesting that the status quo in the region is enabled by a deadening and deadly social amnesia which short-circuits the possibility of thinking otherwise. This is not to say there is no history in the present, but to question what we have come to accept as a legitimate narrative of how we arrived at this point, where the only change that we are told matters is the five year cycle when the votes are mobilised, the speeches and promises are made, a ‘new’ government is elected, the flag is raised, and business continues, more or less as usual. What we have in stock offers us this present we currently inhabit as our eternal future, and calls it independence…

My presentation will explore, through a discussion of xenophobia occasioned by migration…how a collective social amnesia has worked to effect the marginalization of Caribbean peoples. I hope to suggest ways in which we might rework narratives of exclusion, through a preliminary discussion of counter-memories embedded in practices that do not follow the logic of borders, internally or externally imposed.


Let me begin with recent Guyanese media coverage of trade and business links with Barbados. Reports of an official Barbadian delegation’s successful visit to the trade and investment exhibition GUYEXPO were followed by the Government of Guyana’s invitation to Barbadians to lease land at a reduced rate, an overture that prompted a letter to the Guyanese newspapers which noted, “I also have not seen reciprocity; of course we have a big heart and a bench at Grantley Adams international.” (Stabroek Daily News, October 24th, 2007). The reference nudged an uncomfortable memory out of its hiding place. On July 19, 2005, I was at the Cheddi Jagan International airport in Guyana with my two daughters, waiting to return to Toronto via Trinidad and Tobago. There was also a flight leaving for Barbados, and I recognized a few passengers. A few days later I learned that most of those individuals had never made it past what is dubbed “the Guyanese bench” at Grantley Adams airport. I believe over two score were deported in one day. Thinking about this event in preparation for today’s lecture, I realized I had no idea how the mass deportation was dealt with in the Barbadian public sphere. Curious, I decided to search the online national newspaper archives. Two hours later I had filled sixty pages with columns, letters and editorials, dating back over two years (the internet blogs are another matter altogether). While the importance of a constructive and open dialogue can never be underestimated, I was stunned by the vitriol against Guyanese in much of what I was reading. Words like flood and swamp suggested that Barbados was vulnerable and open to invading hordes (the gendered dimension is clear here) who threatened the country’s social equilibrium, notwithstanding statements by the Barbadian government that the numbers of Guyanese in the country could not support such a conclusion. In letters to the press, images emerged of squatting and overcrowding (the dirty, anti-social Guyanese), of illegal access to scarce social services and free medical care (the duplicitous and greedy Guyanese), of threats to law and order (the criminal Guyanese), of a political imbalance, with at least one opposition politician speculating that the voters’ list could be artificially inflated (the cheating Guyanese), of immigrants accepting lower wages and undercutting Barbadian labour (the Guyanese scab). Indian-Guyanese were singled out and racialised as particularly incapable of integrating, and of threatening to import Guyana’s ‘ethnic’ problem into the island.
Anxieties around borders also turned crucially on questions of sexuality. In some of the online blogs, women were singled out as preying on unsuspecting Barbadian men in order to get themselves legalised (the immoral and sexually loose Guyanese). The Barbadian prostitute was even momentarily ‘rehabilitated’ in order to make the argument that she was put out of business near the garrison by Guyanese women willing to do more for less. Given what we know throughout the region about the general association in the public imagination between prostitution and moral decay - even as sex workers are integral to the tourist industry and therefore to regional economies (see Kempadoo, 1999) - this calling up of the local prostitute to defend the Barbadian nation perfectly illustrates the point that women are the grounds on which claims to community are made which ultimately displace them, which is to say at the end of the day it is not really about women and the inequalities they experience at all. That sexuality is one of the fulcra on which this controversial conversation has pivoted should not surprise us, since concerns about immigration are always simultaneously concerns around reproduction, and one can point to numerous other examples in the region and beyond of this kind of policing of the allegedly pure national body from contamination or penetration by the other. So many Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents are ineligible for public services (including education) because they are not entitled to identity papers. In this case we see how state regulations attempt to circumscribe and reorder people’s lives in the name of something called ‘Dominican national identity’. By denying or refusing to recognize the myriad unscripted ways in which people chance upon, live and love each other, different categories of belonging are created, rendering some families less normal or less valued…

Across the region, one can point to numerous other cases... If we cast our net even wider we begin to see that what takes place in the region is not so different from what Caribbean people – in different ways – face ‘up North’, ‘in foreign’…Take for example the domestic, seasonal hotel and temporary farmworker programmes that recruit Caribbean women and men as workers to Canada and the United States, all of which are based on a presumption that while the workers’ labour is required to produce value, their own lives are treated as worthless, and their families and the costs of social reproduction must remain as far as possible outside the borders of the host country. These jobs are gendered, women doing the feminised (hotel and maid) and men the masculinised (agricultural) work, in a context in which both kinds of jobs have little status and have become associated with immigrants, non-citizens, people of colour. It sends the message that we can treat some people differently because they are not one of us, notwithstanding the reality that it is the largely invisible and exploited labour of these so-called others that creates and maintains the scaffolding of the destination economies…This is the integral underbelly of capitalist development, what is popularly called globalization today…When we look at how we handle our own affairs in relation to visitors and workers from other Caribbean islands, should the similarities not give us pause? There should be nothing comfortable in such familiarity. In an interview, literary scholar Gordon Rohlehr offers the opinion that nationalism necessarily requires and offers little sympathy to the stranger, and that in the aftermath of the collapse of the West Indies Federation, in each country that went its separate – national – way, “the Other became the other Caribbean person” (2003, 253). With CARICOM discussions over freedom of movement and the Single Market and Economy, what do these popular anxieties over borders tell us about the tensions between the local and the global, the regional and the resolutely, at times xenophobically national?

Historicizing current anti-immigrant sentiment is necessary to short-circuit an unhelpful Guyanese moral triumphalism or self-righteous indignation (at one point we helped you, and this is how you repay us)…we forget that the movement of people between countries ebbs and flows and changes direction. In a presentation to the Association of Caribbean Historians 9th Annual Conference, held thirty years ago at Cave Hill, Walter Rodney (1977) reminded us of a reverse wave in the late nineteenth century, when Barbadians, facing what many saw as limited opportunities on the island, headed to Guyana to seek their futures…The impulse to make common political cause through the shared exploitation faced by local Blacks, indentured Indians, and Barbadian estate labourers was often tempered by anti-immigrant feelings, which came to the fore in times of economic distress…Here we see how an immigration system designed to thwart the aspirations and cripple the bargaining power of the Afro-Guyanese working-classes in the post-slavery period, would pit those who occupied the most marginal positions in Guianese society against each other. If we extend this analysis to the contemporary situation in Barbados, we might want to think about how those on the margins of Barbadian society – both citizens and immigrants from other Caribbean islands – come up against each other, while a larger social and economic arrangement that has produced the kinds of privations that generate inequalities, as well as the actors who benefit from these hierarchies – “unscrupulous employers, landlords, service providers” – are let off the hook, and remain unaccountable (CAFRA 2006)…

While remembering can enable us to historicize contemporary exclusions and recognize our own implicatedness, it can also serve a more hopeful purpose. If we start with the gendered lives and survival strategies of women and men, their uneven circulation and mobility stitch the Caribbean together in ways that make it impossible to insist on separability over connection. The fact that earlier migration patterns tended to be heavily male (in contrast to today, where women equal and at times even outnumber men in migration statistics, especially to the UK and North America), should not distract us from thinking about where the women went and what they did…In some cases they were responding to official labour schemes like the domestic worker programmes in Canada, while in other instances they traveled as individuals and in staggered form as members of wider family units…
It would be folly to assume a straightforward gendered divide in which women’s contributions related to cultural transmission and the space of the household, while men’s occupied what is often rendered as the more encompassing space of the political. There is also a problem in not seeing the work that women do in the family as political, or relegating it somehow – and usually as afterthought – to the secondarily political….The diasporic turn in the academy has unearthed for us the myriad roles played by Caribbean men in all kinds of struggles, from the Garveyite movement to Pan-Africanism. We need more work like this that refuses to be disciplined by a narrowly nationalist frame, but we would also do well to extend and recast what does exist by asking different questions of the material (for instance, what kinds of community did these men envision, and how did the terms of belonging address differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation?), and by exploring the ways in which women emerge as complex political actors in their own right…

It seems to me, then, that it is movement and not borders which is naturally Caribbean, by which I mean it is a continuously defining element of our collective historical experience and memory. We are caught between nationalist preoccupations that require the design and management of policies regulating the flow of people across the region, and another plane of reality that confounds this logic on a daily basis…

This is of course most obvious today in the unofficial intra-regional ‘people’ networks, perhaps best embodied in the trader, whose symbolic red, white and blue striped bag at the airport counter has become an instantly recognizable accessory. In Guyana, and mainly in response to the food bans imposed with no consultation and little preparation in the 1980s in the name of growing and buying local under co-operative socialism, it was women who, with men and ahead of men, trekked in and out of the country by plane, boat and overland, who endured numerous hassles at border points as well as harassment and even imprisonment for trading in what were deemed contraband goods, who bargained with their bodies and whatever else they had, and who contributed to an informal economy that kept households fed and going in the lean years…From Guyana to Suriname, St. Lucia to Martinique and Guadeloupe, Barbados to Puerto Rico, there is a way in which we can read these actions as a form of popular regionalism not circumscribed by linguistic divisions.

I find it ironic – but sadly not surprising, because again it confirms the ways in which women’s work remains largely invisible and undervalued, even though on paper there has been official recognition as far back as the UN Conference on Women in 1985 to recognize and measure the significance of women’s unpaid labour - that so much of the pronouncements emanating from CARICOM on freedom of movement under the CSME have emphasized ‘skilled labour’, a definition that surely excluded these women while misrecognising not only the skill involved, but the centrality of their work in sustaining regional economies…. Notably, teachers, nurses, domestic and hospitality workers, higglers and artisans were not among the first categories approved for freedom of movement, even though they represent precisely those women who, as Guyanese activist Andaiye has contended, have long made the Caribbean a single economic space … There is much press given these days to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, and of course we hope that some genuine semblance of this will occur, more than three decades after the establishment of the regional movement, but ask any woman who trades regularly and informally what the CSME means to her, and I am sure we will get a sense of the distance between the decisions taken by trade ministers in closed rooms and those who continue to face the hassles of making livelihoods at the grassroots…

Anthropologist George Mentore, who has worked for over 25 years with the Wai Wai community in Southern Guyana near the Brazilian border, recently wrote a column for the Guyanese Stabroek newspaper (Stabroek Daily News, August 3, 2007). Reflecting on the growing numbers of homeless people on the streets of the capital city, he observed that homelessness does not exist in Amerindian society because there is no ethic or value that could result in “the distress of loneliness”. What he was saying, in effect, was that the answer – he prefers to call it the gift of sociality - to this most visible face of poverty and marginality is already here, awaiting our recognition and acceptance. Migration represents one instance in which, through our practices, we have created the stranger at the doorstep and in our midst. We might think that the stranger helps to reinforce a sense of who ‘we’ are, but if we continue to go down this road, it will not be too long before the stranger takes up permanent residence inside each of us. The Wai Wai offer us a most instructive lesson with which I want to begin to draw tonight’s reflections to a close. They show us that there are a few places in the Caribbean where we remain each other’s keepers, where there is no homelessness, no loneliness, only the company of neighbours. As The Mighty Gabby says, “Brother Stalin it’s so nice to see/ Trini-Bajan-Guyanese unity/ We love for this region is so strong/ From Jamaica come all the way down/ Every man from the islands me brother/ Every girl from the islands me sister/ And I am sure forever it will remain this way/ Sans Humanite” (Santimanite, 1994, Mighty Gabby and Black Stalin). That is the tentative promise of faith, love and possibility in the midst of a difficult, what many might say is a most impossible situation…