What March 13 should mean for Grenada’s next general elections
Kimalee Phillip is an African-Grenadian woman currently based in Canada. Her body may be in Canada but her heart and spirit are in Grenada and with all people struggling for liberation and freedom. She is a writer, educator and organizer, currently living and working on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory in Ottawa. Her current waged work is a combination of human rights work within the Canadian labour movement and feminist movement building within an international context.
Never has the government of Grenada named March 13 as a significant and memorable day and/or public holiday. The events that took place on that day, 39 years ago in 1979, the inauguration of the Grenadian Revolution, are still not part of the education curriculum, much less mainstream political debates and discussions on the island. Therefore, the current Prime Minister’s decision to name March 13, 2018 as the next general election date leaves one questioning his intent.
There is currently an emptiness, a historical and collective memory void around March 13. It’s not named as a day of significance, unlike October 25, the day our island was invaded by US troops and oddly celebrated as Thanksgiving Day. Considering that March 13 was never deemed significant enough to be named yet the actions that took place on March 13, 1979 reverberate across the Caribbean region and global progressive world, what memories are the Prime Minister and his government trying to erase or replace that void with?
Former Prime Minister Ben Jones of the New National Party (NNP) declared March 13, 1990 as the date for the general elections that year. That electoral process saw the National Democratic Party claiming victory, winning 7 of the 15 seats with a voter turnout of 68.4%. I would like to hope that our current Prime Minister is not reducing the significance of selecting March 13, 2018 to party political games.
This exercise of attaching the general elections to the Revolution anniversary without ever formally naming it as such reeks of a revisionist project where the historical record of what happened on that day is being reinterpreted to fit another agenda. If the government in power had policies, programs and even a political ideological stance that reflected the progressive goals of the New Jewel Movement and People’s Revolutionary