On Caribbean Empathy?
D. Alissa Trotz is editor of the In the Diaspora column. Christian Campbell is a poet, essayist and cultural critic, and the author of Running the Dusk. Running the Dusk was also translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo.
It is now more than two weeks since Hurricane Dorian uprooted and destroyed lives in The Bahamas, with an estimated 1,500 persons still reported missing. Over the weekend, at the time of writing this column, tropical storm Humberto was predicted to dump more heavy rain on already shattered communities.
As last week’s diaspora column by Angelique Nixon and a recent article titled ‘The Poor are Punished’ in the British Guardian newspaper underlined, Dorian has revealed historical and contemporary faultlines in Bahamian society. Vulnerability is unevenly experienced, with the brunt of the devastation falling on poor Bahamians, on Haitians and Haitian Bahamaians, on those without family in other parts of The Bahamas spared by the storm, on those without the requisite papers to leave Grand Bahama and the Abaco islands, on those denied entry to the United States, with the US President referring to Bahamian climate refugees as potential gang members and drug dealers.
But this most recent storm has also revealed an uncomfortable faultline within the Caribbean family. It seems to come from the impression that compared to the rest of the Caribbean, The Bahamas is a high growth economy. There is also a sense that Bahamians think they are better than the rest of the Caribbean, or not even quite Caribbean; that in fact they have stronger ties to the US than the region. In the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, these sentiments have translated into arguments against offering assistance, such as an extended comment on social media from a fellow Caribbean. Titled “I have no sympathies for Bahamas [sic]”, the author (This is one of a series of weekly columns from Guyanese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
insists that if he was a political leader he would not help Bahamians, and concludes that “Bahamas pissed on the rest of the CARICOM citizens because they though[t] they were great. How the mighty have fallen.” Another personifies Hurricane Dorian as a vindictive response in patois to Prime Minister Minnis’ rejection of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy’s free movement of people policy. The organizer of a relief drive in a Caribbean country reported getting phone calls from persons asking why they should give anything to Bahamians, while someone else proclaims, “They are not getting a dime from me. I would rather give what I have to the poor children in this country.”
Such statements demonstrate the complete absence of broughtupsy, the sheer crassness of kicking someone when they are down, of heaping contempt in the midst of other people’s pain. And it must be said that the overwhelming response in the region and diaspora – as in the case of other disasters - has been an outpouring of love, solidarity and support that supersedes fear of outsiders and national partisanship. Barbadians raised millions last week in a telethon. In Trinidad, relief drives are being organised, with Caribbean Airlines taking supplies in for no charge. The people of The Bahamas have also contributed extensive relief to Haiti, Dominica, and other sister countries in the past.
But, and this is the elephant in the room, this rejection of each other, this sense of insider and outsider, is tragically also a deeply Caribbean reflex. It is the strangest kind of paradox, and one that must be confronted. This growing sentiment affects who gets support and who does not. Who is valued, who is not and why? We need to take a long hard look at ourselves. In the first instance, the sentiment that Hurricane Dorian was some kind of divine lesson, sounds very much like a Caribbean version of the racist response of American televangelist Pat Robertson to the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. At the time, Robertson described the earthquake as punishment that the Haitians received for making a pact with the devil (exemplified through the Haitian revolution that ended slavery and the widespread practice of Vodun). Today, among some of our Caribbean family, the argument is that Bahamians have received retribution for thinking they are better than the rest of us, with Dorian acting as the great equalizer that brought the people of The Bahamas to their knees.
The resentment being expressed also comes from a sense that The Bahamas, a longstanding member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), sets itself apart from the rest of the Caribbean. Why then should CARICOM respond to calls for assistance, from a country that sees regionalism as inimical to its national interests? It is true that The Bahamas is the only full member of CARICOM that has not joined the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the agreement to deepen integration that was the outcome of the 10th Heads of Government Conference in Grand Anse, Grenada. It is also true that concerns over freedom of movement provisions played a significant role in this decision, with Bahamian Prime Minister Dr. Hubert Minnis stating last year at the conclusion of the 39th CARICOM Heads of Government summit in Jamaica that “The Bahamas will not allow free movement of people within our boundaries, so we are not a part of CSME.” But before we rush to judge and condemn, we should stop to reflect on the fact that the CSME has not proven to be a magic bullet, with concerns being expressed, especially among the smaller countries, about the uneven effects of
smaller countries, about the uneven effects of
implementation. This is in fact a historic tension in the wider regional integration project that we can trace all the way back to the failed West Indies Federation. Freedom of movement has been unevenly realised across the region; even at the start, only so called ‘skilled’ nationals were allowed to travel freely. The case of Shanique Myrie – a Jamaican national who was stopped, cavity searched, detained, humiliated and deported from Barbados - that reached the Caribbean Court of Justice just six years ago, put a face to the horrific treatment ordinary people going about their daily business confront at border points across the Caribbean. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, there was pushback in some quarters in Trinidad when Prime Minister Keith Rowley offered to ease restrictions for Dominicans coming to the country. Just in July of this year, Barbados reversed no visa requirements for Haitians. In Guyana, the presence of Venezuelans and Haitians has given rise to deeply xenophobic arguments; the Guyana Times newspaper carried a sensationalist and racist article that suggested Haitians were disease carriers threatening the health of the Guyanese body politic. Who are we to condemn The Bahamas when under the cover of full membership in the CSME we do exactly the same thing? What we must realise is that the kind of virulent attacks represented by the social media comments above rely on a faulty logic that fails to confront our collective complicity. If we critique xenophobia in The Bahamas, and we must, we must critique it as a Caribbean problem. None of us is exempt.
Moreover, whether it is Bahamians who see themselves as not quite – or even – Caribbean, or other Caribbean folks responding to this sentiment or treating Bahamians as outsiders to the region, we might well ask, who is a Bahamian? For that matter, who is a Martinican, a Vincentian, a Puerto Rican, a Surinamese, a Cuban, a Kittitian? Alissa’s paternal grandmother’s husband was a Guyanese man named Kenneth Sobers, as ‘Barbadian’ a surname as can be. Christian is Bahamian and Trinidadian and his lineage is also Grenadian and Martinican. The Bahamas has one of the largest and most diverse panCaribbean populations. To withhold support from The Bahamas is to hurt Haitians, Guyanese, Barbadians, Trinidadians, and everyone who has made this archipelago home. Over a decade ago, a DJ called Admiral Nelson of 94.7 FM radio in Barbados shared an extempo calypso by The Mighty Gabby and the late Black Stalin which captures this sense of what it means to see ourselves as a Caribbean family, knitted together by the movement that defines our region, that is as second nature to us as breathing:
Brother Stalin it’s so nice to see,
Trini Bajan Guyanese in unity,
We love for this region is so strong, From Jamaica come all the way down, Every man from the islands my brother, Every girl from the islands my sister,
And I am sure forever it will remain this way, Sans Humanité
Climate crisis also starkly lays bare a kinship based on our shared fragility. Grenada and Haiti the day before yesterday. Barbuda, Puerto Rico, Dominica, The US Virgin Islands, St. Martin yesterday. The Bahamas today. Tomorrow, who?
Nine years ago, the late Jamaican economist Norman Girvan introduced “existential threat” (a term that circulates widely today in conversations about climate change) to refer to what he described as “systemic challenges to the viability of our states as functioning socioeconomicecological-political systems; due to the intersection of climatic, economic, social and political developments.” Existential threats, Girvan argued, were beyond the capacity of any individual Caribbean country to tackle on its own, and required a robust and meaningful regional response.
In another register, responding to the need to show support for some courageous women in Jamaica a few years ago, the late social activist Andaiye penned the line, ‘Touch one, touch all.’ These four powerful words are a blunt rejoinder to the divide and rule logic that has been the fate of the Caribbean since the first European ships arrived on our shores. It is a logic that maintains the fiction that we are separate countries, and that some are better than others. It is a logic that serves those who profit from our division, including an entire political class in power today. It is a warped and mentally colonized logic – the internal plantation - that reveals itself among those who have responded to the massive destruction in the aftermath of Dorian, by saying The Bahamas has been taught a lesson. It is a logic that leaves us completely defenseless in the face of the existential threat facing the region.
We close this week’s article with a poem of Christian’s, Goodman’s Bay II, which references a childhood game called Moonshine Baby that was played in many parts of the Caribbean and West Africa, in which someone lies on the ground and their outline is traced with bits of glass and shiny stones and shells. When they get up, the iridescent outline is called the moonshine baby. The beach that this game is played on in the poem was named after a Haitian Bahamian. In the aftermath of a storm that turned the sea into a weapon, brought the sand everywhere and took the beach, we offer these lines as a tribute to those most recently lost, an elegy to the most vulnerable among us across our Caribbean in the aftermath of Dorian and other storms, and a reminder that we are part of each other, and that we forget or deny that at our peril. We don’t have the language. We don’t have a careful enough language to speak to each other clearly. But we must constantly seek to create it and re-create it. Touch one, touch all.