#caribbeanness

Cubans themselves, especially black Cubans, always thought of the Caribbean black as a second-class black. It was rare that a Cuban black or mulatto formed a family with a Haitian or Jamaican; and even rarer for a white Cuban, who hardly inter-married either with a black Cuban. A Cuban white man did not marry a Caribbean woman and only rarely married a black Cuban woman. Although Caribbeans were gradually absorbed and assimilated into the population as Cuban, a certain degree of segmentation persisted. This was actually part of the segmentation that affected all blacks and mulattos in Cuba, but especially the so-called Antillanos (Caribbeans/West Indians).

“Caribbean” is a root word. “Caribbean” is also a “route” word – it can offer one way to travel; one path in practices of self-articulation. When you add the suffix “-ness” to the root/route, the resultant word is one that compels you to confront a condition of being – that condition or quality of “being Caribbean.” What then is Caribbeanness?

The Caribbean is not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago (an exalted quality that Hellas possessed, and the great Malay archipelago as well), and as a meta-archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. Thus the Caribbean flows outward past the limits of its own sea with a vengeance. Its ultima Thule may be found on the outskirts of Bombay, near the low and murmuring shores of Gambia, at a Balinese temple, in an old bristol pub, in a windmill beside the Zunder Zee, at a cafe in a barrio of Manhattan.

I owe to my predecessors - from Fernando Ortiz to C.L.R. James, from Aime Cesaire to Kamau Braithwaite, from Wilson Harriss to Edouard Glissant - a great lesson, and it is at every intellectual venture directed toward investigaing Caribbeanness is designed to become an unending search. It doesn't matter which ideology you profess, Caribbeanness will always remain beyond the horizon.

What is missing from the notion of Caribbeanness is the transition from the shared experience to conscious expression; the need to transcend the intellectual pretensions dominated by the learned elite and to be grounded in collective affirmation, supported by the activism of the people.