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Stuart Hall

Negotiating Caribbean Identities

In this lecture I will address questions of Caribbean culture and identity. I

want to suggest that such questions are not in any sense separate or removed

from the problems of political mobilization, of cultural development, of

economic development and so on. The more we know and see of the

struggles of the societies of the periphery to make something of the slender

resources available to them, the more important we understand the questions

and problems of cultural identity to be in that process. I want to examine

some of the themes of a topic which has been richly explored by Caribbean

writers and artists----cultural identity presenting itself always as a problem to

Caribbean people. 1

Why it should be a problem is not a mystery, but I want to probe this

question of identity and why Caribbean writers, politicians, civic leaders,

artists and others have been unable to leave worrying away at it. And in

doing so, I want to problematize to some extent the way we think about

i d e n t i t y . I w a n t t o e x p l o r e t h e t e r m ‘ m y t h ’ i t s e l f -----the English are not

good at myth, always opposing it on the one hand to reality, on the other

hand to truth, as if you have to choose between them. I specifically

do not want to choose between myth and reality, but to talk about the

very real contemporary and historical effects of myths of identity. And I

want to do so with one other purpose which I hope will come through

more clearly at the end. The issue of cultural identity as a political quest

now constitutes one of the most serious global problems as we go into the

twenty-first century. The re-emergence of questions of ethnicity, of

n a t i o n a l i s m -----the obduracy, the dangers and the pleasures of the

rediscovery of identity in the modern world, inside and outside of

E u r o p e -----places the question of cultural identity at the very centre of the

contemporary political agenda. What I want to suggest is that despite the

dilemmas and vicissitudes of identity through which Caribbean people

have passed and continue to pass, we have a tiny but important message

for the world about how to negotiate identity.

The Search for Essence

There is a very clear and powerful discourse about cultural identity,

especially in the West. Indeed most of us have lived through, and are still

living through an exercise in the definition and defence of a particular

kind of British cultural identity. I was puzzled when Norman Tebbit

asked which cricket team you would support, in order to discover

whether you were ‘one of us’, ‘one of them’ or maybe neither. My own

response to that was, if you can tell me how many of the four hundred

members of the British athletics team are properly British, I’d be ready to

answer the question about the cricket team; otherwise not. But the

discourse of identity suggests that the culture of a people is at root-----and

t h e q u e s t i o n o f r o o t s i s v e r y m u c h a t i s s u e -----a question of its essence, a

question of the fundamentals of a culture. Histories come and go, peoples

come and go, situations change, but somewhere down there is throbbing

the culture to which we all belong. It provides a kind of ground for our

identities, something to which we can return, something solid, something

fixed, something stabilized, around which we can organize our identities

and our sense of belongingness. And there is a sense that modern nations

and peoples cannot survive for long and succeed without the capacity to

touch ground, as it were, in the name of their cultural identities.

Now the question of what a Caribbean cultural identity might be has been

of extraordinary importance, before but especially in the twentieth

century. Partly because of the dislocations of conquest, of colonization

and slavery, partly because of the colonial relationship itself and the

distortions of living in a world culturally dependent and dominated from

some centre outside the place where the majority of people lived. But it

has also been important for counter-identities, providing sources on

which the important movements of decolonization, of independence, of

nationalist consciousness in the region have been founded. In a sense,

This text was given as the 1993 Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, at the kind

invitation of Professor Alastair Hennessy, Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of

Warwick.

until it is possible to state who the subjects of independence movements

are likely to be, and in whose name cultural decolonization is being

conducted, it is not possible to complete the process. And that process

involves the question of defining who the people are. In Black Skin White

Masks , Fanon speaks of what he calls ‘a passionate research directed to the

secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-

contempt, resignation and abjuration, some beautiful and splendid area

whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and others’.

And as I’ve said, that passionate research by Caribbean writers, artists and

political leaders, that quest for identity, has been the very form in which

much of our artistic endeavour in all the Caribbean languages has been

conducted in this century.

Cross-Currents of Diaspora

Why, then, is the identity of the Caribbean so problematic? It is a very

large question, but let me suggest some of the reasons. First of all, if the

search for identity always involves a search for origins, it is impossible to

locate in the Caribbean an origin for its peoples. The indigenous peoples

of the area very largely no longer exist, and they ceased to exist very soon

after the European encounter. This is indeed the first trauma of identity in

the Caribbean. I don’t know how many of you know what the coat of

arms of Jamaica is. It has two Arawak Indian figures supporting a shield

in the middle, which is crossed by pineapples surmounted by an alligator.

Peter Hulme reports that in 1983 the then prime minister of Jamaica,

Edward Seaga, wanted to change the coat of arms on the ground that he

could not find represented in it a single recognizable Jamaican identity.

‘Can the crushed and extinct Arawaks,’ he asked, ‘represent the dauntless

inhabitants of Jamaica? Does the low-slung near-extinct crocodile, a cold-

blooded reptile, symbolize the warm soaring spirits of Jamaicans? Where

does the pineapple, which was exported to Hawaii, appear prominently

either in our history or in our folklore?’ I read that quote simply to remind

you that questions of identity are always questions about representation.

They are always questions about the invention, not simply the discovery

of tradition. They are always exercises in selective memory and they

almost always involve the silencing of something in order to allow

something else to speak.

Maurice Cargill, a famous commentator on Jamaican affairs in The

Gleaner , responded to the prime minister, ‘What about a design

containing entwined marijuana plants? Against a background of US dollar

bills with tourists rampant and ladies couchant?’ Silencing as well as

remembering, identity is always a question of producing in the future an

account of the past, that is to say it is always about narrative, the stories

which cultures tell themselves about who they are and where they came

from. The one way in which it is impossible to resolve the problem of

identity in the Caribbean is to try looking at it, as if a good look will tell

you who the people are. During the period in which I was preparing my

BBC series on the Caribbean, I had the occasion in a relatively short space

of time to visit a large number of Caribbean islands, several of which I had

not seen before. I was absolutely staggered by the ethnic and cultural

diversity I encountered. Not a single Caribbean island looks like any other

in terms of its ethnic composition, including the different genetic and

physical features and characteristics of the people. And that is before you

start to touch the question of different languages, different cultural

traditions, which reflect the different colonizing cultures.

It may be a surprise to some people in this room that there are several

Caribbean islands, large ones, in which blacks are nowhere near a majority

of the population. There are now two important ex-British Caribbean

societies where Indians are in a majority. In Cuba, what you are struck by

first of all is the long persistence of white Hispanic settlement and then of

the mestizo population, only later of the black population. Haiti, which is

in some ways the symbolic island of black culture, where one feels closer

to the African inheritance than anywhere else, has a history in which the

mulattos have played an abolutely vital and key historical role.

Martinique is a bewildering place, it is in my experience more French than

Paris, just slightly darker. The Dominican Republic is a place where it is

possible to feel closer to Spain and to the Spanish tradition of Latin

America than anywhere else I have been in the Caribbean. The melting-

pot of the British islands produced everywhere you look a different

combination of genetic features and factors, and in each island elements of

o t h e r e t h n i c c u l t u r e s -----Chinese, Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese, Jewish-----

are present. I know because I have a small proportion of practically all of

them in my own inheritance. My background is African, also I’m told

S c o t t i s h ---- o f p r e t t y l o w d e s c e n t , p r o b a b l y c o n v i c t -----East Indian, Portu-

guese Jew. I can’t summon up any more but if I searched hard I expect I

could find them.

What is more, in another sense, everybody there comes from somewhere

else, and it is not clear what has drawn them to it, certainly not whether

the motives were ever of the highest level of aspiration. That is to say,

their true cultures, the places they really come from, the traditions that

really formed them, are somewhere else. The Caribbean is the first, the

original and the purest diaspora. These days blacks who have completed

the triangular journey back to Britain sometimes speak of the emerging

black British diaspora, but I have to tell them that they and I are twice

diasporized. What is more, not therefore just a diaspora and living in a

place where the centre is always somewhere else, but we are the break with

those originating cultural sources as passed through the traumas of

violent rupture. I don’t want to speak about the nature of this rupture,

with the majority of the populations wrenched from their own cultures

and inserted into the cultures of the colonizing plantation relations of

slavery. I don’t want to talk about the trauma of transportation, of the

breaking up of linguistic and tribal and familial groups. I don’t want to

talk about the brutal aftermath of Indian indenture. I simply want to say

that in the histories of the migration, forced or free, of peoples who now

compose the populations of these societies, whose cultural traces are

everywhere intermingled with one another, there is always the stamp of

historical violence and rupture.

Of course the peoples thus inserted into these old colonizing plantation

societies instantly polarized. And if anyone is still under the illusion that

questions of culture can ever be discussed free from and outside of

questions of power, you have only to look at the Caribbean to understand

how for centuries every cultural characteristic and trait had its class,

colour and racial inscription. You could read off from the populations to

the cultures, and from the cultures to the populations, and each was

ranked in an order of cultural power. It is impossible to approach

Caribbean culture without understanding the way it was continually

inscribed by questions of power. Of course that inscription of culture in

power relations did not remain polarized in Caribbean society, but I now

understand that one of the things I was myself running away from when I

came to England to study in 1951 was a society that was profoundly

culturally graded, which is what the old post-colonial society I grew up in

was like. Of course those cultural relations did not remain fixed, and the

relative cultures were quickly open to integration, assimilation and cross-

influence. They were almost never self-contained. They became subject at

once to complex processes of assimilation, translation, adaptation,

resistance, reselection and so on. That is to say, they became in a deep

sense diasporic societies. For wherever one finds diasporas, one always

finds precisely those complicated processes of negotiation and transcultu-

ration which characterize Caribbean culture. I don’t want to try and

sketch the cultural relations of that period, simply to identify three key

processes which are at work creating the enormously refined and delicate

tracery, the complexities of cultural identification, in Caribbean society in

that time.

Survival and Assimilation

First, and especially with respect to the populations that had been

enslaved, the retention of old customs, the retention of cultural traits

from Africa; customs and traditions which were retained in and through

slavery, in plantation, in religion, partly in language, in folk customs, in

music, in dance, in all those forms of expressive culture which allowed

men and women to survive the trauma of slavery. Not intact, never pure,

never untouched by the culture of Victorian and pre-Victorian English

society, never outside of Christianity or entirely outside the reach of the

church, never without at least some small instruction in the Bible, always

surrounded by the colonizing culture, but importantly-----and to some

e x t e n t t o d a y i m p e r a t i v e l y -----retaining something of the connection. Often

unrecognized, often only in practice, often unreflected, often not

knowing that people were practising within a tradition. Neverthless, in

everyday life, in so far as it was possible, maintaining some kind of

subterranean link with what was often called ‘the other Caribbean’, the

Caribbean that was not recognized, that could not speak, that had no

official records, no official account of its own transportation, no official

historians, but nevertheless that oral life which maintained an umbilical

connection with the African homeland and culture.

But let us not forget that retention characterized the colonizing cultures as

well as the colonized. For if you look at the Little Englands, the Little

Spains and the Little Frances that were created by the colonizers, if you

consider this kind of fossilized replica, with the usual colonial cultural

l a g -----people are always more Victorian when they’re taking tea in the

H i m a l a y a s t h a n w h e n t h e y ’ r e t a k i n g t e a i n L e a m i n g t o n -----they were

keeping alive the memory of their own homes and homelands and

traditions and customs. This very important double aspect of retention

has marked Caribbean culture from the earliest colonial encounters.

Stuart Hall - Negotiating Caribbean Identities.pdf

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