There is a kind of grand heroic narrative that can be told, in fact that must be told, about the contribution of Caribbean resistance to our modernity. For example, in his book, Silencing the Past, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot asserts that the Haitian Revolution represented a truly universal and previously unthinkable claim to liberty in its insistence on the right of slaves, indeed all subject peoples, to win that freedom by armed struggle—an idea that Western “free” nations did not accept well into the twentieth century.
That history writ large seemed far away this past April in the beleaguered city of Spanish Town, Jamaica, where gang warfare had claimed at least 17 lives in just two weeks. In response, 5,000 people streamed into the historic Prison Oval grounds, lifted their hands to the sky—and prayed. A minister who addressed the vigil said, “The Devil was let loose like a roaring lion in Spanish Town.” This counter-narrative describes a violence rampant in the region that is not that of anti-colonial resistance, nor of Frantz Fanon’s constitutive violence of the wretched. It is violence turned against itself, reflective of multiple forms of decay, suspension and crisis. Amid the helplessness, victimization and fear, appealing to higher powers may have been the most radical of acts.
There are certainly causes of collective trauma traceable to more than runaway violence, including the transfers of wealth out of the Caribbean to foreign banks and corporations, the ruling powers’ zeal to stamp out any rebel impulses, re-colonization under structural adjustment and now, threats of new devastation wrought by challenges to agricultural markets in the international trade arena. While Latin America may have been globalization’s laboratory, the Caribbean has certainly been its whipping post, and now, its forgotten dumping ground.
Yet, rather than seeing only stasis and capitulation, argues Brian Meeks, we should recognize this as a moment of “hegemonic dissolution,” where the old ruling alliance is considered illegitimate by the majority, and no alternative from below has yet consolidated itself to take its place. Meeks points to discernible, varied yet much more complicated signs of contestation: in the cultural agency of socially conscious reggae and dancehall, in popular rebellions against the symbols of bourgeois law and order and in the coming to power of Jamaica’s first woman prime minister.
However uneven, these visions of change seek to counter the legacy—particularly strong in Jamaica—of strategies of two-party rule that propped up Creole nationalist elites and reinforced local differences where now “every man fe himself, everybody fe dem food.” To these, Anthony Bogues connects the troubling emergence of the “shotta don,” a figure of wanton violence and criminality divorced from animating logics of resistance rooted in aspects of early postcolonial rebellion.
Indeed, the rule of the “shotta” at the local level—inhabiting small lanes and blocks—counterpoints the frustrated desire for sovereignty at the national level, particularly in the attempts of Caribbean leaders to break from the traditional weight of imperial powers. The ouster of Aristide in February 2004 reflects a level of naked belligerence on the parts of these powers that has reopened the wounds of that country and the region. Both Diana Thorburn and Reed Lindsay point to repercussions of this: Thorburn, in her assessment of foreign policy options as U.S.-Caribbean relations sour and new international alliances emerge; and Lindsay, in his report on the crisis of legitimacy facing the UN stabilization mission in Haiti.
What, then, can be said of the prospects for civil society mobilization today? David Abdulah, one of the Caribbean’s most committed labor leaders and activists, reminds us that the long trajectory of Caribbean popular resistance has included both decisive eruptions and repercussive setbacks, and notes real signs of movement and new formations. He also raises serious questions about the direction and prospects for recapturing past revolutionary traditions.
One thing that clearly emerges in these pages is that, despite the challenges of fragmentation, multiple languages, differing cultural legacies and distance, Caribbean communities, activists and intellectuals are seriously engaged with the shift to the left by their mainland neighbors. With this Report, which focuses on areas of the Caribbean less usually covered in the pages of this magazine, we hope to renew a sustained conversation between the Caribbean and Latin America at a crucial time—when the Caribbean finds itself teetering between paralysis and upheaval, promise and oblivion.
About the Author
Steve Cupid Theodore is a NACLA editor.
