Boxing Day in Barbados and the nation has a NATION to read today, the newspaper keeping stride with Barbados’ own relentless march into the modern world, just like Trinidad 24 years ago when I was a reporter at the Express.
It was a novel thing, then, for that paper to publish issues on days following bank holidays, days on which everyone in the production process would not be in their cubicles but in a ponche de crème/garlic pork/ham and turkey-induced stupor.
Boxed into its history, Barbados marches boldly into its future. Just like Trinidad.
Barbados prides itself, and rightly so, on keeping its house in order. For 400 years-plus – the Charter of Barbados granting effective self-rule will be 360 years old next month – Barbados has made itself by its own efforts. For a long time, this little rock – dismissed by detractors as “a sand-trap in the Atlantic” – was the pivot on which the British Empire turned.
The achievements of the place are genuinely grand, out of all proportion to its tiny size; Barbados is the Atlantic’s Hong Kong.
More than anything else, Barbados prides itself on its stability.
But Barbados is a coral island.
Under the most magnificent Bajan edifice, who knows whether there might be a greater cave? We find out only when the latter swallows the former whole and concrete achievements vanish into the underlying emptiness.
Boxing Day in Barbados and I’m in a New Year’s groove, thinking about what is and what should be – and what was.
Barbados was not laid on a foundation of equality. The vast majority of Bajans were, for most of their history, not deemed to be real people at all. Universal adult suffrage did not arrive until 1951. (But at least Barbados is ahead of Egypt where, after the return of democracy this year, Islamist governments will, next year, take Egypt rapidly back into the Dark Ages, where women are always in hijab and out of school, praising Allah noisily all the way.)
This is the Caribbean and New World challenge arising out of our dark past: not how you keep people in bondage, but how you set them free. Barbados has been doing well, with never a mention of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But, for all its undeniable achievements in the equal treatment of all citizens, we should never forget that modern Barbados was built by slave labour. The Prime Minister of today would have, just 50 years ago, aspired to middling success in some profession.
On Boxing Day, the good Christians of Barbados, reading their NATIONS over their turkey, are doubtlessly in a haze of pleasure induced by the celebration of what they take to be the date of birth of the long-dead Jew they regard as their saviour; and no one in Barbados thinks it could be another Trinidad.
As if it was founded on something different.
Or following a different path.
As if buried violence does not inevitably erupt as explosive violence, the more explosive the longer it’s buried.
Boxing Day in Barbados, the day after the birth of the lord Jesus Christ.
And Bajans will see nothing wrong with still being on their knees.
