All I am asking for is a little respect when you come home . . . R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to me . . . . Sock it to me. – Aretha Franklin
Respect – the most vital ingredient in regional integration.
Why am I on about this again this week? Well, in the SUNDAY SUN two days ago I came across an article (Attempt To Bash Jamaica), written by Donarene Morris-Henry, who describes herself as “a Jamaican who chooses to reside in Barbados”.
She wrote about six hundred words educating Richard Lowdown Hoad on Jamaican culture (culture as expression, artefacts, “products”).
Well, I say that is between Hoad and her – I en in dat! But although I accept that she was on a specific mission, I did not sense any concern about what may have got Hoad’s goat (or got into his goat’s milk) – and yet she has chosen to come and live in his home (Barbados). She was concerned only that he learn to respect her and hers.
Right here in Barbados, living with Barbadians, she informed us, in part at least, of the elements that should be the basis of respecting Jamaicans. Fair enough. But we never got to know if the writer, choosing to live here in Barbados, was even mildly interested in any sensitivity, any empathy, any respect towards Hoad or Barbadians generally in their moment of perturbation.
It was like Paul Keens Douglas’ “The hand, the ticket and the money”. “No humanity for you!” the “Soup Nazi” in Seinfeld would have said.
I choose to live in your country but I show no willingness to at least try to enter into what may have upset you once the law lords have ruled in favour of one of my own? Just, “Hunderstand dis ’bout Jamaica”?
That is where the legalism of the latter-day integration ideologues has carried us.
So we are not travelling as well as we used to. These days as we move into other people’s spaces, we are more self-indulgent, more self-consumed. CARICOM/CSME schooled us in that.
Yuh see, the present shapers and advocates of the Caribbean community idea are operating as if the only contributor to tensions would be the failure to assure the rights of incomers. The emotional dimension of respecting the “home team” has not been pressed.
The crafters and shapers of the Caribbean “community” presume, “We is all one”. Not true. Jamaica is not Barbados. Trinidad is not St Lucia. Antigua is not Guyana. Lordee, Lordee: Nevis is not even St Kitts – ask the Nevisians.
You know how we like to say that Europe destroyed Africa by, apart from the slave trade and colonizing, throwing together people who were not of the same nation (the European word is tribe). Well, look how we going full speed ahead with the same thing. The colonials sacrificed humanity on the altar of greed; we sacrificing it on the altar of economic progress. Just remember that they thought they were about economic progress too!
If different peoples who share the same land mass have troublesome tensions in sharing that space, why do we think we can simply put together people from different land masses, each set with their own history and their sense of themselves, their own separateness without the necessary nurturing of the bond – a critical element being respect for the host?
(A little bit of history about how a philosophy, an ideology is not a strong enough basis for healthy coexistence. Rwanda. You may or may not know that that country had been dubbed a “Christian Kingdom” – just before its different peoples sharing the same space killed one another in unimaginable ways and in unimaginable numbers. The “triumph of Christian missions” preceded the triumph of ethnic hatred, as one writer put it.)
So if you think that the “religion” of regional integration without a vibrantly nurtured underpinning of goodwill, sensitivity and respect, especially for host people is strong enough to measure up to the requirements of truly getting along, you probably believe that shouting “xenophobia” has the same effect as intoning “abracadabra”.
Caribbean community has now become an ideologist’s imperative without the necessary emotional sense buttressing it.
And so these ideologues stand, with all their good intentions, also as agents of presumptuousness and emotional dumbness.
High IQ, no doubt. Not so high EQ (emotional quotient), though.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T . . . find out what it means to me. And when you come to my home, sock it to me.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor.