YeKengalé

“The settlement of Jamaica was not financed by any joint-stock company as in New England or Virginia; or by any lord proprietor offering venture capital, as in some Southern colonies in the USA; or by the Crown as in some other colonies. Some early Jamaicans brought their wealth from Barbados and Nevis. Others acquired wealth by the theft of Spanish gold; others by the exploitation of bondservants, and still others by trading in enslaved people. Early Jamaicans owed little to anybody from outside. Huge moral questions surround their means of self-reliance, but nascent Jamaican nationalism was born in this admixture.” – Errol Miller

The most creative tool we bring to life is narrative. The story we tell ourselves and others about reality, is more important to outcome than reality itself. This is because human beings are essentially not creatures of circumstance, but beings of choice; and through astute observation and accumulated wisdom, sometimes, masters of consequence.

This and this alone explains the present state of our planet, whose face unmistakably carries our fingerprints observable from the heavens. For good and sometimes for ill, humanity is a force of nature whose collective creative and destructive capacity is constantly expanding.

At the very heart of that capacity is narrative. Narrative unlocks or inhibits the forces of change. Narrative determines mindset, expectation, disposition. Narrative makes fears flee or makes us flee in fear at common circumstance. Narrative looks at clear danger and calls it tremendous opportunity (or impending doom). The situation is what it is, but narrative determines attitude … and often outcome.

It is for this reason that an in depth and detailed historical narrative necessarily informs creative endeavor. Knowledge of the past is no limit on the future, but rather springboard of human imagination to launch new creative assaults on given reality and demands upon present resources. The most potent assault against human creative agency is the usurpation of narrative capacity ( AKA ‘hypnotism’). Reality is what I tell you it is, not what you perceive it either is or can be.

The ‘I’ in this equation has become a ‘god’ by tacit permission of the cooperating ‘you’. Such accurately defines post-colonial Jamaica seeking to define its claimed independence amidst a sea of new and old nations, dancing to the tune of the Bretton Woods institutions, the new voice of the imperial ‘I’.

When a historical troubadour comes along singing songs and telling tales of yore, reminding people of their nascent truth, the instinct of the zombified, entranced sleepwalker is to kill the message and if needs be the messenger also to ensure a blessed, undisturbed repose. However, every once in a while, a brave soul hears; and listens; and chooses to awaken; and remember.

Miller’s casual observation has much in it subversive of both government and church imposed order, which begs the question of the degree to which our own institutions of nurture have historically been deployed against us in service to oppressors. He continues,

Debt financing has subsequently become the bane of Jamaica’s advancement and the source of mendicancy. First, debt to the Imperial Government over the course of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century and more recently debt to the international community in the second half of the twentieth century. While there have been gems of altruism that have advanced Jamaican society, for the most part, debt has served the agendas of the lenders.

Miller’s reflection on Jamaica’s forgotten past (and identity) is symptomatic throughout the Caribbean. I am struck by the common recurring decimal in people from opposite persuasions and perspectives, apparently spellbound from seeing certain opportunity staring them in the face, blinded by a common mindset, deep-rooted in the psyche, giving skewed and twisted information on the locus of authority, agency and mobilization; and doing so with the serpentile impudence of biblical, legal and constitutional quotation.

Perhaps the Caribbean will wake up. Even more securely planted in human consciousness than any learned entrancing shibboleth is the Law of Survival, or as the new lingo goes ‘resilience’.