Nobody or Nation

The conjuncture of state and society that produced the nationalism of the 1930s, however, confronts a world economy that demands privatisation and open markets. This is a barrier to the building of the class-alliance politics that characterised Creole Nationalism.[i] It is not necessarily an insuperable one. West Indians confront the same problems as other peoples in the less-developed world, but they do so with the advantage of stable democratic institutions, decried though they may be by scholars like Thomas who can carp about the adoption of a European model of democracy and see a two-party system as mere “factionalism” without telling us what the alternative could or should have been.[ii]

Creole identity was formed by a process of both contention and adaptation. That contention and that adaptation were on grounds set by the European coloniser. The result, however, was something that the British did not expect a people distinct from their erstwhile masters and who were to attain dominion both over the master’s tools and the house he built. The subordinated people had to struggle for the most basic recognition of their humanity in the process creating cultures which have produced genres to which the West has turned both for entertainment, instruction and, perhaps, renewal. Creoleness has not died, and, in the Francophone Caribbean, may be undergoing a renewal.[iii] In a world in which economic dominance is less and less given expression as white racial supremacy it may, at last, come into its own. It is a paradox that, at a moment when it is beginning to look as if non-Western powers will be the economic drivers of the near future, the West has become a truly global civilisation. The West Indies, as a part of the West that is also connected to the non-Western world, should have a role in that world other than as a provider of labour and a place to visit in the winter.

The largest Creole vision, that of Eric Williams, of a Caribbean economic league that could become the basis for a Caribbean Creole nation is still a hope. Its achievement would mean the overcoming of what Derek Walcott has called “that long groan which underlies the past”.[iv] The Creole talent for survival and adaptation, the best product of that harsh and inhuman history, is ultimately a sign that humanity can prevail. As one of the founders of Creole Nationalism put it: “In the West Indies, whatever the differences of colour, ‘all o’ we is one’.”[v]

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[i] Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens, “The Bourgeoisie and Democracy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives” in Social Research vol. 66 no. 3 (Fall 1999), 781.

[ii] Thomas 2004, 54.

[iii] See Beverley Ormerod, “The Martinican concept of "creoleness": A multiracial redefinition of culture” in Mots Pluriels no. 7 1998, http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP798bo.html accessed 26 July 2006.

[iv] Walcott 1992.

[v] James 1984,173.