The complexities of Caribbean identity

“In Miami, we all tend to try to get along because we are in a minority, so we have to get along. That said, whenever the fight bruk out, they usually tend to be along the lines of stereotypes, which are really ways for not thinking for yourself. And some people don’t want to think for themselves.”

Living Guyana describes the Caribbean as “a unique collection of people strung together by a common history and increasingly and perhaps irreversibly influenced by Americana.

Yet not all people automatically buy in to the concept of “one Caribbean”. For Francis Wade to emotionally connect to this notion of “one Caribbean”, it took the persuasion of a Trini friend that “we were all one Caribbean people”, and a vacation to Trinidad, which felt familiar to him: “It looked like Jamaica; it felt like Jamaica.”

There are many answers to this question of Caribbean identity, as Caribbean Free Radio, and the BBC have discovered.

For some, national identity brings its own challenges. To Living Guyana, being Guyanese means “regrettably, inherent discrimination both internally and externally. It means being perceived as being disadvantaged but it simultaneously means having to be diligent and committed to perseverance in order to succeed. It means being resilient and more open to Caribbean integration. It means being naturally hospitable and warm. It means being proud.”

West Indian versus CaribbeanMany people use the terms “West Indian” and “Caribbean” interchangeably. Yet the question still remains, is there a distinction between the terms “West Indian” and “Caribbean”? Living Guyana thinks it’s “mere semantics”, while Wade uses the terms interchangeably: “Logically I know that Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, and Martinique are Caribbean,” he says. “Caribbean primarily means English-speaking, Caribbean Basin country, but I include Bahamas and Belize in there although they are not really a part of the Caribbean Basin.”

Philp, on the other hand, has a clear distinction about the terms:

“West Indies refers to the former colonies of England – mostly English speaking. ‘Caribbean’ refers to the whole gumbo: English, French, Spanish, patwa, what-have-you speaking archipelago of islands, and the coastal regions of South and Central Americas. You could even extend the definition to places in North America such as the recently colonized Miami and the older cities in Louisiana and the Carolinas or Plantation America.”