#caribbean indians

[reasoningdaily]

Indian immigrants to Guyana in the 1800’s

To be precise, I am an Indo-Guyanese-American: The mother of all hyphenated identities and an illustration of a historic journey from India to the Caribbean. This heritage is commonly packaged in a number of different terms, all of which are heavily used as referential identifiers: Indo-Guyanese. Indo-Caribbean. Caribbean. West Indian. Indian. It is most aptly described as the Indo-Caribbean experience—an experience that is shared by Indians living throughout the Caribbean diaspora and thus serving as the blueprint for my existence.

This unique cultural disposition is why the Indo-Caribbean are able to culturally identify with public figures ranging from Hasan Minhaj to Nicki Minaj. It is why bursts of Caribbean intonation in Rihanna’s voice blanket me in the comfort of home, while the ballads of A.R. Rahman awaken pained demons within me, crying to connect with a history that was ripped from my hands long before I was born. 

My parents hail from Guyana, a small country on the northern coast of South America. Guyana is one of the original colonies of the British West Indies and, although not located in the Caribbean Sea, the CARICOM Seat of Secretariat is located in Georgetown, Guyana, thus rendering the country a crucial member of the Caribbean family.  [Read more]

[ourrace-sexraceandculture]

The Original American Indians, the Black Indians.

[nenan]

First ever gay couple (Melinda Angel and Danika Marquez) to get married in Curaçao on July 27th 2024, after the official legalization of same-sex marriage on July 12th 2024.

[neges]

📍Morne Puilboreau, Haïti 🇭🇹

via @jeanoscar.a

[bossymarmalade]

After just using the well-known Caribbean phrase "massa day done" as a tag in reference to the sun finally setting on the British Empire, I thought I'd revisit Dr. Eric Williams' famous 1961 speech decrying the appointment of a rich white man to political office as a "feather in the cap" of the party, the speech where the term was solidified in our culture as shorthand for self-determination and independence. And I couldn't stop laughing because it was exactly the way that a certain class of educated West Indian STILL talks to this very day when irritated:

This pack of benighted idiots, this band of obscurantist politicians, this unholy alliance of egregious individualists, who have nothing constructive to say, who babble week after week the same criticisms that we have lived through for five long years, who, nincompoops that they are, think that they can pick up any old book the day before a debate in the Legislative Council and can pull a fast one in the Council by leaving out the sentence or the paragraph or the pages which contradict their ignorant declamations for people like these power is all that matters.

I love this aspect of Caribbean language-ways and how we adhere to that particular era of English that came over on the boats. It's like how the specific form of Bhojpuri spoken by East Indian indentured labourers didn't develop in an Indian context but alongside/blended with other language groups in Trinidad & Tobago, and why our words for things don't scan with Hindi-speakers from the sourceland.

When I moved back to Canada from Trinidad and spoke with other Indian people, sourceland Indians, they never knew "what I was" or what I was saying when I used Trini Hindi. It was a source of embarrassment then, constantly having to explain that we from the diaspora are still Indian and also distinctly individual, but now I love it. My sister nearly physically fought some dude in a kebab shop in England over her identifying as Trini-Canadian rather than South Asian because he said she "wasn't proud of who she was".

We have to tick "South Asian" on forms because there's no space for us and any reference to Caribbean is Afro-Caribbean, but that's not really what I identify as. I'm the granddaughter of those sugar cane plantation workers who were told (in 1926!) "the less education your children have, the better". I'm the daughter of a man who grew up in the plantation barracks where the sugar employers thought it "unnecessary to provide adequate sanitary facilities for their employees, because the workers would not use them".

Massa day done. It's a powerful phrase when you're constantly decolonizing your own identity in the face of a world that isn't aware of what you are.

Massa Day Done, Sahib Day Done, Yes Suh Boss Day Done. - dr. eric williams

[a-meh]

[guayaba-podrida]

Caribbean Writers & Their Art: History, the Caribbean and the Imagination (1991)

Kamau Brathwaite in conversation with Edward Baugh as a part of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute at the University of Miami.

Speaking on comparative literature in the Caribbean, Brathwaite says, "It is necessary that we do this because the Caribbean although artificially divided into English-speaking, French-speaking, Dutch-speaking, Spanish-speaking, is really part of a whole underground continent of thought and feeling and history."

Commenting on the fragmentation of the region he remarks, "In the days of the Caribs, you could take a canoe and travel easily from St. Lucia to Martinique. Now with the arrival of Europe, despite Europe's technology, it is almost impossible to move from St. Lucia to Martinique, and let me explain that they are within hailing distance from each other."

[nellybrook]

Belize Born & Raised 🇧🇿

[ourrace-sexraceandculture]

The First Native Americans

[island-pickney]

One love

[neges]

Ayiti, Hayti, Haïti — Land Of High Mountains.

📍Cap-Haïtien, Haiti via Jean Oscar Augustin

[ihearttseliot]

[thebellekeys]

Artists: Michel-Jean Cazabon (1813-1888)

[guayaba-podrida]

For the native poet like myself, that is where the nostalgia comes from. All the places where my poetry came from have been taken over by hotels. And they now squat upon my metaphors.

Kamau Brathwaite, "Poetics, Revelations, and Catastrophes: an Interview with Kamau Brathwaite" (2005)