The diaspora in time to come

DAVID BRIZAN

CALYPSONIAN Crazy speculated in his 2000 masterpiece In Time to Come what the social world might look like in the future. Some of his prognostications have already come to pass. America did have a black president, and marijuana does sell in shops. Crazy unfortunately had no words for the future of Trinidadians and West Indian immigrants in New York City. They seem to share a fate of immigrant dilemma similar to that described by Jay Caspian Kang about "Asian-Americans."

In May 1973, I witnessed a dozen New York subway police officers descend on a wayward black Trinidadian subway rider with such violence as would rival Lord Blakie’s Steelband Clash. He had done nothing more than refused to answer a question. That very month his sister graduated from New York State University with a doctorate in economics. They had both gone to the diaspora to improve their lots.

The "diaspora" is indeed a melting pot where disparate histories encounter comparable circumstances and dissipate in the evolution of not too dissimilar dreams melting in another paradigmatic pot of emotional dissonance and uncertainty.

My sisters came to America to pursue a better future. They got paid menial wages for menial undertakings. One hundred years from now, their descendants may praise their ability to reshape a world seemingly inimical to social transformation but a world that is exactly right for reshaping.

The vision-to-accomplishment dream will soar, must soar, past the threatening social forces and reaction of conservative minds, bringing to bear a convergence of acquired competencies born out of the same contingencies of current angst.

Their poet asks the question:

Who is them boldface, big bottom West Indian

with rock-and-mauby eyes

in the steel and concrete

of never-ending avenues?

Carnival red, not soft enough

not loud enough?

Has Trou Macaque erupted?

Do northern clouds no longer suck

the breasts of El Tucuche

till she climaxes in a blaze

along the May slopes

of Santa Cruz?

(from this writer’s Poems of Trou Macaque)

Who is now asking the questions that would entice a movement from the secret servitude of immigrant status that would spare us the violence of a resentful group of people who hate us because we made the wrong choice of skin colour when we got born?

We can change that by becoming a Le Roy Clarke type-of-poet people. He urged us to change the way we talk. Changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are, is to change what, for our own purposes, we are.

There are philosophers who believe that a sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the new West Indian immigrant. It is in this sense that the Trinidadian Clarke (1981) sees the role of “a new poet, who claims neither name nor roof, who will sacrifice child or field.”

Which immigrant will draw on the ability of a “new poet” to create new distinctions or invent new ways to work with new distinctions about continuously generating new possibilities around the possibility that immigrants are? All American genius was carved in this fire of a “new poet,” who brought rockets out of the fertile imagination of dreamers and unto the moon and beyond. This “new poet” is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his speaking, of his conduct, and really feels such a responsibility with heart and soul. She will shift the gaze of the diaspora from one of unconscious servitude to that of an unshakeable commitment to changing the world. Yes, she can!

I am proposing that a deliberate carving of a responsible and rugged individualism will access our human evolutionary gift of survival, yielding fruits of human solidarity and a new paradigm of other dreads, in the ongoing evolutionary dreams of human survival. Immigrants did that before. They can do it again. This disparate West Indian diaspora can blaze a trail of freedom as another unstoppable countervailing force against the Trumpian obsession with foreclosing on the valid aspiration of those from “s---hole” countries.

But this magical moment will require an evolutionary gestalt in which the individual experience of the passage of time blends beyond the transience of social distinctions of egregiously stupid stereotypes, on the welcoming doorsteps of spirituality. Which immigrant, in time to come, will take up the mantle of emancipation from continuing mental slavery and the desire to surcease from pain and identity anguish? In time to come.