Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean
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Alissa Trotz: Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean CGDS, The UWI, Cave Hill Campus Working Paper No. 14, March 2008 Alissa Trotz Associate Professor, New College, University of Toronto, Now Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Director of the Undergraduate Caribbean Studies Program New College, University of Toronto ISBN: 978-976-621-157-4 Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS) The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus Working Paper Series Editorial Committee Prof. Eudine Barriteau, Head, CGDS, NBU, UWI, Cave Hill Campus; Editor, CRGS Prof. Patricia Mohammed, CGDS, The UWI, St. Augustine Dr. Letnie Rock, Head and Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Government, Sociology and Social Work, The UWI, Cave Hill Campus Ms Sheila Stuart, Social Affairs Officer – Gender, ECLAC Dr. Keith Nurse, Director, Shridath Ramphal Centre for International Trade, Law, Policy and Services, The UWI, Cave Hill Campus Dr. Jessica Byron, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Government, Sociology and Social Work, UWI, Mona Editorial Assistant Ms Carmen Hutchinson, CGDS, NBU, UWI, Cave Hill Campus 327 www.sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 9 ISSN 1995-1108 Keywords: Caribbean gender relations, migration, Caribbean development, globalisation, regional integration, Caribbean diaspora How to cite Trotz, Alissa. 2015. “Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies issue 9, 327- 372 328 Alissa Trotz: Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean Editor's Note Working Paper No.14 is based on a lecture delivered by Dr. Alissa Trotz, Associate Professor, New College University of Toronto, USA. Dr. Trotz delivered the 13th lecture in the series, Caribbean Women: Catalysts for Change on November 16th 2007; this series is dedicated to honouring the memory of Dame Nita Barrow, Governor General of Barbados 1990-1995, and the first subject of the research project, Caribbean Women: Catalysts for Change. As a Caribbean feminist and scholar, Dr. Trotz mines the intersecting sites of diaspora, identities and constantly shifting Caribbean political economy. In the process she offers a searing assessment of a creeping social fragmentation in the region facilitated by the politics of polarization and division. While maintaining that we need to move past defensiveness and to engage each other, she proffers a different future and concludes with the gift of sociality. It is a social blue print from the indigenous Wai Wai of Guyana on how we can remain each other’s keepers. She uses three dimensions of Dame Nita’s public life to organize her lecture on the theme “Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean.” These themes are the Social Geography of a Pan-Caribbean Identity, Caribbean Movement and Political Conflict, and Social Justice and Gender Equality. Examining the operations of gender in each of these themes, Trotz explores how a collective social amnesia has worked to effect the marginalization of Caribbean peoples by deploying the politics of polarization and division. She also suggests ways in which Caribbean peoples might rework narratives of exclusion through a preliminary discussion of counter-memories embedded in practices that do not follow the logic of borders internally or externally implied. Alissa Trotz’s analysis is insightful, rich and compelling. She presents a rarity in the academic community because while she sojourns in the academic community, 329 www.sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 9 ISSN 1995-1108 she traverses the terrains of Caribbean communities whether diasporic or state defined. As a scholar activist her voice and vision are clear and compelling. In the process she reveals the multiple and shifting realities of Caribbean women. Trotz uses these complex realities to question our understanding of migration, working class communities, regional integration and Caribbean development, and the place of gender in all of these sites. 330 Alissa Trotz: Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean1 Introduction My paternal grandmother died in 2003 at the age of 95. Some years earlier, she had begun to lose her short-term memory, although this did not diminish her ability to recall events in (what was for me) the distant past, complete with time of day, what she was wearing and doing, in absolutely astonishing and minute detail. There is a medical diagnosis for this condition, but in the context of what I want to offer, I sometimes wonder whether my grandmother’s selective forgetting metaphorically indexed a deeper sense that, in the dusk of her life, there was little that was memorable in the contemporary Caribbean. This is a provocatively harsh opening, one that a glance at any Human Development Report – which notes that the Caribbean experience is one of political stability and relatively high social indicators - will challenge, but for Caribbean women and men like myself who came of age or were born in the decade of the 1980s and after, I say this deliberately in order to register that there is little of the anticipation and excitement that animated the pre- independence era. There is little sense of how popular discontent with the emerging political order’s refusal to effect a radical break from the colonial past was channeled collectively, and of the energy that infused a number of social and political experiments in the decade of the 1970s, culminating in the Grenadian revolution in 1979. A vibrant women’s movement came into its own during these years, drawing on the creative energies of those who had been nurtured by the promise of citizenship, only to find that the place of women in an independent Caribbean was anything but equal.2 This was the period that produced Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), which included women from 331 www.sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 9 ISSN 1995-1108 Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, as well as calls, led by the Global South, for a New International Economic Order. These times, which in different ways appeared to offer rich and radical hope of transformation for all across the region, seem lost now from the vantage point of a present caught up in the singular logic of neoliberal globalization.3 In these times democracy is linked to the free market, where commodification and consumerism extend into more and more aspects of our lives, where purchasing power is increasingly the criteria for citizenship, where a US-led war of terror is carried out in the name of protecting these so-called freedoms, a war that has touched down in the Caribbean in holding pens in Guantanamo Bay. In the Caribbean, more than two decades after the introduction of structural adjustment programmes,4 the region’s future seems more than ever mortgaged to the interests of international capital. What do we have to show for it? The region’s dependence on single and primary crops, (the Caribbean remains wedded to an unsustainable agricultural model (Weis 2007) and services (particularly tourism) has not shifted. This underlines the vulnerability of our overall position even for the more developed economies among us that have not, for example, been affected by the steady erosion of preferential arrangements under the WTO vis-à-vis sugar and banana regimes. In broad terms, we face an extremely high rate of HIV infection, by some counts the second highest infection rates in the world. There are growing income inequalities in many countries; alarmingly high levels of violence, which has been described by economist Norman Girvan (2007) as poor-on-poor, poor-on- not-so-poor, state-on-poor, community-on-community. Levels of functional illiteracy are increasing, accompanied by limited job opportunities and unsustainable out-migration rates. A recent study found that between 76% and 83% of the highly skilled workforces of Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago migrated to OECD countries.5 332 Alissa Trotz: Gender, Generation and Memory: Remembering a Future Caribbean Notwithstanding some feminist successes and claims of male marginalization (a most misplaced accusation which has been effectively challenged by Eudine Barriteau (1997) and Linden Lewis (2003) among others, but which according to Gabrielle Jamela Hosein (2007) has greatly complicated women’s organizing) women continue to lag behind men in political representation and experience higher rates of unemployment and poverty. This is especially so among female- headed households, even as domestic and sexual violence continue to be a daily feature of women’s lives in the region. Unlike the momentous shifts that we have witnessed in Latin American politics in recent years, in which candidates (one of them indigenous, two of them women) have been elected on platforms that – to varying degrees, from Venezuela to Argentina – openly challenge the impact of neoliberal reforms, there is no sense of a sea change on the political horizons of the Caribbean6. With rare exceptions the difference between parties is one of degree and not substance. While the logic of the Washington Consensus is not the subject of fundamental critical appraisal in public debate, its fait accompli status is never challenged. I am no pollster, but judging from my conversations with friends and colleagues and observations of the state of play in countries like Guyana, there appears to be widespread disaffection