My beloved Belize is set to become 39 years old tomorrow, and I’ve been alive for two decades and a trinity of those years. I have the distinction of never being a British subject, but my mother and her mother cannot claim the same. As I sit in a room with my Garinagu brother Wasani as we travel to study at the university (I am three years his senior), I am thinking, as I am every year, about how far we have come as a politically independent state. Where has the time gone? What is the national perspective and the lens through which we will be required to look beyond the horizon of a pandemic that has made practical the Shock Doctrine? Rt. Hon. Said Musa is on my mind tonight, a man who has given Belize 46 years of his life in public life. A man whose son has sat in parliament with him, a man who is the father of one of Belize’s greatest creative minds.

Mr. Musa is a man who has no doubt met with triumph and disaster in his time as leader of this nation. I’ve never had a conversation with him and only listened to him speak once outside the House while I was attending Saint John’s College Junior College. I recall listening as he, with his signature silver hair, and in his signature tone, spoke to us and reminded us of the importance of service. My most dominant memory of him is from a sitting of the lower house. I believe it was the same day he abstained from voting on the Referendum Bill. I sat in the gallery behind the Opposition for a bit on that day, watching as he flipped through the pages of his notes. I was impressed by his penmanship, impressed that he still wrote out all his notes with an ink pen and then impressed by his diplomatic prowess when he finally stood up to make his contributions, whether I agreed with them or not. Forty-six years is two lifetimes for me, and despite his orbiting the dialectic nature of Belizean politics, there is something to say thanks for. As I endearingly wrote Evan X Hyde on the half-century anniversary of his and Ismail Shabazz’s sedition trial this year, the dues have been paid, and I do hope he takes time to smell the roses. I do hope he writes a biography. His legacy is an important piece of the patchwork in Belize’s identity.

I am thinking of the frequency modulation of 2000 plus 20 Belize. Have we successfully impressed the wave of liberation into the minds and hearts of born Belizeans and those who have transitioned into Belizean identity? What is the Belizean identity? What were the hopes and dreams of the 1981 21-year-old? I listened to the Bocas Lit Fest earlier in the day and was wildly impressed by the presentation, “A Question of Leadership”, on the backdrop of literary works by panelists former Prime Minister of Jamaica, PJ Patterson; Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belize, Godfrey Smith; and Professor at University of Toronto, Alissa Trotz. The three delved into the topic of contemporary Caribbean leadership with ease and a visceral nature that I have never experienced, dissecting and consolidating history and history in the making of the Global South Caribbean. Our history was interrupted and stunted by that of genocide-fueled colonialists, leaving behind the residuals of neocolonialism that we are still struggling with and navigating through today. You see, our Independence is often romanticized and encapsulated in a narrative that is somewhat incomplete, because it is presented as if that was the only thing happening in 1981. Our Independence came at the height of the Grenadian revolution. Two years later Maurice Bishop was killed. Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and that same year someone tried to assassinate him. Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, and was Europe’s first female prime minister. Jamaica had just had a spate of violent elections. Walter Rodney was killed in 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana.

I can go on and on with this, and here is little Belize thinking, or at least promoting a thwarted reality, that we are so blessed to be Mother Nature’s best-kept secret. “Coincidence? The universe is rarely ever that lazy.” We often tout our badge of honour of having a peaceful and constructive revolution that led to our independence, but I don’t think we can claim a non-violent history. The fairytale story of Belize’s becoming has to be deromanticized for us to achieve true consciousness-raising. I believe a famous writer calls it a decolonializing of thought. The debt we have had to pay because of this colonial narrative has been exponential, and moving into our 40th year of Independence in 2021, it is the only bill that must be killed.

Belize is much to unpack on the eve of our Independence, and so I consoled myself by watching episodes of the United Kingdom’s ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’ Happy Independence Day to my home, my heart, Belize!

We can’t be content to carry on the business in our countries based on relationships which were determined in the past in which we had no involvement in which we could not participate.-PJ Patterson, Bocas Lit Fest 2020

Written on Independence Day Eve, September 20, 2020 and first published on curiousmusings.home.blog.