Wednesday, July 10, 2024
I read this letter to the editor by one Ray Meyers. I don’t think I know the gentleman, but he wrote about the above piece of music that is used in graduation ceremonies in the Jewel. I agree with Mr. Meyers that we should have our own graduation themed music. It can be very hard to get rid of some of our colonial traditions, believe me I know. I’m still an Anglophile myself; I think it’s one of the most beautiful countries in the world. I love English history, the pomp and circumstance of the medieval and renaissance kings and queen. I love their literature and their different traditions. I love all that while never forgetting that they were colonizers, slave traders, and that they raided the wealth of much of Africa and Asia, and brought us to the Caribbean as slaves to make them richer. So, no, I’m not giving them a pass; but this passive admiration is there.
When you are chattel, when your body and heart and soul is owned by someone else, and I’m not talking about a lover, I’m talking about an owner, you tend to submit to them in order to stay alive. They make you feel that you couldn’t survive without them, with all that conditioning they drill into your innocent mind. Malcom X had this riff about the house slave; he used the N word to describe them. If the master was sick, the slave would say, we sick. What a ting!
Mr. Meyers is correct that after 43 years of independence we still have not been able to figure out who we are, to assume our own identity. We have given up some of the Britishness in us, but we just traded it in for Uncle Sam’s influence and traditions. For goodness sake, some of us celebrate the 4th of July and Thanksgiving as though they were part of our DNA! It is so embarrassing in so many ways!
But, as the publisher of this newspaper, and many others have lamented about before, over and over again, it all stems from our theocratic educational system! Government after government have ceded our right to know our history; they have allowed the church to decide what is taught, and what is fraught, regarding our genesis and our exodus. The creole culture is disappearing at an alarming rate; the Mayas don’t really know the sacrifices their ancestors went through in Yucatán! The slavery and the indentured and the abuse and the genocidal and religious wars that they had to withstand, and survive! As Sergeant Shultz would say in Hogan’s heroes, “We know nothing!” I envy the Garinagu people; they suffered abuse and racism, but they know their history! Thus, their resilience and their stressing education as a means of survival and advancement!
But even their communities are losing their identities, being swept up in the clutches of our Big Brother. Hopkins, Barangu, Seine Bight, owned by the gringos! Placencia, San Pedro, Caye Caulker, Consejo, the Cayo District, losing their identities! Why? because we let others decide what we teach and what we learn! We didn’t have that burning patriotism burnished into our hearts and minds; we were denied the rights of citizenship in our own country, by being denied our history. To be thyself, you must first know thyself. We know nothing!
Glen