ROOTS, IDENTITY AND BEING
By Winfield Williams

I recently heard a young lawyer addressing some secondary school students on the matter of their roots. Her basic message to the students was that knowledge of their roots was very important to their future lives and that they should seek to find out about them. She further went on to suggest to the students that these roots were located in the cultural life of the Caribbean and not in the metropolitan countries outside the region.

Importance of Identity
Although she was not explicit about why roots were important, I suspected that she was trying to draw the students’ attention to the larger question of their identity - the question of who they are; from whence they came; and what they will be. This advice to the young people was very timely and very encouraging since we do not seem to bother much about it these days. Yet, it can be argued that it is the most important matter that all of us have to settle if we want to live comfortable and harmoniously with others.

In fact, at the risk of sounding reductive, I want to suggest that most of our social problems stem from our inability to sort out our individual and collective identities. It cannot be doubted that all of us are intuitively aware of the problem in our moments of existential crisis.

Of course, we hear, from time to time, oblique references to roots in our political rhetoric about nationalism and regionalism. In this Heritage month, we will get large doses of it in the usual ritual of the shows and spectacles that purportedly help to develop the Vincentian identity. But all of this is part of the game of "Ostrich" that we play when we are confronted with this perennial question that goes to the core of our being.

Roots and Identity
One certain thing is that the quest for roots does not necessarily lead us to self-identification. In fact, this quest has often led us into much confusion and self-misunderstanding instead of a stable and solid sense of who we are. Today, many of us continue to paddle in the same pond trying to be Africans, Americans and everything else but ourselves.

At the root of all these failures, is our unwillingness to accept the fact that the origins of our identity lie deep in our psyche. But it has always been a problem for us as Caribbean people to look deeply into ourselves. Perhaps, we avoid introspection because we are afraid of what we would find out about ourselves. This is not surprising given our experience with slavery and colonialism. It is, indeed, a miracle that we emerged from those situations with a sense of humanness. Despite this, however, we have learnt the incapacity to explore our minds and souls in order to determine who we are and how we should be.

Identity and Our Way of Being
Our way of being has been little more than a Pavlovian response to the images and other stimuli presented by societies that have little to do with what we are in essence.
One clear example of this is the automatic preference for ideas and artifacts coming from other cultures while we summarily dismiss anything that is homegrown. The result of this is that we define and evaluate ourselves almost exclusively in terms of those possessions we have acquired from a world outside of our own. This is how we have ended up with a social and individual pseudo-identity that is externally constituted and oriented. This is the source of the dependency syndrome that our leaders so often talk about. But again many of our leaders can do nothing about this problem that they have so clearly articulated. For they are themselves victims of the same psychological problem of which we speak.
Let me hasten to say that there is absolutely nothing wrong with looking outside of our culture to find ways of improving our lives. However, when we do this we must be really certain of who we are and what we want to be. This is especially important in the new world order that is being created. We cannot allow ourselves to be absorbed into a scheme of things where the more powerful are imposing on us their way of life. Our recent history has shown us that those who push those schemes see us as mere satellites and consumer markets.

Contrary to this, we have to see ourselves as a people trying to determine our own destiny; trying to create a healthy, comfortable and meaningful existence for our children. We cannot be satellites to a society whose industry and consumption patterns make them the chief destroyer of the ecology of the planet. Many people say that it is impossible to avoid this but others say, correctly, that to accept this way of life is self-destructive. It is, therefore, for this reason that we have to look deep into ourselves and determine who we really are and who we want to be.

Let me say that I feel very uncomfortable with the advocacy for the search for roots. This seems to come from a deep-seated national inferiority complex. I suspect we do this to show other people that we are viable. This is really not necessary. Further we seem to be using the yardstick of other cultures to define ourselves.

Of course, social comparison is important for the establishment of identity but it sometimes tends to result in the race to "keep up with the Joneses". And quite often the Joneses are heading for the precipice. This is why we need a strong sense of who we are in this perilous world. We need especially to train our children to look into themselves in order to sort out those needs that they feel. When we do this we enable them to respond to their world in a confident and meaningful way.


13^th March 2005

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