Even when they try to make you nothing but a shadow, you can love yourself in any light or shade
This
is what it is to be of dark in this world: everybody thinks they have the right
to control you. That’s what the murder of George Floyd was about; along with
fear, greed, ignorance, hatred. The irony is that all the people who live life
trying to forcefully control others, manifestly show that they are not in
control of themselves.
The
following column, published so long ago, speaks to that: where people who
suffered under bigotry and the slaughtering controlling force of others turn
around and try to do the same.
Worldwide,
people of African blood face this challenge from anyone, even those with whom
they share experience, history, ancestry. Whether people physically hold you
down and kill you with a knee at the back of your neck; or openly discuss how
they might systematically enact the same murderous effect, the truth is that
being dark means facing constant, repeated, willful attack by people who think
themselves superior, but who are actually barely more than animalistic in their
approach to life and human beings.
(First published May 30th, 2003, under the column Brew. Douglar is pronounced: doe - as in deer, and glar to rhyme with star)
Pinch yourself, and know how others feel. – Japanese Proverb
HERE’S THE BURNING question: “Can the Indian
community ostracise Douglars?
Dr. Elisabeth Sieusarran seems to think they
can: “The Indian community has to decide how to handle the offspring of this
significant group locally referred to as Douglars. Do we accept them, or
ostracise them?”
Yes, “whatever course is adopted,” there will be
repercussions. That’s the fact of the matter the likes of Sieusarran fail to
take into consideration.
As we move further into the 21st
century, the world opens up to us with all its diversity. None of us can safely
afford to dish out discrimination. “Ostracise” is a damn strong word: “exclude
from society, favour, common privileges, etc: refuse to associate with”; or to
banish a person outright. Do “pure-blood” Indians have the power to do this to
Douglars? And what – if the power they have – form would this take?
Penned in and penned out
Will Douglars be banned from buying at
Indian-owned stores? Will we have to step off the pavement to allow Indians to
pass, the way Indians had to do for whites in South Africa under apartheid? Will
we not be allowed to sit next to Indians in school; work alongside them at
jobs; stand next to them in a line to pay a bill or buy a doubles?
And what to follow: stonings, cutlass attacks,
lynchings, mass murder, genocide? Don’t tell me that’s extreme! Because I
bloody well think it’s extreme to invite people to ostracise a “significant
group” in society!
What will happen to Indians, and to our nation
as a whole – of which they are an integral part – when Douglars, non-Indians
who accept Douglars, and even Indians who accept Douglars (and, yes, there are
those, or there wouldn’t have been any Douglars to begin with), decide to
ostracise unto them as they ostracised unto us?
Decades after Samuel Selvon wrote A Brighter Sun,
we’re still fighting that same fight his protagonist faced in that novel.
For better or for worse
My parents loved each other, and were married
till the day they each died. They both were the best of parents. They loved me –
their little, mixed-breed progeny, as they loved my brothers and sisters, and
all their even more mixed-breed grandchildren.
So since lives like ours make liars out of the
bigots among us, well hell! – no wonder they want to ostracise us, sweep us
under some rug and pretend we don’t exist, never existed; in the effing vain
hope that it will keep Indians from “inter-caste, inter-religious and
inter-racial” mixing.
But look! See the “inter-caste” in Sieusarran’s
words: showing clearly she accepts the concept of the caste system that deems
some Indians “untouchables.” Hey, if an Indian can see another Indian as
“untouchable,” what’s a Douglar to them?
Fleeing being "untouchable"
The hundreds of “untouchables” who came to this
land were searching for a good life – something they knew they could never make
in India, because of their assigned status there. Should they have stayed in
India to be treated like mongrels? But wait! No! “Mongrels” was the name given
to half-breed children of Indo-Afro birth. Douglar means “pothound.”
We marginalised mixed people, we Douglars, may
have started off in certain eyes as dogs, but we are that no longer ... never,
ever were actually. Not any more than the “untouchables” who stepped off the
Fatel Razack are that any longer, or ever were. None of us are what we once
were.
The aim of those who give ostracising as an
option, who try to pit the races against each other, is to spread hatred and
mistrust, to set people against their neighbour, co-workers, classmates, friends,
even family. It’s geared at goading belligerence, violence, bloodshed: calling
for people to “do all within their power” right after preaching a gospel of
hatred and rage.
The bigoted would have had my Indian grandmother outcast her very own grandchildren like me.
When peace and togetherness, tolerance and
betterment should be our goal, to help us be strong co-operatively against the
forces truly threatening us, instead we have leaders, elders, for God’s sake
educated people trying to incite bedlam ... war.
Terror’s turning tide
If it should come to pass that people do take up
arms against each others, will you racists sit safe in your high towers and
watch people killing, people dying, even those you claim to care for and call
your own? Will you watch their blood flowing as red as the blood of the person
of another race, and laugh and say, “This is what I wanted. Now I am happy. Now
my people are better off!”?
When Nazi Germany fell, when Hitler knew
countless numbers of his “beloved” people had been killed, did he laugh, I
wonder. Was it really his love for them that took them to the edge and resulted
in them being ostracised by the world instead?
It is Indian Arrival Day today in Trinidad and Tobago. It is my birthday today. The Indians who came are also in my bloodline. You would like to forget that. But, I am not here to be forgotten!
What will be forgotten one day, is the fact that
there were people who thought they could forever thrive by doing unto others as
they would not wish others to do unto them.
0 Comments