Black Lives Matter ... the Caribbean edition

It blows my mind even after all these years of schooling that it would have been a completely different and better world if and only if the British had not wandered off those islands.  Of course I am biased.  But, come on!

Whenever I get way too angry about how the colonizers messed up the Subcontinent forever, I console myself that it could have been worse.  Like how the Congolese were butchered and maimed by blood-thirsty Belgians under their king.  Or how the Dutch massacred people in ... oh, the list is long, dear reader.  In the process of consoling myself, I then end up getting angrier about all of us from, and in, the "shitholes" who were terrorized by the melanin-impaired from the cold climes.

Anyway ... a couple of months ago, forced by the coronavirus to watch movies at home, we ended up wasting our time on a C-grade movie that was set in England.  One of the bizarre sub-plots involved the backstory of how the father earned his fabulous riches from the sugar plantations that he owned in the Caribbean.  This sub-plot that was left dangling hinted that the father was not any good-hearted colonizer.

The British did make quite some gold out of those plantations, which is why Trevor Noah wittily joked about the Common"wealth" games and how Jamaica might possibly get the gold back one medal at a time.

How important was Jamaica and the Caribbean to those godawful British?

Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important—tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica—were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses, the transformation of major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in national wealth.

Fortunes were made far away from the cold and dark and damp British Isles.  How were the fortunes created?

We all know the answer.  It is one word.

Slavery.

All this abundance, luxury, and social progress at home derived from the brutal exploitation of huge numbers of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic (thousands of whom were brought over to the British Isles as well): by the eighteenth century, Britons were the world’s preeminent slave traders.

Nearly two years ago, when I was in Chennai for a longer-than-usual stay in Chennai, I went to the local literary festival.  One of the talks that I attended was by Venki Ramakrishnan--the Nobel laureate.  In selling the importance of science, he stretched his argument by talking up science, technology, and the industrial revolution, as having transformed Britain.  He never said anything about the role of slavery and colonization, which provided Britain with plenty of resources and fortunes.  All the looting!  During the discussions, there was question about this, but he flailed.  He should have instead stuck to talking about the RNA!

If only we would educate kids about the history of these slave traders!

Even the sociopathic enslavers in America were empathetic humans compared to the British enslavers in the Caribbean who inflicted a "sickening degree of extreme violence" on their human chattels.  As difficult as it was to read the following sentences, I forced myself to read them in order to truly understand what it meant to be enslaved by these atrocious creatures from Britian:

In Barbados in 1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved to anger about the bloody flogging of some other slaves: for his “insolent words” he was burned at the stake. At other times, black people were judicially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quartered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,” or publicly starved to death while suspended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).
Beyond such horrific formal penalties lay the lawless universe of everyday enslavement, in which whites tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated black people with complete impunity. Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals. Like almost all West Indian whites, he also took for granted that they needed to be frequently and harshly punished. He flogged them incessantly and savagely, rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice, and urine into the scarified flesh to increase their suffering. At his whim, any man or woman might be scourged, branded, chained, dismembered, or exposed naked in the stocks day and night, covered in treacle and swarmed by biting flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he would then force another slave to defecate into the injured victim’s mouth, and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.

This was the white man's burden to civilize the non-white world that Kipling championed!

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men"

And what comes with enslaving people?  Hint: One of the rallying chants at the protest movements is directed against ... the heavily armed police.  (Read Jill Lepore's essay on that, and you too will want to defund the police!)

It was the case in Jamaica:

To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed writings of the planters’ leading apologist, Edward Long, who’d lived through the rebellion, helped develop new, “scientific” theories of black inferiority and racial danger

Seems very contemporary, right?

Ready for the icing on this bloody cake?

[The] independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.”⁶ In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. Black lives, white rights.

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

Hello! My name is ... Suriname?

After five weeks of misspelling my name, and me often pointing out the incorrect name, the student seems to have finally figured out how to spell my name.  But, at least this is a student who made that mistake.  A senior citizen takes the proverbial cake with how she butchered my name as "Shram."  I suppose I should be happy that she didn't make an "Ashram" out of my name!

My grandmother said that in the traditions, they gave children god's names so that it then gave them yet another opportunity to think about the divine.  And she, like many elders, didn't care much for the modern names that don't have any godly interpretations.

Sometimes, acquaintances shorten my name to "Sri." If these are people whom I might rarely encounter, then I don't waste my time and energy to correct them.  In my mind, I take it as they are addressing me with the honorific "sri" from the old country.  To others that I might interact with more, I politely tell them that I go by my first name in its complete form--Sriram.

But, never in a million years would I have ever imagined that people might have been duped into thinking that after three months of travel they would meet the god Sri Ram.  And that is exactly how some were misled, writes the author of the book that I have been commissioned to review.

Think about the Subcontinent in the 1860s and 1870s.  The bastards had a tight squeeze on India and were extracting every possible penny that they took with them to London.  Meanwhile, some of their colonies far away needed labor because the damn good-hearted managed to screw up the African slave trade.  So, they created an indentured labor scheme that would then take people from the Subcontinent to halfway around the world to the Caribbean.

The problem was the local culture and the fear of the unknown.  But, the colonial masterminds knew well how to tap into the culture.  "These recruiters knew the inner workings of indenture and skillfully used their experience to inveigle intending indentured Indians."  Bastards, I tell ya!

What strategies did they use?  "For instance, recruiters told the intending Indians that they were going to Sri-Ram instead of Suriname.  To Indians, Ram indicates a religious place that sounds like the Ramayana ... "

The bastards knew their enemy really well; so well that they knew exactly how to string them along.  Sociopaths are experts at this, remember?  "Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person."

Thus, Suriname became Sri-Ram!  And more twists to the names of places so that gullible Indians would fall for it.  And they did.  They boarded ships to Mirich Desh (Mauritius), Chinidad (Trinidad), and others.  For the long voyage: "The sea voyage from India to the Caribbean is about eleven thousand miles."  Took them about a 100 days, to Sri-Ram. Sad!

Broken history. Broken hearts.

“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.”

Wrote Horace Walpole.  The same Walpole who also gave the English language the word Serendipity.

To think that I had to come to the US as a graduate student and then learn about the horrors that these bastards unleashed upon the browns!  How twisted that the history that we studied in a "free" India was merely the European version :(

In contemporary India, the fair-skinned rulers have been replaced by uber-nationalistic Hindu leaders.  The curse of the East India Company haunts the old country.  Heck, it haunts the entire Subcontinent and the world!

So, yes, there is immense schadenfreude--I won't deny that--when the old colonizer is all twisted about itself thanks to Brexit.

What an ironical twist of fate that the melanin-deficient Brits who roamed the far corners of the earth, imposed their customs, religion, language, and themselves too, on the browns everywhere, are now upset that other melanin-deficient ones from the continent across the channel are pouring into their precious island!

If only we humans learnt the lesson not to mess up other people's lives!  But we don't.

And, so, here i am thinking and writing in English as a result, instead of carrying on with one of the oldest languages ever.  I am often reminded of this:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

The word "pariah" of course coming from the Subcontinent.  A word that in its usage in the old country that is as awful as the "n"-word in this culture.

Why this unleashing of anti-colonial emotions?

I am reading a book about people from India who were brought to the West Indies.  I have been commissioned to review that book.  In the formal review, I cannot bring such emotions.  So, I will vent here, and then take the sober academic writing there ;)

Yes, Virginia, colonialism exists!

I was an intern in a regional planning agency in Los Angeles, during my graduate school days, thanks to this departed friend.  The internship was one of the many awkward and uncomfortable phases of my life, but that is a different story for another day.

My supervisor was an African-American woman.  Boy was she excited when Clinton beat Bush!  There were two younger women of color who worked in the adjacent cubicles.  Both were full-time employees.  One was from Eritrea.  She was the first person, and the only one ever, from Eritrea with whom I have talked to in real life.

The other woman was from from the Caribbean, she said.  St. Thomas, she added.

My reaction was simple. "St. Thomas?"

Hey, there is only so much one can know.  Life does not teach everything all at once to everybody.  Learning is a lifelong activity.

It was before the days of the world wide web.  Back then, we learnt from each other.  I asked her a whole bunch of questions about St. Thomas.  Including whether they too enjoyed Belafonte's songs.

I thought I had learnt everything important that was to be learnt about St. Thomas.  Of course, wrong I was.  I had no idea all these years that:

One hundred years ago, the islands were called the Danish West Indies. Denmark sold the islands in 1917 to the United States for $25 million.

The Danish West Indies.  One speck of a tiny European country colonizing remote parts of the world, the old country included.

St. Thomas was in the news, but briefly.  Hurricane Irma smashed into the islands there.  Even though the island, along with a few others, is a part of the US, well, the people there aren't "real Americans."  We Americans are the colonizers, and they are the natives who are part of the whole but without any voting rights.

The island has been devastated.

When I finally received a text from my Aunt Cecile on Thursday, she wrote, “The post office is gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” I texted back. She responded with a list: “Grocery stores gone. Schools gone. Hospital gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” I asked again. “Gone,” she texted again. “Demolished. No roof. No walls.”

Imagine the scenario.  A tiny island. No where to run to.  You are stuck.  And now without anything.  Not even food and fresh water.  And you expect your government to come to your rescue, right?

Wrong!

Because, they are not "real Americans."

Virgin Islanders are led by a president who makes clear delineations between “real” Americans and all the rest. True, the people of the Virgin Islands didn’t vote for this current president. The people of the Virgin Islands didn’t vote for any president of our United States of America, because voting in the general election is not a privilege of citizenship that the federal government extends to us. Like the citizens of Puerto Rico, Guam and the other United States territories, we are not yet real Americans.

We Americans do not care when cyclones batter Bangladesh. We don't care even for the Virgin Islands.

No wonder TV networks and even the president’s homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, can’t seem to get it right.
In a press briefing last Friday, Mr. Bossert appeared to chastise the news media for not covering the government response to Hurricane Irma’s assault on the Virgin Islands. Watching him, I held my breath, wondering if now someone would claim us. But he mentioned the evacuation of American citizens from the Virgin Islands in the same way he talked about the evacuation of American citizens from St. Maarten and St. Martin. I took him to mean: We are evacuating the real Americans from these foreign Caribbean islands.

It is like how post-Katrina, many commentators were referring to the people fleeing Louisiana as "refugees"--because "real Americans" are white and, therefore, the non-whites were like those running away from Eritrea!

I suppose the "real Americans" are very happy with this real-American president!