By James Cartwright, ICS Intern
Stories are vehicles. We can use them to take a ride through our past or to preview the future.
How we use stories and how we receive stories are important ways that communities find their purpose.
The essence of storytelling and the oral tradition of the Caribbean was the focus of the June 14 AllSPICE event, Telling Our Stories, Curating Our Lives’
Within the intimate auditorium of the World Bank J Building, two professors and a development expert – an eclectic mix – if I may so myself, stimulated a conversation about how digital media can ensure the preservation of Caribbean Diaspora history and culture.
The evening proceeded with a brief introduction and a discussion of Caribbean identity from a representative from the World Bank, Dr. Richard Cambridge, who heads up the African Diaspora Program. After introductions by Roger Caruth, the panelists Dr. Anestine Theophile-La Fond and Professor Andrew Millingtonm, both of Howard University, talked about how digital media can be a key medium for telling the story of West Indians in the Diaspora.
Dr. LaFond offered interesting thoughts on digitalization’s relative cultural utility making the point that digitalization saves time and money, gives access to information, destroys cultural boundaries, and allows for quick comparison of information. She shared the example of a 17-century text that was recently uncovered by Howard University librarians and while it’s nice to see the text, there are limitations for touch because of the aged nature of the book. As a complement – and in some cases alternative – digitalization allows preservation of very delicate but culturally significant artifacts.
Digitalization destroys the traditional boundaries between custodians of information and custodians of artifacts and that cost and access are the key drivers of its success. For her, the issue does not lie in the actual digital preservation, but in the fact that such digitalization and preservation cannot influence people’s appreciation of their history. Which if West Indians, in the Diaspora or at home, value their history and culture more, then the fight for preserving would be without debate. She pointed out it’s not just the Diaspora that is struggling with telling their story but in the region, governments have to be pressured to see the value in museums and historical sites. That MUST change.
Filmmaker and Howard University professor Andrew Millington relates a popular folktale of the camel and the scorpion, moving from one island to another for a fete. The scorpion says “let me go across the water on your back”, to which the camel replies “you are a scorpion, you will sting me”. After much resistance camel agrees, and they both get to the fete. They have a good time, and it’s time to go back home. They return the same way they came and just before they get back home, the camel feels a stinging pain in his hump. “Why? Said the camel.” Said the scorpion: “see brother this sting is in my nature, it was bound to happen sooner or later”.
Ask Millington and he will tell you unabashed that he is a storyteller. That’s what a filmmaker is, he says. And as a storyteller (filmmaker), there are two essential questions to be asked:
1) How do we use stories?
2)How do we receive stories?
On the politics of the griot: he quotes Pierre Janay “narration created humanity”. Stories are vehicles, he says, that take us to different places. They help us to organize time and make sense of events. They give us a sense of purpose. Space is a framework, a “practice place”. The space that we create for ourselves is a battleground of ideas and of memories. One day, as Professor Millington related, he met a fellow Bajan. He recognized this man’s accent , but when he questioned his identity he did not receive the positive response he anticipated. Instead of finding common ground with the man, he untapped hostility. The man simply stated that Barbados was a place that he didn’t want to ever go back to because his aunt was robbed three times and it was “a horrible island, dat place”.
In Professor Millington’s words, the man “made peace with the place that he had to create for himself and was content to never return”. We learned that in storytelling there is a measure of healing, and that the griot’s ability to testify as a storyteller is his greatest medicine. Battling with traditional historiographies, a Caribbean-American person has to define his own space . “We have to look for a source to mediate our reality, so we gather together through festival arts to recreate a sense of self, a sense of community, of identity.” Professor Millington then went on to describe what he called the ABCs of development for Caribbean peoples in America: affirming identity (discovering who are we), building community (carving out a group identity within our space and developing a vision), and recreating in the space (inserting oneself into history, thereby achieving power by telling one’s own story.) He reflected on Rex Nettleford’s expression that “telling our own story is the exigency of creating the concept of a Caribbean Civilization” and suggested that digital media was the ideal way to tell these stories in the 21st century, to build a bridge to islands. He quotes Lahming “Create a space, create a place, and one day we will find a monument to Caribbean Civilization…the role of the artist is to return a society unto itself”. When we tell digital stories they should allow members of the community to empower themselves.
At the end of the evening, Dr. Nelson offered remarks that emphasized all that was said. Caribbean Americans should embrace digitalization to build visibility, voice, and identity, she said. It can be a KEY to establishing a communal identity that would allow Caribbean Americans to deftly navigate the American cultural space. It is of paramount importance that Caribbean Americans begin to have a greater voice, that they have the agency to tell their own stories and to claim a piece of the American dream that everyone is here to claim.
