Performing Resistance Memory and the Mobilisation of Afro-Indigenous Identity for Social Change in St Vincent

• Published in: Caribbean quarterly Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 76 - 87
• Main Author: Palmer, Kimberly J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mona Routledge 01.06.2014; University of the West Indies; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Cultural heritage; Culture; Diaspora; Roads & highways; Social change; New York
• ISSN: 0008-6495; 2470-6302
• DOI: 10.1080/00086495.2014.11671890

The United Labour Party government of St Vincent, in conjunction with the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan, recently built a bridge over the Dry River, so that it is much easier to cross - no more vehicles getting stuck in mounds of pumice and volcanic stones, or risking a flash flood if it was raining in the mountains. Speaking to these processes of identity formation within the context of the diaspora, Hua is essentially reiterating that "identities and communities are not fixed, rigid, or homogenous, but are instead fluid, always changing and heterogeneous",6 while Sneja Gunew concurs that diaspora is indeed the "endless process of travelling and change rather than simply being framed by leaving and arriving, with mourning and nostalgia as its dominant markers".7 In diasporic Garifuna communities across Central America, North America and elsewhere, Hua's and Gunew's ideas on a fluid and political process of building and re-building culmre and identity are evident in the ways that Garifuna collective memory pays tribute to, and mourns the loss of, the homeland settlement of Yurumein or St Vincent. Collective memory is thus a contested space of negotiation, within which various stories vie for a place in history. Because it is highly political, and because different stories are constantly battling for a place in official community narratives, analysing group memorial processes "is crucial to understanding a culmre ... it reveals collective desires, needs, self-definitions, and power struggles".12 Memorial "acts of transfer" involve the negotiation and performance of a "dynamic negotiation between past and present, the individual and the collective, the public and private, recalling and forgetting, power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia, consciousness and unconsciousness, fears and desires".13 The fluid, contested and constantly negotiated cultural memory of the Garifuna diasporic community is becoming a potent force to negate the enforced forgetting that has been imposed on the diasporic centre (the homeland, Yurumein) during the two-hundred-plus years since exile. Based on the premise that Garifuna culture remained in St Vincent post-1797, especially in areas associated with a historical Garifuna or Kalinago presence, community members are identifying as Garifuna in an effort to simultaneously re-envision the future and re-imagine and remember the past.