In the Diaspora
By Gabrielle Jamela Hosein
Gabrielle Jamela Hosein is a feminist, activist, poet and Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
Calypsonians and newspaper editors once ruled political commentary in the Caribbean. With technology such as the Internet increasingly available to citizens across the region, and especially accessed by youth, we need to begin to pay attention to what gets said in this virtual world.
Caribbean ‘blogs’ are Internet sites where ordinary people share aspects of their life, comment on economic and political events in the region, add personal opinions, distribute on-line clippings of newspaper or magazine stories, and even upload music, photos and videos. Blogs are both personal and political as they usually represent one person’s view of something going on. As well, they reflect a perspective that she or he wants to put across.
Blogs have become famous around the world because they enable investigative journalists and regular citizens to report from frontlines, in democratic or even military struggles, with little censure and immediate, international reach. This lack of state or even capitalist regulation is important in regions like the Caribbean where our governments have proposed, as part of CSME, to make journalists apply to their state for a yearly license to work in the media.
There are hundreds of bloggers from all over the region, writing in all our languages, commenting on everything from Jamaican dancehall to political corruption, Caribbean books and romance. One blog from Trinidad and Tobago, for example, focuses on challenging the proposed aluminum smelter and unsustainable development approaches. This blog can be found at http://drummit2summit.blogspot.com/. Two others are fake ‘secret blogs’ of Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday. During the last election campaign, they offered creative yet searing critique. If our Emperors are wearing no clothes, these blogs fearlessly let them know.
Blogs have recently begun to include video commentary and their authors post what they have to say not only on a single Internet site, but also on Facebook and on Youtube. Both enable thousands of people across the diaspora and region to share thoughts, communicate and organize. A good example is the YesTT video blog. Its videos talk about the link between basic services and good governance in accessible language, and can be found at http://www.yestt.org.
My own blog, ‘If I were Prime Minister…’ is also accessible on Youtube. I started the blog a few months ago because I was fed up with thinking of the things I would do that were not being done. I thought that there must be alternatives, new ideas and analysis – and imagination. I imagined the world differently: Local Government budgets planned differently, bicycle paths, trees along highways, bigger budgets for NGOs, new buildings that didn’t waste water or rely wholly on air conditioning, politicians who took public transport once a month so they knew what it was like, health care centres that could provide good care.
If every cook could govern, and possibly do better than the ruling politicians, then I could too. The blog was the long campaign, the truth spoken to power, the challenge to Prime Ministers, and it drew on a long history of Caribbean experimentation with creative and political expression.
Each episode can be found by typing Gab Hosein in Youtube or Google, more hilariously, by typing Trinidad Prime Minister. You will get to my video blog before you get to clips of Prime Minister Patrick Manning at various events and rallies. This replacing of official footage with unofficial critique is itself subversive culture jamming.
The first episode introduces the series and guiding manifesto. My position is that I have one voice, one vote and I’m vex, and looking for solidarity. The second episode takes on hubris, the Achilles heel of politicians and the basis for so much bad decision-making. This episode layers the PNM party school song of choice, ‘It’s a Love Thing’ (by the Whisperers) with thick irony and necessary humour as well as relevant statistics and global scope. The episode was based on the Prime Minister’s reference, in a platform speech, to a NACTA poll. Knowing the poll was not credible, he still used it to score cheap political points. As a citizen who thinks that leaders need to deal in realities and truths, and to do so with some standards, the blog became a space for me to say so.
The third episode wrestled with the goals of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting and the advocacy needed at the Copenhagen talks on Climate Change. The result was hard hitting deliberation on the basic governance and economic issues at the heart of true sustainability. The blog enabled political agenda-setting, creativity, global reach and free expression. There are increasingly moments like CHOGM and Copenhagen when our leaders and we need to make decisions for the future of the planet and all its inhabitants. The blog said that not only is the time now, the men in charge needed to take action because civil society was way ahead.
Each episode enables advocacy for transparent budgeting, accountable spending and good governance. Each tells our leaders, ‘watch us, we are watching you and we are a whole Caribbean generation; educated, unimpressed, on-line and uncensored’. Here we are, governors of tomorrow’s dew, as the late Lloyd Best would say, and we know what kind of world we want.
In this sense, technology is changing democratic participation. Not only do politicians, like US President Barack Obama, use video blogs to speak directly – and cheaply – to millions. Any one of us millions can speak back. All any of us need is a phone with a camera, access to an internet café or computer, and something to say to our leaders and the world.