Whenever natural disasters – or other events that legitimately merit media attention – occur in the region, reporting ‘prejudices’ frequently exclude those tiny pockets of Caribbean people who occupy small geographic spaces in bona fide Caribbean territories, but which rarely for any reason – save and except some earth-shattering occurrence that simply cannot be ignored – attract the attention of the mainstream regional and/or international media. Here one might add that this deficiency ought to have been remedied years ago through robust and sustained interventions by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the ‘parcels’ of ignored territory being bona fide members of larger territorial spaces of the Community.
Truth be told, it is a glaring oddity, and worse, that CARICOM has simply never made any serious and sustained attempt, that we know of, to raise the respective profiles of what one might call the ‘forgotten groups’ of Caribbean people whom, over time, have lived and died in those ‘forgotten spaces’, many, perhaps even the majority, having never really ever having internalized what one might call a sense of country or an understanding of their Caribbeanness.
With any luck, these altogether ‘unrecognized’ portions of Caribbean spaces (if indeed they can be described as such) are largely perceived as disconnected spaces, their Caribbean-ness legitimized solely by the particular spaces occupied on a map. Here one might add – and the experience of Beryl’s onslaught validates this point – cut off as they are from the bigger geographic space of which they are legitimately a part of, they tend to attract the attention of what we refer to as ‘the Community’ only in the face of the most compelling, and, invariably, – unpalatable occurrences.
Whether or not the rest of the region will ever become aware of the full extent of Beryl’s rampage on those spaces is not a question that can be categorically answered here, the greater likelihood being that the various regional capitals to which they are geographically joined always, in times of crisis, have what we in Guyana refer to as ‘bigger fish to fry’.
Here it is a matter of bona fide Caribbean citizens living then dying without ever having felt that socio-cultural ‘connect’ with the wider geographic space in which they live. All of this, mind you, is occurring more than half a century after the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas which, among other things, made those now ‘forgotten’ spaces bona fide parts of a Community which, for the most part, are blissfully unaware of their very existence.
However much we (at least some of us) might seek to assert to the contrary, these communities – not just spaces but portions of wholes under international law, their geographic bona fides accounts for almost always only in circumstances where the need to undertake such accounting simply cannot be set aside. Here, we infrequently neglect to embrace the significance of what we have opted to call ourselves – a Community.
