…But if you don't love the country you live in, no one will love it for you. Except on leaflets, making amazed faces, like one loves a setting sun.» Edouard Glissant, The Commander's Cabin (1981).
The Antilles, this place as vast as it is small, because it is reductive in many respects. It is often frowned upon and unwelcome to go against this conventional designation because you suddenly become a social divider, a hindrance to
If wine, fruits and everything we consume have an originality due to their respective terroir, it goes without saying that there are also geographical territories that precisely support each of these terroirs. Although we are not fruits, nor vegetables, and even less so alcohols, we are no less sensitive to places than all the natural elements that constitute us. This equally simple reflection follows: : how to define yourself in an identity when the system's desire is to drown you in a human norm?
I cannot define myself as West Indian, nor Caribbean, without first defining myself as Guadeloupean. First, because the West Indies are a vast archipelago made up of more than 13 countries and more than 14 dependencies. Occupying the Caribbean Sea (Greater Antilles And Lesser Antilles), THE Gulf of Mexico (northwest coast of Cuba) and theAtlantic Ocean (Lucayan Islands or the set grouping the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos). The archipelago forms an arc of a circle of more than 4 000 km long extending from the Gulf of Mexico (Cuba) to the sea of the Venezuela (Curaçao And Aruba), all in a not well-defined space called the Caribbean. Therefore, this place called the Antilles is an area shared by countries, but also by larger economic and colonial powers such as France, the United States and the Netherlands. So, I am West Indian, what does that mean? ? To me, this is simply nonsense. ! Should we define ourselves in relation to a relative common history which is that of slavery and the advanced trading posts of colonial empires? ? Which is reductive ! Or should we define ourselves according to the realities of the territories? What we are accused of ! For my part, I have chosen to define myself as Guadeloupean, my territory, my archipelago, the one that shaped me.
It seems to me that ultimately what connects and binds Humanity is the acceptance of the expression of the differences that unite us. These differences are in no way something pejorative or divisive, quite the contrary. These differences are strengths, pieces of a single puzzle that we must build, each piece fitting into one or more others in its unique place. But rather than that, we are trying to transform a magnificent 5,000-piece puzzle that requires time, patience, and heightened observation into a 10-piece puzzle that appears easier to complete. So, we created conceptual identities to group together particular identities, even though particular identities in no way prevented us from being part of the same family. Just as I am not my sister, nor my brother, nor even less my father and my mother, but we are nonetheless a family unit. Just as being Guadeloupean does not prevent one from participating in a Caribbean space which constitutes an extended family made up of peoples with particularities and who recognize themselves in common historical and cultural links with singular variants.
No, I'm not West Indian. ! I am Guadeloupean. I cannot confine myself to a whole of false grandeur that is only a hodgepodge of what no one wants to consider. I cannot accept being a Cuban badly dressed in Haitian clothes in a French canoe tossed by the waves with uncertain contours. I am a Guadeloupean, brother of the Haitian, cousin of the Cuban, uncle of the Martinican, brother-in-law of some and related to all ; a family that would discuss its future taking into account the identity and expression of the identity of each of its members.