Group Maintenance and Ethnic Commitment

It will be possible for Indo-Caribbean Canadians to survive as a group only if they can overcome the feelings of displacement and alienation that are so deeply rooted in their history and experience. Victor Ramraj has argued that Indo-Caribbeans have always been marginalized in historical accounts of their region, and that feelings of marginalization were the impetus for their migration in the 1970s and 1980s. It would be ironic indeed if having emigrated from the Caribbean in order to escape being marginalized, Indo-Caribbean immigrants, classified as South Asians in Canada, should now face the risk of becoming culturally invisible. Yet to be identified only as South Asian and grouped with people whose numbers are much greater, and whose cultures are older and more homogeneous, may threaten the very survival of Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada.

Bissoondath’s story “Security” raises the issue of the second generation of Indo-Caribbean Canadians who are becoming culturally differentiated from their parents because of their rapid absorption into mainstream Canadian life. And Kamala Jean Gopie suggests that the experience of Indo-Caribbean Canadians may follow the general immigrant pattern in which the original immigrants are inwardly sustained by memories of their native land and culture and thus resist wholesale assimilation, while their children are quickly assimilated and show little interest in the culture of their parents. It is then left to the children’s children – the third generation of immigrants – to try to recover their cultural roots. The conflicts between Indo-Caribbean Canadian parents and their children, so often discussed at conferences and workshops, suggest that Indo-Caribbean youth are becoming assimilated into mainstream Canadian culture and turning away from their parents’ customs. At the same time, the existence of Indo-Caribbean student organizations, for example, at Ontario’s York University and the University of Toronto, suggest that all Indo-Caribbean youth seek to retain their cultural identity.

Gopie speaks of the need to collect and record information about Indo-Caribbean experience for the use of younger Indo-Caribbean Canadians in the future. As we have seen, this need is already being partly met in the literary work of the remarkable group of Indo-Caribbean writers in Canada. The more practical job of classifying, recording, and stimulating Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada has also been started by the Ontario Society for Services to Indo-Caribbean Canadians (OSSICC), which holds conferences, workshops, and lectures and brings out publications on Indo-Caribbean culture, for example, Indenture and Exile (1989). The OSSICC also holds an annual event called Indo-Caribbean Heritage Day, which includes a formal dinner, Indo-Caribbean music, awards for community service, and a keynote address by a distinguished speaker. Previous speakers include Cheddi Jagan, former president of Guyana, and the late Reverend Roy Neehall, an Indo-Trinidadian who was a minister of the United Church of Canada.

Indo-Caribbean culture was also sustained in Canada by several Indo-Caribbean newspapers, for example, Indo-Caribbean World (1983– ), Equality (1984– ), Caribbean Camera (1990– ), and Guyana Times (1992– ). These papers are all based in Toronto where they appear fortnightly or monthly. Numerous radio programs serve a mainly Indo-Caribbean audience by providing music and information on community events. In addition, there are several religious organizations (both Hindu and Muslim) and social groups such as school alumni associations that serve to propagate Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada through the organization of conferences, religious festivals (for example, phagwah), concerts, recitals, and picnics. These are all public events that can stimulate group solidarity.

Whether Indo-Caribbean culture will survive in Canada or whether, as Bissoondath’s story “Insecurity” hints, Canada will simply become another stopping place for itinerant, permanently displaced Asian Indians remains to be seen. After Columbus and European colonialism, the sense of displacement, exile, and alienation thus produced by the willing or enforced migration or trans-shipment of large numbers of people from one part of the world to another is one of the chief subjects of major post-colonial writers, especially Naipaul. But the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed the phenomenon of large numbers of colonized people flocking abroad to former centres of empire. Whether they are West Indians in London, Africans in Paris, Indonesians and Surinamese in Amsterdam, or Indo-Caribbeans in Toronto, their experience of loss and marginalization is similar because it originates in the double displacement evolving out of largely similar post-colonial conditions.

It is too early to know the full consequences of this double displacement for Indo-Caribbean Canadians. What we do know is that, since their arrival in Canada, Indo-Caribbean immigrants have acquired an increased measure of material well-being, which has so far proved a mixed blessing because it is accompanied by inner feelings of emotional unease and psychic disorientation – in Bissoondath’s phrase, “insecure security.”