Caribbean Integration: A terrifying concept

In a course I am currently pursuing, entitled Critical Readings in Caribbean Arts and Culture, (which i spoke about in my previous note entitled 'Is it really integration that we want') we were to present our first assignment today. It was a group project, where one was required to present on themes relevant to our Caribbean situation, i.e. diaspora/ the Caribbean as Home/ the threats to the Caribbean/ Our approach to our history and ancestry etc. Five groups presented. However, every group, apart from mine, managed to narrow each topic back down to Trinidad, though the works being critically interpreted were from a disparate group of writers: Aime Cesaire, Guillen, Martin Carter, Brathwaite, Walcott, Lovelace. Yet everything managed to be parochially brought to Trinidad, with several strokes of nationalism, like the singing of songs like Sweet sweet T & T and the like. I had to keep reminding myself that this is not the University of Trinidad and Tobago but the University of the West Indies. I do not expect to come to Trinidad to go to UWI and not meet Trinidad culture in several aspects of my life here. I expect that. But in the actual academic atmosphere, in a course that dared to call itself Critical Readings in CARIBBEAN Arts and Culture, I found it horribly unfair what was happening. But it was nothing strange to me. But i did raise the issue during the question session; that i felt that there was a skew. an unfair one, as there were Vincentians, Jamaican and a St. Lucian (myself) in the classroom as well. The justification was predictable: That Trinidad is the cosmopolitan centre of the Caribbean as it has a fair representation of a number of ethnic groups as regards demographics and what not. I think that is a poor excuse. Trinidad is a place that was peopled very much by the people of the islands of the archiapelago, those that are rendered obscure now. It is a hybrid culture not indigenously, but very much because of the migration of people from all along the islands. What i think has come about with these UWI campuses, especially with Jamaica and Trinidad, is , a sort of Elitism has come about by a false notion, purported even by writers and intellectuals from the smaller islands, that somehow these countries are the intellectual hubs of the Caribbean. Well News Flash....there's a University there! Whether or not Trinidad has the most multifarious population in the Caribbean, why then did the group who did Guillen not talk about the fact that Cuba , though socialist, has several citizens who do not feel at HOME (since the concept of home is one of the themes) bcuz of racism and bigotry and so forth. Or why not look at how Cuba has been in many ways excluded from the idea of the Caribbean. Why not look at Martin Carter's situation in Guyana. You see, what happens when these pernicious paradigms are allowed to exist unchallenged, is that you find that Trinidadians are educated on Trinidad, and the other nationalities are educated on Trinidad. That is the underlying attitude here, I am convinced. There is a guy who is around me often enough, who each time he sees me asks me "When u going back to St. Vincent" or When you going back to St. Kitts. I kept correcting him as to where I was from, until I realized he was doing it on purpose. And I can't lie, I've faced this sort of indifference to, not just my island, but the smaller islands of the Caribbean on several fronts, both by lecturers and students. And the efforts at even integrating the international students into the school have been nothing short of a sort of pitiful patronizing. And of course, I've been faced, in places least expected, with that pejorative phrase: "Small island ting." "Small island people behaviour" and so on. What I am left to wonder is, what about the size of a people's country alters their being to being as parochial as OTHERS view their geographical space. But this is a recurring thing. It is like when persons come to a smaller island and look at our malls and say...'thats a mall....thats not a mall?!' .....well I will respond as Walcott does in his Nobel Prize speech (although ironically he was referring to who we call MASSA but it is sadly appropriate here) when told such things one must respond 'I AM NOT YOUR CITY ...." This here meaning that persons have their perceptions based on their circumstances, their terms and ideas of development. A place like St. Lucia does not NEED a huge mall. Build a huge mall and we can probably provide housing for a large percentage of our citizenry. A torpor had grown over me as regards this idea of integration. As my brother said to me a few seconds ago....what we integrating? And i will add, on whose terms are we integrating. Based on the patterns I am seeing in our so-called premier institution of Caribbean intellectualism, I do have reason to be fearful of integration; that we may merely be subsumed, no longer by America but by Trinidad and Jamaica. It is like saying, I doh want no white man robbin me, I rather a black man like me rob me. A phrase that seems to be popular. Integration, for people like us, from the 'unimportantly beautiful' islands is a terrifying thing, and a sort of reverse-entelechy