12 December 2002, 860 words
The world was created by sex. When the Bible claims that the Word was in the beginning and it then became Flesh, this is a deliberate inversion of reality. It was the Flesh that became Word, and the main reason it did so was in order to talk about sex.
By this I mean that any complete or cogent analysis of culture must start with sex. All human cultures, whether that of an Amerindian tribe or of city dwellers in New York, have certain fundamental similarities. Of these similarities, the most basic is sex. In all cultures most people are heterosexual, males compete for the attention of females, and females favour the winning males in these competitions.
But the strategies of the competition naturally vary according to the society. In an Amerindian tribe like the Yanomamö, different villages continually raid one another and men who have killed an enemy usually have three times as many wives and children as men who haven't killed. In a city like New York, by contrast, a man will strive to attain wealth and/or fame, and women will place a higher value on the attributes (ambition, intelligence, charm) which allow the attainment of these goals. But underlying both strategies is the drive for status on the part of men, and the preference on the part of women for men with resources.
This, then, is the starting paradigm we must apply if we want to understand the complex culture of our own little city-state. It is obvious that cultural differences exist between the two main ethnic groups in Trinidad. This being so, an inclusive vision of anything which could usefully be called "Trini culture" may well seem to be an exercise in futility. Culture, after all, is generally defined as "the enduring behaviours, ideas, attitudes, and traditions shared by a large group of people and transmitted from one generation to the next". But culture is also historically constructed, variable in time and space, and adapts to changing circumstances.
Now when the first East Indians came here in 1845, they met a group which was numerically, but not politically and economically, dominant. The Africans had only been freed from slavery for 11 years and therefore the cultural traits they displayed were typical of enslaved human beings. The trait that is relevant to this topic is sexual relations. What slavery would have done was pervert the normal criteria of female choice &endash; i.e. women would have placed less value on male status, since the men of their own race enjoyed little or no status in the plantation society. Additionally, since the most attractive African women would often be concubines for the white or mulatto men, the respect accorded by men to "good" women in even patriarchal and polygamous societies would have been diminished. The net result is that sexual arrangements among Africans would have been skewed towards a matrifocal arrangement, in which sexual ties are looser than those of a patriarchal or nuclear arrangement.
The Indians, by contrast, came from a culture with strict hierarchical traditions, which among other things determined the women available for marriage and sex. But there were six times as many men as women brought in and, until indentureship ended in 1917, there were always far more Indian men than Indian women in the West Indies.
One consequence of this was that women gained in power, as must happen when a resource is scarce and in demand. One paradoxical sign of this burgeoning change was that all 37 murders committed during the indentureship period within the Indian community were sparked by female infidelity.
It is also worth noting that there is no record of formal liaisons between Indian men and Afro women (and little evidence of informal ones either). One Hindu commentator attributed this to Indian men's loyalty to family (which tells you how much she knows about men's sex drive). The more likely explanation is that Indian men had no status in the wider community, not even that conferred by height, and so Afro women would not have been interested in them even as casual sexual partners. (Decades later, one sociologist would find that Afros and Indos each viewed the other as being at the bottom of the social ladder.)
One consequence of this imbalance of the sexes in the Indian community was that fathers came to place great priority on their daughters marrying well. This, however, was accompanied by the fear that their daughters would choose to marry Afro men. These factors helped ensure that fathers actually came around to wanting their daughters to be formally educated, which was a significant shift in traditional Indian attitudes. This, in turn, led to Indian men being even more highly motivated to attain status in order to get wives.
One hundred and sixty-eight years after Emancipation and 85 years after the end of Indentureship, we can use this foundation to analyse the cultural adaptations each group has made within the same environment, and examine how interaction between the groups has affected such adaptations. This is the basis for understanding race relations in Trinidad, and I will expand on this topic next week.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh