Black Brother and White Master (standard:travel stories, 2457 words)
Author: Juggernaut	Added: Nov 18 2010	Views/Reads: 2805/2084	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A brief biographical sketch

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


“You know, Indians work very hard,” Tommy started a friendly
conversation with me one day. 

“Not me,” I said. “ I see you in the lab from morning to evening.” 

I thought Tommy was trying to butter me up. 

“We had a few Indian traders in my village back home, you know,” said
Tommy. 

Tommy's conversation was following a familiar pattern now, I thought. 

“An Indian family that opened a grocery store in my village several
years ago brought their relatives to work in their store, and then 
their cousins joined the business,” Tommy continued his story. 

I kept listening to his story-type conversation. 

“You know, Indians follow each other like ants, family after family,
they opened small stores through out our country,” Tommy said with a 
smile as he looked at me helplessly as if I were responsible for all 
those Indians owning the shops back in his country. 

“Just like in my country, I also see plenty of Indian owned grocery
stores here in Trinidad,” Tommy tried to equate the position of Indian 
traders in his native country to East Indians in Trinidad, the native 
sons of the Island. 

I was dragged into a one sided conversation with Tommy whom I initially
thought a friendly looking African. After several months on the campus, 
he quit attending the classes, and started selling encyclopedias. After 
some time, he changed his student visa to a work visa, and started 
working somewhere else. I never saw Tommy nor his wife, a slender, dark 
woman with a perpetual beautiful smile. 

Unlike Tommy, John Roland was totally different, a West African came to
Trinidad via the United States for a short stay on a research project. 
He was “Go lucky Harry type”, and laughed at his own jokes all the 
times. I liked his easy-going attitude towards everybody in the 
department. One day, during an informal chat, he expressed his views on 
Indian traders back in his native country and in Trinidad. 
Surprisingly, his comments were subtle and yet clear along the same 
lines as Patsy and Tommy. The message was an acceptance of black 
brotherhood, and tolerance towards the whites to a certain extent. 
These feelings were not universal or overt among all West Indian blacks 
but shared among some of them. 

While I was vacationing in New York, the comments of people from the
various islands in the Caribbean followed a similar pattern. A cab 
driver mentioned that he heard that the East Indian people in Trinidad 
were creating trouble for the President of the Country, a person of 
African descent. Another cab driver, a black person from Haiti 
suggested that it would be better for East Indians to leave Trinidad 
for India for good. 

A black man from St. Lucia, a tiny Island nation in the Caribbean joked
that he would vote (through an absentee over-seas balloting) for any 
black candidate in Guyana or Trinidad, countries with both black and 
east Indian population, though he was not a citizen of either of these 
countries in the Caribbean. 

These men of African descent I met casually in New York had no
experience of living with east Indians in Trinidad, and yet their 
perception about east Indians as foreigners in their own native island 
nation was hard to understand. Surprisingly, none of these men made any 
mention of whites living luxuriously on these Islands. 

The majority of West Indian Blacks in the United States live in
segregated West Indian black neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Bronx in New 
York, and unlikely to integrate ethnically with white Americans or even 
African Americans. Chinese Americans for decades were living in China 
Towns across the United States. In Trinidad, both blacks and East 
Indians live in areas that are of their own race predominantly. The 
complaint over lack of willingness on the part of east Indians to 
integrate with blacks in Trinidad was hard to rationalize. 

The two African students studying in Trinidad, and Patsy the West Indian
of African descent who acquired Trinidad nationality by virtue of 
marrying a Trinidadian black have all perceived the east Indians as 
minorities in their own native country of Trinidad. The perceived 
minority status was not based on numerical or economic terms since, 
numerically the Indian population is equal to that of the black, and 
economically, the Indians were perhaps in better position than blacks. 
The perception of minority status of East Indians in Trinidad was 
largely due to the domination of black culture; the colorful carnival, 
the steel band, and calypso music that eclipsed anything Indian except 
curry goat and roti. Even curry goat and roti, the original Indian 
culinary dishes have lost their ancestral roots in recent times. In the 
Unites States, these dishes were served in the West Indian black 
restaurants as Trinidad dishes with no mention of East Indian origin. 

The blacks consider the east Indians as unwilling partners in ethnic
integration. But the integration at ethnic level should be voluntary. 
The unwillingness of Indians to openly embrace the blacks culturally 
could have contributed to their own isolation to some extent. Though 
culturally East Indians sit on sidelines, they sustained and prospered 
economically because of their frugal life style. East Indians would 
thrive on simple, and less expensive diet consists of roti, tomato 
chokka, bigan bajji (eggplant curry) etc. Their inherent saving habits 
even performing meager jobs such as driving cabs, collecting crabs or 
selling vegetables at roadside kiosks made them economically self 
reliant. While some people might consider east Indians as miserly or 
cheapskates, precisely these habits made them a force to reckon with 
when it comes to survival. 

The blacks in Trinidad address each other “hello brother” or “cool
brother.” These expressions were considered as solidarity of friendship 
and kinship. Very few blacks would address Indians as “brother.” For 
some reason, they have deep down suspicion about East Indians, and this 
feeling was mutual. Trinidad blacks treated me with respect and trust 
perhaps because I was a foreigner. I wish they addressed me as 
“brother.” 

In East Indian vocabulary in Trinidad, it seems the word “brother” did
not exist. I hardly noticed Indians address anybody whether black or 
fellow Indian as “brother.” It always puzzled me. The only East Indian 
who called me “brothers” not “brother” was Mahabir, an East Indian lab 
technician. 

For few months, in Trinidad, I shared a concrete house with a local East
Indian couple in a shanty town area near the University campus. To 
enter the premises, I had to cross an open drain on a shaky 4-foot wide 
wooden plank. The young Indian couple, sub-rented one bed room to me, 
and kept two rooms to themselves. Just outside the concrete house were 
few wooden shacks that housed few black families. A black couple with 
two or three young children lived a few yards on the other side of the 
drain. The man was a truck driver, I saw him once in a while since he 
came home late in the night. His wife, a rotund woman with large arms 
was always washing clothes or dishes outdoors. 

One night, somebody knocked on our door. I opened to find a black girl
in her 20's. She introduced herself as sister of Jensen, the truck 
driver living next door, and asked if I could help open her brother's 
front door, since it was locked and nobody at home. I did not know the 
woman, so I woke up Narad and his wife Premathi, the East Indian couple 
to see whether we could help the young woman. With all the effort, we 
couldn't open the door to let her into her brother's wooden shack. I 
looked at Narad and his wife hoping they would let her sleep in one of 
the empty bedrooms in our house. Instead, Narad and Premati went back 
to sleep. I couldn't leave the young woman alone throughout the night 
outside her brother's wooden shack, I offered the young woman to sleep 
in my room, and I slept on a couch in the family room that night. 
Sometime during the early hours of next day morning she went back to 
her brother's shack since they were at home by that time. 

The girl's brother expressed his gratitude for my help particularly for
allowing his sister to sleep in my bedroom. From that time onwards, 
whenever he saw me, he addressed me as “brother.” I was disappointed 
with the East Indian couple who was reluctant to shelter the woman just 
for one night. The families of Narad and Jensen were neighbors for some 
time, and knew each other, I had moved there just a only few weeks 
before this incidence took place. In that neighborhood, there were 
other shanty homes where blacks lived, most of them started addressing 
me as “brother,” I was sure they might have heard about my gesture 
towards the black woman. I really felt proud and admired whenever 
somebody addressed me “hi brother” or “cool brother.” 

In Trinidad, with few exceptions, the majority of East Indians hardly
participate in carnival events. Very few could play steel pan, or 
aspire to be calypsonians. It is a cultural thing. This would not make 
them less of Trinidadian or less of any thing. Irrespective of 
numerical status, either majority or minority, the cultural differences 
should not be a determining factor for dominance as seen in Trinidad. 
Bob Marley, a philosopher, songwriter, and singer from Jamaica once 
said, people could pretend to be somebody else but eventually they 
would filter it out. I was not sure in what context he said that, but I 
believe what he meant was that to be equally treated, one does not have 
to either dominate others, or pretend to be others. 

In the United States, people of African descent (from Africa, South
America, Caribbean), South Asian descent (India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, 
Sri Lanka) or East Indians from Caribbean and Fiji; were all considered 
as minority groups, and do not culturally dominate each other, but 
demand equal recognition and justice as immigrants or naturalized 
citizens. 

The philosophy of black brother or white master in the Caribbean and
particularly in Trinidad originated from black cultural domination. 
Without steel band, calypso or spectacular carnival events, which are 
largely Black cultural events, there wouldn't be black domination of 
the society. Perhaps, more cultural integration or fusion of Blacks and 
Indians to produce something unique which is neither black nor Indian 
may reduce the tensions. During national elections, the voting pattern 
along purely racial line shows lack of integration between East Indians 
and Blacks even after co-inhabitation over one hundred and fifty years. 


The attitude of East Indians towards blacks as perpetual fun seekers;
the blacks perception of East Indians as profiteers, and their subtle 
demands on Indians to integrate willingly or unwillingly would only 
lead to more separation, and facilitates the black brother and white 
master mentality to continue. 


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