Questions for CSA Past Presidents

Responses from Anton Allahar

How did you come to specialize in Caribbean Studies?

I was born in Trinidad and lived there for the first 20 years of my life. I immigrated to Canada in 1969 and my Caribbean identity was born there, in exile, so-to-speak. It is difficult to have a Trinidadian identity when one lives in Trinidad and all around you are Trinidadians. The same goes for an Antiguan, a Bajan or a St. Lucian etc. Because social identities are situational, they depend on social context, so when I am with Canadians, I am Caribbean, but if I am with Caribbean people I am from Trinidad, and if I am with Trinidadians I am from Diego Martin and so on. This is why I say my Caribbean identity was born in Canada, for it is there that I really came to meet other Caribbean people and to discover how similar Caribbean peoples are culturally, and how culturally different they can be too. As a young immigrant of colour to North America in the 1960s and 1970s the whole politics of black power was a comforting buffer to the whiteness of the wider society. I found meaning in my Caribbeanness and black power was the avenue to my Caribbean identity. Along with my friends, Caribbean and other, especially the Chilean refugees fleeing Pinochet, we began reading and discussing political ideas, attending political rallies, and challenging the United States’ interventions in our region. For that was the climate of the times: the Cuban Revolution, Black Power, anti-Vietnam War, the Women’s Movement, the Student Movement etc. We were all becoming heavily politicized and I found intellectual comfort in those politics, for after all, that was where my friends were. So Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Mao Tse Tung, Stokely Carmichael, C.L.R. James and others were linked with the de-colonization movements in the Caribbean and informed my daily realities. We held meetings, formed an Afro-Caribbean association, a Caribbean studies group, and following the murders of people like Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop, began to speak out on campus. We used to read about such African independence leaders as Kwame Nkhruma, Leopold Senghor, Milton Obote, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, and Patrice Lumumba part of reaching out to others in the struggle against colonial domination and in the process embraced Africa. Read more