Spiral
Experienced User
Joined: 03 Jan 2008
{Posts: 106 }
Location: TnT
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 Posted: Thu 20 Aug 2009 02:55 Post subject: Proud to be Dougla |
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| Quote: | Dougla wars — Part 1: Don’t dig the dougla?
Once derogatory, the term dougla has now become so accepted that people have started calling all manner of mixed-race people Dougla... and it’s not fair.
I expressed as much to an American Caucasian woman professor who came to do a study on the douglas of T&T.
The year before she’d done the same on what she called the Black Caribs of Columbia; and overall she seemed rather fascinated by peoples who defied effortless bracketing.
Her husband was, incidentally, Trini — of a Spanish/African hybrid — and their three rug-rats were suitably something else from what’s easily defined; no doubt destined to eventually face the question asked of anyone not readily pinned down on the ethnic portfolio: “What are you?”
This professor was conducting interviews with douglas of assorted ilk: sex, age, class and education brackets, each with their own history of experiences despite shared miscegenation ground.
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pick the foreigner’s mouth about her interview findings, intrigued as I was to learn for myself whether douglas in this country claim to be “one common people.”
I gave her a straight-up expression of disapproval one time, though not at her, but at my countrymen, who persisted in “assuring” her that her children are dougla.
As I mentioned before, the word has now come to compass any individual with more than any one bloodline; and that, to me, is simply not acceptable nor healthy, for want of a better word.
It is, however, inevitable, in a country that allowed it’s national instrument — the only one invented in the 20th century, to boot — to be hapsed up for mass production by Japanese companies, while we waggle over the defects of standardising the pan.
See, T&T is most laissez-faire about most anything that involves creating cultural clarity by putting things in their proper place and perspective.
Anyone who wants to argue the importance of accuracy, think of how shoddy history lessons would be if nobody ever thought to record things as squarely as possible.
Why, I recall at the first distinguished lecture series put on by the President’s Committee For National Self-discovery, the Carib King of Arima and environs (well, actually, he’d be the Carib King of T&T, really) talked vehemently against the “marginalisation” of Carib ancestors into other race and ethnic brackets.
One of those he mentioned was dougla. The Carib king was most agitated at his people being called dougla.
I was taken aback in turn, because the fact is that many Carib descendants, myself included, can more accurately be called dougla than Carib.
Yet, he saw it as a put-down. Clearly because he himself considers douglas to be a marginalised bunch. Which, to tell the truth, is how we are often treated.
See, while people would tell some white foreign female, for God knows whatever reason, that her mostly white/partly coloured kids are douglas, actual douglas like myself are often reproached to call ourselves African, Indian, Spanish, Carib or whatever else people choose to call us.
Because despite the appearance of things nowadays, there’s still a large fraction of people in our nation who are uncomfortable with the thought of different races mixing; thus are especially discomfited by the “aberrant,” “marginalised” dougla progeny of all the mixing that’s supposedly not, but most definitely is, happening.
There are hordes of “Trinibagonians” — yes, yes, even among the so-called current fathers of our nation — who insist that, for instance, Indians and Africans will never unite.
To acknowledge the existence of masses of douglas would be basically to admit that a whole bunch of Indians and Africans not only united, but had sex and — voila! — there’s another dougla to contend with.
And we just can’t have that, can we. I mean, people might be tempted to stop voting based on race, and where will our racist politicians be?
I’ll tell you: out...of...jobs. |
http://legacy.guardian.co.tt/archives/2005-03-21/Jaye-Q-mon.html
| Quote: | Dougla Wars — Part II
Proud to be Dougla!
Sacrilege, that headline. See, I’m not supposed to be proud to be dougla. According to some, by being proud to be dougla I’m being racist.
I was racist for about two years of my life...but it wasn’t because I was proud to be dougla. It was because I’d allowed others to convince me to be ashamed of being dougla (more on that tomorrow).
No more. We are real. We exist. We will not stay in the shadows for the sake of really racist people and politicians whose own racist agenda is be challenged by our very existence.
I’m being very loud about this right now, when usually I try to break being dougla to you gently.
But I am sick, tired and hot to death of people who do not know what I am trying to brainwash or browbeat me into denying my ethnic identity and thus, by extension, to deny the best parents any human being ever had—my own blessed mother and father, who fought, via the love they shared, the same racism trying to sunder me from my selfhood unto this day.
I believe in my heart that healing for our nation can come from acknowledging the truth of our shared histories and, yes, goddamit, bloodlines.
But embracing history means knowing it. Knowing it requires naming it. Naming it necessitates “giving Jack he jacket.”
Just as the history of how the African, Indians, Chinese, Syrian etc came to T&T—not the bloody Caribbean, but THIS republic—must begin to be taught to our children in schools and homes, so too must the history of how douglas came to be.
Though, to teach of us you must see us. Are we seen? Perhaps. But we are surely still ignored as a people.
The name that gives us our identity is squandered—another technique to turn a blind eye to us and pretend we do not have our own place in the sun.
This isn’t what’s done to other mixed-race peoples. No one would watch me and call me mulatto, quadroon, mestizo. No. So why call any of them dougla?
The etymology of the word is very specific and it defines for us what, then, a dougla is. No matter what else is in the mix, there must be African and Indian to make a dougla.
It’s in the mix and it’s in the look. It’s in the reality of what we were—in our ancestors—and what we are.
Still, non-dougla others want us to pretend we’re not dougla. What the hell is up with that?
I’d like to see you tell a Japanese man to not call himself Japanese, but Chinese, the way Trinis call anybody with slanted eyes “Chinee.”
I’d like to see you tell a curly-haired, staunch Trini Indian woman that she shouldn’t call herself Indian with hair like that, but should think of herself as dougla.
That would basically imply that one of her two Indian parents isn’t actually her parent. Exactly the way people make me feel when they try to fight down my douglaness, and parentage.
A certain buddy often harangued me to despise Indians until I finally screamed, “By trying to make me hate Indians, you’re trying to make me hate my father. That will never happen. I’d quicker hate you!”
Funny thing, he told me that by saying so I was being racist to Africans. I’m not making this up.
People like that man believe that if you won’t be racist to one, then you must be racist to the other. It’s like if you won’t hate Indians, it must mean you hate Africans, or vice versa.
God....
The beauty of my, and others like me, embracing dougla identity is that I am loving all the races and ethnicities that make me and so I cannot be racist.
The very word dougla means a person of Indian and African heritage, and a hotchpotch of other ethnicities, but those two most significantly.
By saying I am dougla, I can never be denying my African heritage. I couldn’t be a true, true dougla if the African was missing from the equation.
I am more than the sum of each my separate ethnic parts...and THAT’S a dougla.
Come good. |
http://legacy.guardian.co.tt/archives/2005-04-02/Jaye-Q.html |
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