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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.
TOMORROW’S BREW: The weakness in me
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