ABSTRACT
During an early visit to St Vincent I discussed my proposed thesis with a local woman living in the Central Windward district of the island. She knew that I was interested in Vincentian history and that I was planning to come back to research my thesis. I began to explain that I was specifically interested in the Caribs and that I planned to stay with them in Sandy Bay. I was rapidly stopped short however by her reaction; her jaw dropped and her eyes widened:
I tried to explain that it was part of my research and that I was interested to learn more about them, but my response merely evoked a slow shaking of the head in resignation and the weary words of someone who knew better:
Until that conversation I had no real conception of the social distance that existed between the Caribs and some members at least of the wider Vincentian community. What made this conversation startling was that it was with a teacher, who had had a better than average education and who, I presumed at the time, was open to new ideas and would have been actively challenging the old prejudices of the past. But throughout my stay in St Vincent the views expressed by that informant were reiterated by many, though not all, of those non-Caribs I questioned. On several occasions informants, anxious to dissuade me from going to stay with them, described the proclivity of the Caribs to get drunk and/or fight. Given my position as a white Englishman from the University of London, my determination to do so tended to evoke a mixture of puzzlement and mild amusement. Occasionally the response would be a knowing nudge and wink, ‘Dere’s plenty ah ganja up there and dose Carib gals are plenty hot white man. You gonna have some good time’. This was a typical young male response and, though the clear inference was still that Sandy Bay was a wild place, the emphasis had shifted away from the wild as dangerous to a wildness based on excitement. These two connotations of wildness and the ambivalence that they evoked were reiterated in conversations with different people throughout my fieldwork. To some, who might be described as aspiring to respectability, the Caribs were the
negation of all the virtues that they held dear, the Caribs were quick to anger, violent, hedonistic and feckless. They lived for today and, so long as they had the price of a quarter of rum in their pockets, cared little for the future. But for other Vincentians, those aspiring to reputation, these traits were an object for emulation. What immediately caught my attention, however, was the similarity between the statements of present day Vincentians and early reports by the missionaries of the seventeenth century regarding the Caribs. Three possibilities immediately presented themselves: first that the Caribs had maintained behavioural characteristics over 300 years despite the changes in their circumstances; secondly, that the discourse of the native Caribbean had been thoroughly internalised by the Vincentian population and it was this that had persisted; the third that occurred to me was that the situation might be a combination of both these factors.
