The Anatomy of a ClapBack
It takes a lot to leave me speechless. What’s worse is when I get my speech back, the response is white hot and visceral. I’ve finally reached that place with the pointless, head scratcher of an article about my paradise island home Barbados, by someone referring to themselves as a member of “an affluent Nigerian family”.
Much has already been written in response to the rambling, condescending collection of vacuous utterances but it is not an issue I feel has yet been efficiently ventilated: that of post-colonial attitudes and the colour divide in Barbadian tourism.
More galling perhaps were the great sweeping leaps the author made to connect factual occurrences ( “An elderly, white clientele served by black staff in a former slave plantation.”)to deeply condescending assumptions & observations (“Some staff were happy to see us, an affluent black family. Others maybe didn’t want to serve a black family, and an African one at that, seeing it as a demotion of some sort.”). The irony was not lost on my colleague John-Paul, who got engaged to his now wife Suzanne, on a West Coast beach in Barbados. Over a spicy curry and a shared yearning for good fishcakes, he chuckled “This lady is confused. Pointing out injustice and the wrongs of colonialism whilst being patronising like an old colonialist. Must be tiring for her.”
She even opened the piece by drawing connections between race and a high-altitude altercation that simply didn’t exist. In fact, in my quiet moments, her tone reminded me of why it is said black overseers treated slaves worse than white masters: to secure their place in the plantation hierarchy by outdoing the master’s brutality.
Hands up I will admit I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with what seems to be some ingrained traditions that hearken too closely back to post-colonial Barbados. The fact that in a country that has a majority black population, social media photos of hip new party spots struggle to highlight a single brown face. Our struggle as a people with a concept that other tropical destinations seem to have mastered: the nuanced but important difference between service and servitude. But to quote a decidedly non-PC reference: I can kick my dog but you can’t kick my dog. On what authority does the author expound the uncomfortable optics of a scenario. More egregious was that by her own admission she viewed her visit through the narrow prism of not one but two all-inclusive resorts. I challenge her to tell me what dish the Martin’s Bay Fish Fry is famous for. Or what makes Harrison’s Cave a natural wonder? Despite her disdain she is clearly no better than the pink, swollen Brits who flock to Malaga & set up their own ghettos of chip shops and pubs then complain about the quality of the paella!
But I, too, view Barbados through a peculiar prism and I wouldn’t dare speak on behalf of others whose experiences have been different. So I enlisted my brave friend Carlie Pipe to address the issue of being a white Bajan. She kicked an infernal hornet’s nest a few years ago when she commented on a predominantly white Crop Over Band (Crop Over is Barbados’ summer festival culminating in an all day street parade called Kadooment Day). The Blue Box Cart band is first on the road for Kadooment day and is accepted as a mostly white band. Carlie described it as symptomatic of a wider racial myopia she refers to as “pockets”. She told The Antillean Media group ““to witness a sea of white faces gathered together is at first glance, surprising…[but] it’s just another way in which the race relations of plantation society curiously manifest themselves in 2014.” In the face of scathing criticism, the BBC overseas correspondent, when interviewed about the firestorm, said the Blue Box Cart Band was not attacked and therefore technically didn’t need defending. However, she stressed “Of course there’s a mix of white, black, brown and purple [in the Blue Box Cart band on Kadooment day]! But that doesn’t change the fact that its demographics do not accurately represent that of the nation: that it is a cultural phenomenon.” I would not have minded if the Guardian article’s writer had at least witnessed a Kadooment day parade and come to certain conclusions (even if they had been ill-advised, they would have had a basis of an authentic experience).
Refreshingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, many of the people I spoke to about the article were white and British. Their revulsion at its tone and inference was particularly brutal. John-Paul and Suzanne have centred their Barbados experience around a particular beach in Holetown, where he proposed in 2008. They returned in 2010. They’ve played pool with locals on the West Coast, made lifelong friends of bartenders and visited for the Cricket World Cup. Suzanne’s Guyanese father has adopted the island as what she called his ‘spiritual home’.
With the frequency and broad spectrum of experiences they’ve had over the years, odds are they may have had at least one bad experience. Tourists all over the world tell wildly different stories about their experiences of identical places. The definition of a “bad” experience is also quite subjective. Yet Suzanne is adamant that her mixed heritage family have never experienced different treatment whether good or bad based on their race. In fact, husband John-Paul believes any awkwardness in service delivery from front line staff may simply be a reflection of how they were first treated. If the snooty tone of the article is in any way reflective of the attitude and mindset of the writer and her family, I’m prone to agree. He said: “If you turn up in a place with a sense of ‘I’m here to have a good time and I’m really grateful for all the effort that people make to make my time here good’ you’re gonna have a good time in Barbados no question. If you turn up with a load of strange uncertainties and discomforts the people that are looking after you are going to pick up on that and avoid or treat you differently.” He surmised that the writer turned up with a fundamental lack of respect for Barbados and it’s culture and that mindset and created a skewed prism through which she filtered her very narrow experiences. Of all the responses to this piece I read, Suzanne’s was the most strident. I challenged her to search her mind and soul for the back catalogue of her remembrances of Barbados to find anything that supported the writer’s claims. Even admitting how some aspects of our bureacracy might prove challenging, overall she could find none. Whether that is the power of our tourism product or, as her husband suggested, an demonstration of the Golden Rule, is a matter for debate.
Award winning Barbadian writer& film maker Shakirah M Bourne joined the chorus of Barbadians on social media who expressed disappointment about the tone of the article. Specifically, that with a platform like the Guardian, opportunities were missed to do the requisite research to at the very least, tell a balanced story. For the avoidance of doubt, no Barbadian I know is so deluded as to think some of her observations were not reminiscent of others’ experiences. But it was the manner of the telling, along with the obvious lack of context that galled. Bourne wrote on Facebook “I’m so annoyed at people saying that she is correct because in her mess of an article she may have stumbled upon a few real issues. She could have discussed modern day slavery and tourism based on her experience. She had no interest in pursuing a well-researched, valid article, even for a space with such a large audience. It really shows that the condescending, entitled gaze and perception of small countries is not limited to whites, and emphasizes the consequences of a single story.”
All told there was a golden opportunity here to demonstrate how, as the writer put it, in ‘black man country’, we had matured and evolved as a populace. Even in the face of the remnants of some our deep seated historical issues. Issues which continue to play out in day to day life. Her closing paragraph appeared, on the surface, to celebrate the fact that, in Barbados, young black men have no fear of the racial profiling that leads to empty shell casings in the streets, blood on the pavement and protesters screaming #BlackLivesMatter in the aftermath. But to celebrate our pride and autonomy as a majority black nation requires no such juxtaposition. All that we are as a people can and should be be highlighted and lauded for it’s own sake. We are more than capable of working on that which is still problematic, without the judgemental musings of the misinformed.
