Bajan pride

MANY OF US in this part of the world may not know a whole lot about Sweden, a comparatively large and wealthy country of about ten million people in northern Europe, in the region known as Scandinavia.

As a country, it may not readily come to Bajan minds if one were to identify any number of countries, say, in a quiz, except maybe if one had to name all those beginning with “s’.”

However, almost all of us have some familiarity with things invented there (or at least by people from that country). Those include the adjustable wrench, the modern refrigerator, Tetra Pak packaging, and the pacemaker.

They also produced ABBA, a music group whose heyday was in the 1970s, but continue to get all kinds of love to this (after all, they made great music) and Ace of Base (what I would call the 1990s version of ABBA).

Sweden is also known for the Northern Lights, stunning landscapes, its egalitarian society, cultural emphasis on modesty, not standing out too much and balance (a concept called lagom). It heavily promotes environmentalism, and as can be gleaned from the list above, technological innovation, and creating popular music. No, I was not hired by VisitSwedenAB (their tourism agency) to promote that country here. Why have I done so, though, you ask?

Local culture

My fellow columnist Cherita O’dell, recently talked about how, during her travels she sees the Jamaican flag proudly displayed prominently in other places including on the luggage of people from that country. She suggested that she would like us to be open in displaying our national pride when we go out into the world.

I would argue that we would only do that if we know who we are as a nation, as a culture, and we truly embrace that to a degree that, as our default, we would promote that as fulsomely as possible whenever we leave this rock.

We are in November and undoubtedly many of us are more than happy to get into our celebration of the highly regarded conkie, and equally important debate around whether they should have raisins or not. At this time, we put on some element/ combination of yellow/ gold, blue/ultramarine and black to show our national pride. However, these are just some fairly specific elements of local culture. I feel that if you did an informal survey of Barbadians as to what is Barbadian culture, one would get a range of interesting answers. Is it our brand of calypso music, is it our rum – which was invented here – road tennis, cricket – inherited from/imposed by our colonisers, depending on your perspective – kite flying at Easter, how we make our dumplings for soup (lots of sugar!)? It is perhaps all these things and more.

Reserved nature

However, though we may take pride in these things, we may not be as loud as other places in proclaiming our “Bajanness”, because one thing we share culturally with the Swedes is our reserved nature. If we are honest with ourselves, though we may “turn up” for a party or on Kadooment Day, a significant part of who we are culturally, is that we are arguably not a showy kind of people. We tend to just quietly go about doing our thing in this isolated corner of the Caribbean, practising those things that evolved from our colonial history and drawn from a mix of influences from Africa, Europe and North America. We are at an interesting stage of our societal evolution, as we open up our country to others to an unprecedented degree. The imperatives of demographic concerns and a drive towards even greater economic growth means that we have been compelled to allow others to come in and help lift the country to even greater heights. That will bring with it some cultural changes over time, and in years to come Barbados, and what it means to be Barbadian could be very different.

Whether or not that is a bad thing is up to debate. I think what is important, though, is that we all must be proud to be Bajan and represent well wherever we go in this world.

Though we are a tiny place, there is no reason why we cannot show off who we are even more, whether we do it loudly like the Americans or quietly like the Swedes, because we really do have a lot to be proud of. After all, we have Rihanna!

Randy Batson is a researcher, social commentator and social advocate. Email ranric1@hotmail.com