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Conclusion

Lucy Evans
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Summary

Below is the opening to Sugar Aloes’ 1997 calypso, ‘One Caribbean’:

I would like to dedicate this song to all the heads of the CARICOM countries. Maybe if you just take this little advice, this could be the solution to find the light at the other end of the tunnel

From Cuba to Guyana

We could be stronger than ever, bad as a tiger

One people, one destiny

With a super powerful economy

What we do is simply

Break down all the boundaries

[…] our leaders

Talk and find the answers

People of the Caribbean

Time for we to be one nation

Come on let's be one

One people

One destiny

One Caribbean

You hear what I tell you

One people

One identity

One Caribbean.

Sugar Aloes’ calypso draws attention to the importance of a shared Caribbean regional consciousness within a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalised world. It celebrates the strength which could result from joining together as ‘one people’, connecting small island nations which have relatively little geopolitical power in a global context, to form a ‘super-powerful economy’. Directing his calypso to the heads of the CARICOM countries and proposing that they ‘take this little advice’, Sugar Aloes suggests that the region's writers, artists, musicians and other cultural practitioners have a role to play in this endeavour; a point reinforced in a later verse when he stresses the need to ‘unite our arts and culture’ as a way of strengthening the region. By associating the Caribbean community (CARICOM), which focuses on economic collaboration between Caribbean nations, with the potential for collaboration in the arenas of arts, culture and sports, the calypso comments on the importance of linking up economic, political, sociological and cultural perspectives in order to achieve a meaningful sense of community.

The vision of community which Sugar Aloes presents here is utopian, in that the calypso appears to offer an easy solution to long-standing problems. With a repetition of the word ‘one’ (‘one people’, ‘one destiny’, ‘one identity’, ‘one Caribbean’), the refrain glosses over the considerable difficulty of reconciling differences both across a region which is politically and geographically fragmented, and within Caribbean nations divided along the lines of race, ethnicity and class.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Conclusion
  • Lucy Evans, University of Leicester
  • Book: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories
  • Online publication: 03 July 2020
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  • Conclusion
  • Lucy Evans, University of Leicester
  • Book: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories
  • Online publication: 03 July 2020
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Lucy Evans, University of Leicester
  • Book: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories
  • Online publication: 03 July 2020
Available formats
×