Caribbean Diaspora in the USA: Diversity of Caribbean Religions in New York City

Chapter 1
The Multiple Dimensions
of Caribbean Culture
What is a Caribbean person, and consequently what is a Caribbean writer? Are they
always Creole? Where are they born, and where do they live? Cannot the Creole
culture – I mean the culture of the Caribbean islands – be transplanted and survive just as
well through the use of memory? In other words, aren’t there new and multiple versions
of créolité? (Condé 1998: 109)
Maryse Condé’s questions draw our attention to the ongoing debate about the
meaning of Creole identity and Creole culture. Thousands of emigrants from
islands in the Caribbean – even rather removed ones – have to face the problem of
identification and demarcation every day. Does the young novelist Edwidge Danticat,
who left the Caribbean, grew up in the USA and publishes in English, still represent
Haiti? She tells stories about Haitians, about a Haitian girl in New York and also
about the Haitian massacre in the Dominican Republic. Her decision to write in
English instead of French or Kreyòl separates her from other Caribbean authors.
Nevertheless, she is still a Caribbean – though one with a new perspective, as she is
able to identify problems with the objectivity of a distant view, problems which are
often unchallenged by people on the islands. Both perspectives represent Caribbean
culture, each being one of multiple versions.
Since the 1990s, when I started my fieldwork in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean
islands and their peoples have fascinated me. The cultures of the Caribbean do
not fit into a pigeonhole; they exhibit all kinds of demands and assumptions. At
one moment people define themselves on the basis of national language, and then
they praise the common history of their own and other islands. Sometimes they
agree to a common definition of Caribbean identity, sometimes they argue against
it. The representatives of the Caribbean cultures seem to be too diverse to agree
in even one aspect. And the picture gets worse when we include the Diaspora.
Many Caribbeans migrated to Panama in order to find jobs during the time of the
construction of the Panama canal. Consequently, today most Panamanians feel a
sense of belonging to the Caribbean, where most of their ancestors came from.
Some of their descendents live now in the USA, where they have become part of the
Caribbean community. The poetry of Carlos Guillermo Wilson illustrates the sense
of disruption which many feel today. His great grandparents came from St Lucia,
Barbados, Granada and Jamaica to Panama. Today he lives in California though
he is indeed a Caribbean person. In his works he argues against the rejection of
African heritage in the process of creolization (see, for instance, his poem Uprooted;
Wilson 1998: 42–3). Wilson defines the Caribbean culture as the result of the violent