Introduction

What does it mean to remember? What is remembered and what remains unspoken? What are the implications of forgetting? Whose interests are served in remembering or forgetting? These questions serve as a starting point for mapping the power relations that underpin memory and amnesia in the Caribbean. The history of the Caribbean space since the Columbian invasion has meant that Caribbean people have not had the luxury of organically remembering or forgetting. Instead, deliberate efforts were applied to forcibly sever and erase the memories of subordinated people. ‘A people without history’ was one of the narratives of deficits directed towards non-European people in the age of ‘discovery’ (Wolf 1982; Grosfoguel 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013).

Apart from the severing of connections to precolonial ways of being, coloniality invisibilized the imperial disruptions of indigenous societies. Even when scholars have connected coloniality to modernity, this has remained a minority discourse in contemporary understandings of economic and global development. Scholars have argued that the founding moment of our modern world was one of dispossession, slavery and genocide (Bhabha 1990; Quijano 2007). Decolonial scholars present this as the modernity/coloniality dialectic where coloniality is the hidden and underlying aspect of the modern colonial capitalist world system (Grosfoguel 2011). If the starting point is a macro analysis of the origins of European empires, what stories are to be found when the Eurocentric narratives of history are overturned? What are the experiences of ordinary people who have not only had to contend with the impact of colonial empires on their communities but have also had to wrestle with the diverse and layered localization of global coloniality? How have people at the margins of empire navigated, resisted and accommodated the internal institutions, epistemologies and entangled hierarchies of modernity?

With these initial questions, this chapter draws upon fieldwork done in Trinidad and Tobago between 2010 and 2016 to focus on the experiences and worldviews of Rastafarians in Trinidad and Tobago, juxtaposing the historical emphasis of this movement alongside the historical erasures of coloniality.