I Know Who I Am - A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada

I Know Who I am - A Caribbean Woman's Identity in Canada by Yvonne Bobb-Smith. Publ. Women's Press/Toronto 2003 Racism, it seems, is word that will not go away, as diey say, any time soon. One hears accusations of racism in all kinds of situations in which people, all over the world, meet, including international sporting events, which somehow, one might like to hope, should be free of it. Yet Bobb-Smith, in this book, demonstrates, among odier diings, that it is diere, and she sets out to help the reader understand why. She does so by sharing not only her own dioughts and dieories on the phenomenon, but also the testimony of 45 other women interviewed on her journey, whose self-definition allows glimpses into the individual struggles, by which they gain the empowerment and enabling mechanism to survive as immigrant women in Canada. As Ramabai Espinet says in her unique preface, it is a noisy text, meaning, among other diings, that it is often frankly spoken in the everyday language of the women, widi rarely any attempt to avoid this. Bobb-Smith herself, however, employs suitably elevated language which may, therefore, require at times that the reader diink twice about its intellectual interpretation. Inevitably, colonialism, that event in Caribbean history which has laid an indelible mark on the peoples of these territories, is discussed. It has to be admitted diat, for whatever reason, some of us believe that it is sign of churlish weakness to be still, centuries later, blaming all our misfortunes on that time, instead of accepting that it did happen, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and moving on. Bobb-Smith is not one of diose - not entirely. She will not forget it happened, but neither will she allow it to reduce her or any of her fellow Caribbean women to cringing creatures defined by submissiveness or subservience. Unsurprisingly she calls such women in the tide of that chapter rebels and spitfires. Subsequent chapters allow her to do such things as recognize independence as feminist ethic and of Caribbean woman's identity in Canada; affirm that is complicated concept and that the Caribbean as also harbours its own brands of racism; accept that it may not be easy to wear the label Black as defining term, difficulty further reinforced in territories where Indo- and Afro-Caribbean people must share space; and show how sexism becomes an added ingredient in the equation. As Bobb-Smith tells her story, we see her leaving Trinidad as junior librarian, having embarked on training towards British overseas diploma, a program [which was] the next best thing to university degree, and going to Canada in the sixties as part of that country's scheme to import domestic servants. She was placed widi White family in an upper-class district of Toronto, who quickly recognized [diat her] skills went beyond household routine and was encouraged instead to teach and counsel dieir sons. Yet she admits that being offered this token of equality may well been compliment in reverse. The stories of some of the women interviewed are like hers, starting off in the domestic scheme, while others with teaching or secretarial certificates from home had their qualifications discredited, leaving them no recourse but to accept menial tasks instead, like factory work. Coming from Caribbean just struggling to assert its independence from colonial rulers, the purpose of such displacement was, in some cases, to open up avenues for education, and in others to provide an escape as well from an unpleasant domestic situation. Under such circumstances, the dehumanizing racism they were forced to endure may come as shock to readers who have either not been exposed to it, or had not, till dien, considered Canada particularly racist country. Yet, as Bobb-Smith goes on, [t]he people of this region named the Caribbean have common history of domination and born of imperial systems - genocide, servitude, slavery, indentureship and colonialism in which they learnt to strive for survival by resistance - collective as well as individual. …

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