Congratutalions Barbados! Poem by Professor Dr. Stanley Collymore

You’ve come a long way Barbados,
Since those dark days
Of despair and disdain
Saw you fashioned in the fiery cauldron
Of brutality, suffering and pain.
When your noble black sons
And their daughters
Together as slaves lived and died;
Stripped routinely of their entire identity,
While their humanity was callously denied.

It was difficult, I know, to watch helplessly
As your fair isle and tropical Eden
Was turned into a bastion of cruelty
By folk who’d sailed out from England:
Those greedy, red-necked Caucasians
Whose arrogance and lack of regard
For the plight of the Blacks,
On whose enforced backs
Britain’s wealth and prestige were assured.

Bristol and Liverpool, Manchester and London;
The Midlands, Wales and beyond
Are all major beneficiaries
From centuries of forced labour,
Carried out by your daughters and sons.
And although no credit is ever given
To the massive contribution you’ve sustained
In turning a backwater European island
Into the imperial power it became;
The true facts of Blighty’s hidden history -
From financing the Industrial Revolution
To its former mastery of the seas -
Owe much to your sugar plantations
And the Black Gold of slavery.

Moreover, you’ve always been the focus:
The conduit for our misgivings and fears;
Our abiding hope and inspiration,
A refuge when no one else cared.
Exactly as you did for our ancestors,
Who in chains from Africa were taken;
And in surviving the Triangular Passage,
Sired a nation of exceptional Bajans.

Let’s applaud then your latest achievements,
As your thirty first birthday we celebrate;
By confidently looking forward to the future
With this country we helped to create.
Let’s also thank God for our deliverance
From the yolk of the colonialist’s reign,
To become a proud nation of free people;
Whose destiny is now ours to frame.

© Stanley V. Collymore
30 November 1997.