Marina: a true Caribbean.

Marina Taitt is the office manager for the Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Centre. We had a fascinating conversation over lunch about reparations for slavery. During the conversation we branched into searching for ancestors and how difficult that is for black people in the Caribbean. Marina spent over 20 years in Jamaica, including time in Islington, in the parish of St. Mary. This happens to be close to the area where my father comes from. She reminisced briefly about planting peas and enjoying a short spell of agricultural life there, not wanting to leave.

Marina's background is also typically Caribbean. She was born in Guyana, is of mixed heritage of East Indian, Portuguese, and African. Her paternal grandfather, Jabez Taitt, moved from Barbados to Guyana in around 1920 to do his internship at a hospital in Guyana, because Barbados would not train nonwhite doctors; he never looked back. Her parents moved back to Barbados in the 1970s, thus completing the circle! Marina has tried to find out more about her Caribbean ancestors before her grandfather, but records in Barbados (affectionately called "Bim" by many) apparently don't go back to 1895, when he was born. Her grandfather had told Marina that his mother or grandmother was a slave on the Cave Hill plantation in Barbados, but Marina cannot confirm that. Marina's paternal grandmother, was Dorothy Pendleton, a white Guyanese-Portuguese who married Jabez in the 1920s. Marina's maternal grandmother was the daughter of an East Indian merchant from a rice-growing family, named Sawh, from somewhere in India, which disowned her for marry a man of African descent, her grandmother's parents had migrated from India to Guyana.

Marina has a great love of the Caribbean arts and culture. Her love for theatre led her to the Jamaica School of Drama at a time (1979) when some of the region’s most outstanding practitioners were teaching there, and she studied for the Diplomas in Theatre Arts and Theatre-in-Education. She developed a cultural sense of the region as a whole. She soon discovered that it was not easy to find research and reference materials on topics related to regional cultural development, without travelling around the region and collecting the information "out there". Marina wanted to find a way to collect information which was scattered, often unpublished/unseen and only partially recorded, and put it in a place where it could be easily accessed. So she developed http://www.caribarts.org/ as a way to do that: it's a true online "home" for Caribbean artists, a developing repository of information on our cultural traditions, which provides coverage of contemporary developments in Caribbean arts. It's a bold and dignified presentation of Caribbean lives and cultures, making a serious attempt to document cultural realities.

Marina is another modern day griot, online! She got a private grant in 2003 to design and post the full site online, and after a year of work a greatly expanded version of the site went live with the information databases she had been building. Today, she continues to expand the site’s listings and update the events and newsletter pages monthly. However, the site needs financial backing to boost the site’s income-generating elements and make it self-sustaining; unfortunately, responses from institutions have been few and negative.

The debate about reparations needs to continue. Some have argued that the important element of true emancipation is mental and spiritual, not financial. As Bob Marley sang, "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves will free our minds." Marina shows one way to go along this road.