Trinidadian Nobel Laureate the late Sir Vidia “VS” Naipaul once wrote, “I cannot really explain the mystery of ... inheritance … sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves”. As artificial intelligence forces us to think about what it means to be human, Naipaul’s words ring truer today than ever. While AI is a storehouse for vast amounts of human information and knowledge, it does not know everything. How can we ensure Caribbean people are seen through the lens of 21st Century technologies and applications not created by us for us? And how can we find ways as Caribbean people to process the sorrow, the joy, and the mystery of belonging. 

Caribbean life is a work of art, an act of creative will. The narrative of the Caribbean emerging from the brokenness of slavery and colonialism is a becoming … the “gathering of broken pieces” into a new way of being. It’s the “restoration of shattered histories” into a fresh story that tells of Caribbean triumph through the challenges of liberation and independence. And the story is still being written today because none of the Caribbean’s social advances are sustainable without home-grown innovation and widespread economic enfranchisement. This is the challenge facing the region on the next leg of its independence journey. To have been broken, fragmented, shattered, and put back together again. This is the anguish, but also the joy, of belonging. 

The Promise of Belonging is powerfully articulated in the “Children of Independence”, an opinion piece I wrote to reflect on Barbados’ 44th anniversary as a sovereign state. It was published in the Sunday Sun edition of the Barbados Nation Newspaper on November 28, 2010. As smart technologies accelerate the pace of change in the world, it continues to astonish me how fitting the original words were for their time, and how prophetic they remain for such a time as this, accurately mirroring Barbados’ current reality more than 12 years after they were written. 

As we watch the things our parents and grandparents built collapse under the weight of universal demands for justice and a balanced, sustainable future, these days I find myself reflecting more and more on the memory of belonging. Who or what is a Barbadian, a Bajan as we say? What makes Barbados unique? What role has the island’s history as a plantation economy founded on the trade in enslaved Africans had on who Bajans are as a people attached to a particular geography at this particular moment in time? How does it impact how we recognise, create and assess value? The truth is that identity is a social construct, and self-confidence a learned behaviour. In many ways, we are what we remember. Perhaps even what our DNA remembers. And our memory of belonging, or of not belonging as the case might be, has the power to shape how we treat to today. 

Nothing stays the same. Change is an inevitable by-product of the human condition. But as time seems to accelerate in a 21st century reality driven by the technologies and global crises of the moment, what imprint has Barbados’ history as a plantation economy had on its development and its perception of what it means to belong to today? How does a tiny nation preserve its distinctiveness in an interconnected world being overtaken by the mass movement of people, money, information, knowledge, and cultural content? How does it make the transition from a consumer society shaped by the remnants of the plantation to an economy fuelled by home-grown innovation, where its people have a safe space to belong? 

The Time of My Remembering is a poetic piece I began years ago that continues to speak to the moment. Its theme is understanding who we are, what we were born to do and how who we are and what we were born to do has the potential to connect us to each other in empowering communities of purpose that anchor us in the world. 

“Know yuh place!” That’s how Bajans warn people to stay in their lane. While it usually signals someone has overstepped or is in danger of breaching an invisible line, on the flip side, there’s value in understanding where we belong. There’s power in knowing our purpose. As the world faces upheaval triggered by countless existential crises, I’m launching this 14-part series My Belonging to encourage virtual conversations and empowering action around civic decay, national reconstruction and the idea of digital transformation. This notion of transformation has been so misused, abused and misunderstood in recent years, it is now almost a joke. One thing I know: as human beings, we can effect change only if we, ourselves, have been transformed … and there is a structure, a process, a discipline, and principles that govern such transformations. As we say in Barbados, “It doan just happen so!” The tiny islands of the Caribbean can become test beds for new approaches to solving difficult global challenges … but they have to first realise their own internal transformations. Introductions, the first Episode of My Belonging, sets the stage for a virtual exploration of these issues. At its core is my evolving understanding of what it means to be an Afro-Caribbean woman of faith specialising in technology policy, innovation and development at this global changing of the seasons .