From Caribbean hip-hop to Puerto Rican lament

Thinking about mass communication in the Caribbean and how to identify the relevance, strengths, threats or challenges posed by the mass media in regional work, I feel overwhelmed and frightened. As a Caribbean working in the media in Puerto Rico, I relive the history of our peoples: I hear the echo of their forms of communication across the centuries, their rights, their styles of expression, their accents, their silence, their brave struggle against the powerful. I dream of the slaves' rebellion, and witnessed their freedom.

In order to fulfil my role as a journalist I would have to undertake a long post-doctoral thesis, post-Caribbean, post-world. I would have to set aside the beauty of solitude, the privilege of reflection, and rush to the West Indian bateyes in order to remember my ancestors. I would have to tread the soil of the little island of Anguila, of Venezuela, the Cuba of Martí and Castro, the Haiti of Toussaint, Duvalier and Aristide, the Dominican Republic of Trujillo, Balaguer and Bosch, the Guyana of Cheddi Jagan.

In order to strengthen memory and complete the historical and cultural picture, I would have to carry with me the works of Martí and Hostos, of Eric Williams, C. L. R. James and Walter Rodney, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera, Carlos Moore, Rex Nettleford and Naipul, the poetry of Una Marson and Louise Bennett, the novels of George Lamming and Sylvia Wynter, and the anthropological studies of Eugenio Fernández Méndez and Ricardo Alegría.

The physical, mental and spiritual journey, this Caribbean hip-hop, is costly and demanding. But it would be necessary in order to reflect on Caribbean communication beyond its linguistic barriers. Reading the Barbados papers owned by the Barrow family, and Burnham's news of the Bahamas. Watching television in Dominica, listening to the radio in Martinique and Guadeloupe, St. Vincent and Jamaica. Checking out cultural and ethnic relations in Trinidad and Tobago. Communicating in the street language of each island, in Spanish, English, Papiamento, Creole, French. Talking with people, studying their lives in depth, listening to their stories. Conveying their worries and concerns, their joys, festivals and religious rites.

It is a postmodern task, iconoclastic and eclectic, and essential. It is also a post-journalistic challenge. It is not just a beginning, a moral and risky exploration. It extends to enquiries into the quality of life, power relations between men and women, the environment, analysis of education levels, work skills, the impact of CNN on cultures and expectations for the 21st century, social transformations arising from political independence and the technological achievements of McLuhan's disciples.

To do this is to discover, shape, reconstruct and recreate my world and make it yours, overwhelm you with struggles and misfortunes and move you with achievements and triumphs. This mission goes beyond the Caribbean itself to become infinitely universal and exemplary.

However, from my press cubicle in Puerto Rico I can philosophise a little about the benefits and challenges of the media, and offer a vision, perhaps, from a veteran communicator. I offer these Caribbean footnotes as a way of introduction to the Black Puerto Rican lament, which is fundamental to an affectionate debate about the Caribbean.

Rules of the game

After three decades of struggling with thinking, journalism, communication and conflict, I can say that:

•The main contribution of mass communication in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, is without doubt the provision of genuine reflection on the intellectual and spiritual diversity of our people. This is also its principal challenge.

•Mass communication should help us to look for what unites us as human beings, given our diverse Caribbean context.

•Each person has the right to hear their own voice in the press and on the radio, and see their own image on the screens of the TV and cinema.

•The purpose of the mass media is as complex as existence itself. Its raison d'être lies in some part of the labyrinth of the human endeavour. For some its principal purpose is to offer information. Such information is not necessarily correct or definitive, but merely a guide for those who want to think more about the subject under discussion. For those, perhaps, who see no further meaning to life than living and dying, the media serve as entertainment. It is escapism. Other see the media as an element of government propaganda.

•Remember: today's news is yesterday's secret and vice versa.

•Between roaming round the streets in the search for information and setting it down on the computer or typewriter, journalists live at least ten lives daily, one more than a cat. Their lives, their value systems and their ethics are at stake: they are vulnerable to all human tasks.

•The great benefit and challenge of the mass media is to develop journalists who are aware of their social responsibility. An alert and courageous conscience carries the risk of death or, even worse, the threat of conformity.

•The astute journalist, committed to life and justice, also writes poems and novels. This is motivated by the moral duty to present a complete picture of the everyday, in a language that helps the reader to justify his or her dreams, fantasies and meaning in life. The novel is memory restored and rehabilitated. Think of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and the poems of Derek Walcott.

•The journalist speaks for the inarticulate, the censured, the oppressed and repressed, those marginalised by the descendants of Columbus. The journalist must tell and retell their stories, and make these people's lives their own. And who are they? Who are we? By way of illustration I want to tell the story of a lament, a story which for me is fundamental to all work concerning the Caribbean. I want to tell this story as a woman, as a Puerto Rican and as Black. I am speaking of the Black Puerto Rican Lament.

•The sense of being Black - its spirit and spirituality, its humour, intelligence and conscience, its perception - is fundamental to the long, arduous process of salvation and rescue of our race, our Caribbean.

Turning screams into words

In our society, the idea of the common good becomes an instrument of power: of the strong over the supposedly weak, the rich over the poor, men over women, parents over children, of humans over animals and plants, the educated over the ignorant, the unemotional over the emotional, of politicians over peoples, the sighted over the blind, cultures over subcultures, students over those studied and, at the bottom, of White over Black.

Many Puerto Rican Blacks, men and women, suffer racial harassment at work, in the street, and in their own families. They tell their tales of harassment in private.

Part of the work of the Caribbean mass media is to focus on the situation of Blacks in Puerto Rico. The historical continuity of Blacks in Puerto Rico has now been severed. The Black presence in the communications media is small. The lack of Black professionals in government, in finance and in the universities, is an old story.

Puerto Rican youth do not have positive examples of Blacks, the third race of Puerto Rico. They do not hear the voices of the ancestors. They do not recognise their contribution to Puerto Rican society and to the country's vision as the 21st century approaches. They do not hear the scream inside the Puerto Rican silence about race. This is the scream of the invisible Blacks, of philosophers, poets, prophets and writers, the scream of the poor and marginalised. And the greatest challenge to the Caribbean media is to turn that scream into words.

Eneid Routté-Gómez is an award-winning journalist who is closely involved in socio-cultural affairs. She has lectured extensively in many parts of the world on social and political issues, multicultural relations and diversity, gender issues, democratic freedoms and the state of the arts. She has published numerous columns, features, articles and reviews for The San Juan Star, the only newspaper published in English in Puerto Rico.