Abstract
Orlando Patterson’s Gen Ed taught me that, from sugar, to reggae, to anticolonial praxis, the world owes much of its material, cultural, and intellectual wealth to the Caribbean. The power that this experience had in reshaping my worldview further revealed to me that education itself was a critical tool for appreciating the Caribbean’s worldwide contributions and for leveraging these insights to address the challenges that hinder marginalized communities in the Caribbean and beyond. These epiphanies set the course of my college career: I dedicated my extracurricular activities to advancing equitable education initiatives, applying my Gen Ed knowledge to empower Barbadian youth. Seeing how this course’s insights could help design empowering pedagogies, I devoted my senior thesis to exploring how a single high school in Martinique helped train several generations of anticolonial leaders and luminaries. By mobilizing these historical insights through community service, I helped stimulate the cultural and civic agency of youth in Chinatown and Roxbury. These experiences inspired by the Gen Ed ultimately determined my post-graduate mission: I will first study for a masters on the history of emancipatory intellectual traditions in the Caribbean, then call upon these insights through a career in education law, where I plan to advance culturally responsive education opportunities to both empower local student communities and assist in the effort to uplift Caribbean societies today. This Gen Ed has not only inspired my professional commitments but has ultimately served as a seedbed for the answers I bring to challenges in education and civil society.
Submission
A teacher who reliably animated the lecture hall with vigorous commentaries, Professor Orlando Patterson was unusually restrained the day of his lecture on modern Haiti. Replacing his incisive narratives was a turbulent video montage of Haitian people suffering under US occupation, François Duvalier, and the 2010 earthquake. After the footage ended, Patterson delicately broke the silence, uttering, “You stare in the face a real dilemma. You can find this story of Haiti repeated all over Latin America.” Then, locking eyes with the class, he asked, “What do you do in a situation like that?”
Figure 1 Me (cursor) in Professor Orlando Patterson’s Gen Ed, “The Caribbean Crucible.”
Professor Patterson’s question seized my interest, so much so that I took his Gen Ed, “The Caribbean Crucible,” twice.1 His course opened my eyes to how Caribbean peoples, in the face of some of the world’s most horrific catastrophes of enslavement, colonialism, and natural disaster, have indelibly enriched the musical, literary, artistic, and intellectual life of the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Underscoring our indebtedness to Caribbean culture, Professor Patterson’s Gen Ed inspired in me a dedication to honoring the place of the Caribbean in world history and consequently formulating solutions to address the legacies of colonial violence that hamper the development of Caribbean societies today. Through my own transformative experience in Patterson’s class, as well as his insights from his experience as the chair of Jamaica’s Education Transformation Commission, I became convinced that education could serve as a meaningful instrument for raising historical and cultural awareness of the Caribbean, and for igniting, as the Gen Ed did for me, the conversations needed to empower and rebuild societies like post-colonial Haiti.
My epiphanies from this course catalyzed the personal and professional pursuits that have defined my college experience. Hearing Professor Patterson’s lectures as a call to action, I committed my extracurricular capacities to promote equitable education opportunities by leading organizations like Harvard Undergraduate Studies in Education. I volunteered for Harvard’s Pre-Texts initiative, where I fostered art-based pedagogies to promote literacy and citizenship with organizations like KEYS, a Barbadian nonprofit that offers programs to promote education and mental health among Caribbean youth. There, I applied the historical and sociological understandings from the Gen Ed, such as the central role that institutions have played in the development of Barbados, to help design initiatives that fostered dialogues between youth communities and civic institutions. My approach to turning my insights from the Gen Ed into service tools was so successful that the executive of the Pre-Texts initiative, Professor Doris Sommer, appointed me to serve as the internship director of Pre-Texts, where I helped lead over 20 partnerships between Harvard students and international education organizations.
This fruitful engaged scholarship experience led me to dedicate my academic career to studying education in the Caribbean. In Patterson’s Gen Ed, I was particularly inspired by the Francophone Caribbean, as the history of Haitian Independence galvanized my political imagination and the poetry of Martinican thinkers like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon deepened my awareness of the existential tolls of colonialism. Eager to learn more about these histories and figures, I ultimately switched my concentration to a joint in Romance Languages (Francophone studies) and History, focusing specifically on the intellectual and literary history of the Francophone Caribbean. Professor Patterson’s emphasis on education and his exploration on how the sociohistorical specificity of the archipelago shaped its cultural traditions continued to guide my approach to my studies: after noticing that Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant all attended the same high school in colonial Martinique, I became interested in how their common education experiences shaped their groundbreaking anticolonial visions. This question became the topic of my senior thesis, which took me to archives in France and to communities in Martinique, where I investigated the history of Caribbean education, met the descendants of Toussaint Louverture and Aimé Césaire, and drew inspiration from Martinican teachers today, who continue to promote the emancipatory values of education in the Caribbean.
My experience of engaging knowledge from Professor Patterson’s class in community service initiatives inspired my relationship to my thesis research. Equipped with a historically- grounded perspective on how pedagogies can facilitate explorations and affirmations of diasporic identity and double consciousness, I realized I could implement my thesis findings to design empowering classroom protocols. Drawing inspiration from how Aimé Césaire’s teacher Gilbert Gratiant shared creole folktales to foster Césaire’s appreciation for Martinican culture, for example, I partnered with the Boston Public Library to create an Afrocentric curriculum for Roxbury’s Somali-immigrant community. Then, as senior counselor for the Chinatown Adventure six-week Summer Urban Program, I created lessons on Caribbean activists like Claudia Jones to inspire underserved Chinatown students to formulate their own democratic projects, like a newspaper by and for Chinatown youth. As I witnessed my students flourish intellectually and grow in confidence through these educational opportunities, I discovered that curricular knowledge grounded in the emancipatory history of the Caribbean was yet another gift that the archipelago offered to communities around the world.
This discovery has determined the academic and professional path I will pursue after graduation. I have been accepted and committed to a history masters at Sciences Po in Paris, and then to a J.D. at Harvard Law School, where I intend to advance the missions inspired by the Gen Ed. During my master’s program, I will explore the emancipatory pedagogies of the Caribbean more deeply, this time comparing the intellectual upbringing of Aimé Césaire with that of the Anglophone Caribbean anticolonial visionaries that I learned of in Professor Patterson’s class, such as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams (they also attended the same high school in Trinidad). Having discovered the power of these historical insights when transformed into pedagogical blueprints in education spaces today, I am determined to pursue a career in law, wielding educational and international legal frameworks to extend these empirically-informed pedagogies to marginalized communities today. Particularly through HLS’ Education Law Clinic, I plan to blend my historical background with my legal training to offer equitable and culturally responsive education opportunities to Boston Public Schools’ growing Haitian immigrant student population. Turning to transnational advocacy, I wish to continue learning from Professor Patterson to understand how I can leverage international policies and institutions to promote community-driven education opportunities in Caribbean societies.
Now, as just this week factions have destabilized Haiti’s leadership and are imperiling hospitals and other vital institutions, Professor Patterson’s question rings as clearly and as urgently in my ear as it did when I first heard it in the Gen Ed classroom: “What do you do?” As I work to deepen my understanding of the history of the archipelago and strive to formulate solutions to its challenges, I believe that the plans and projects I have since pursued have constituted my effort to comprehend the different dimensions of this question and to offer answers. Pushing me into the realm of engaged scholarship, “The Caribbean Crucible” inspires me to take action by implementing my findings to address the challenges of communities in the Caribbean and beyond.
1 I audited “The Caribbean Crucible” in Fall 2021 and officially enrolled in Fall 2022.