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When Professor Emeritus Arnold Rampersad spoke to graduating students of the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The UWI in 2009, he drew their attention to the notion of Self.
Casting himself in the role of a “scholar-critic committed to biography and autobiography” (for which he is globally acclaimed), he defined the term as the essence of the life in question.
It was a riveting lecture, given on the occasion of the conferment of the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa to this eminent son of the soil who has made his home in the USA since 1965.
I had become editor of the campus newsmagazine, UWI TODAY, earlier that year, and I was present at the ceremony. Listening, I felt I was grasping a sense of what it means to write about people, to grope for the essence—something I had done rather intuitively in the past without really examining why.
But I do not invoke Professor Rampersad today because of his profound influence on me as a writer. Rather, I want to look at the notion of selfhood that he explored because I think it is an adjunct to the topics that I have been preoccupied with these days.
Trauma, coping mechanisms, repressed emotions, casual cruelty, fear and fury—a tumultuous convergence that could, and often does, shatter the spirit.
The moment I connected his words with my own musings was when I read his question, “Is the ‘self’ the same as what we call the soul?”
As he pursued the notion in the context of biographies, he cited VS Naipaul’s Nobel speech and his invocation of the disagreement between French literary critics, Charles Sainte-Beuve and Marcel Proust, over what was most salient in capturing that essence. After adding Sigmund Freud’s opinion to the ring, he made his own conclusion.
“One might say that at least three selves seem to exist in any one person. First of all, there is the face one shows the world, often with an ingratiating grin. Next, we have a private self we reveal to our family.
“And then there is the self that one keeps largely hidden even from one’s family. This is the self we often think of as painfully misunderstood, a place unreachable by others.”
“Who do we think we are?” This was his question, as he encouraged the quest of trying to align all these different aspects—although he cautioned that a “completely harmonious alignment isn’t possible”, but it was still an obligation to monitor these selves.
Professor Rampersad suggested four elements of the Self which he thought could probably shape our sense of identity: “race or ethnicity; social class and/or money; gender—male, female, or in between; and religion”. These could be either sources of strength or weakness, he said, as he added another possible aspect.
“This is the nagging desire for freedom from the chains of the preceding four.”
He expanded on these notions, of course, but I can only share the gist and leave it up to you to find his full words if you so desire.
I want to try to connect the threads I discerned between his profound insights and the mental alleys I have been inhabiting. Much of what I have been focusing on these past few weeks comes from very personal observations and experiences.
Looking at the nature and volume of the responses has persuaded me that even if we have been in the middle of the wining season—seen as a time of release—the pain is brooding and palpable.
One of the things that struck me about the responses was the gendered differences.
Women shared experiences and expressed the feeling that they better understood the nature of what they were going through because they had learned something. They also talked about not feeling they were the only ones going through their pain.
Only one man, I think, shared an experience. Generally, males either said they thought it was a subject that needed airing, or they veered off into negative, disparaging remarks.
Interestingly, about one particular column, roughly equally weighted between female and male comments were those that accused me of not wanting to submit to male authority. Just thought I would mention that observation, given the commemoration of International Women’s Day. (They were correct, and I’m still perplexed about why I should.)
That aside, it was obvious that people were sinking under the weight of a kind of silent misery that made it difficult to navigate each day. Without something to anchor them—and I proffer the notion that a strong sense of Self is that prop—there remains something desperately brittle as a foundation.
In Naipaul’s 2001 Nobel speech, he described at length his childhood experiences: “We lived for the most part ritualised lives, and were not yet capable of self-assessment, which is where learning begins.”
This exists more fully than I think we care to believe. We drape ourselves with fraying, musty rituals without examining their relevance or value to our current times. Self-assessment, that capacity to explore one’s inner world, to know oneself intimately and frankly, can only be gained by opening oneself to ideas, new and old.
For what do we experience when we live the unexamined life? I imagine that we are more vulnerable to the darkness when we don’t know who we are. To thine own self be true.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
