Becoming one nation

Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon calls Trinidad and Tobago beyond inherited wounds towards a covenant of belonging.

As Trinidad and Tobago marks 64 years of independence and 50 years as a republic, the country stands at a crossroads: proud of what it has achieved, but still struggling to become one nation.

The Archbishop of Port of Spain offered that assessment during ‘Soul of the Nation’, an Independence and Republic Day edition of For the Greater Good, a special production of Trinity TV. In conversation with programme host Roger Sant, he reflected on the country’s historical wounds, cultural creativity and the deeper commitment required for nationhood.

He described his outlook as a mixture of gratitude, anxiety and hope. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has accomplished remarkable things and repeatedly demonstrated resilience, including through the 1970 Black Power Revolution and the 1990 attempted coup. At the same time, the present moment demands a different way of navigating national challenges.

Beyond freedom to nationhood

Archbishop Gordon returned to Dr Eric Williams’ warning at Independence that two races had been freed but a society had not yet been formed. The statement, he said, recognised the distinct wounds of slavery and indentureship while making clear that “a flag, an anthem, colours” do not by themselves create a nation.

Those histories must neither be denied nor turned into a contest over who suffered most. “We haven’t yet become a nation,” he said. “That isn’t by ignoring the wound of each ethnic group that has arrived here. But it doesn’t happen either if each one only looks at its wound and not at the other wound.”

He urged citizens to remember another idea associated with Williams’ Independence addresses: there is no Mother India, Mother China, Mother Africa, Mother Syria, Mother Lebanon or Mother Portugal for the citizens of this country—only Mother Trinidad and Tobago, who cannot discriminate among her children.

“Each race has found its freedom, but we have not yet found a way to become a nation,” the Archbishop said. “And that task of nationhood and building nationhood is really where we are 64 years on.”

National observances such as Emancipation Day and Indian Arrival Day remain necessary, he stressed, but their meaning can be enlarged. Rather than concentrating only on ancestral suffering, the country should also celebrate what communities created here against extraordinary odds: families, systems of mutual support, economic activity, religious traditions and new cultural forms.

Looking backwards should help citizens understand the constrained circumstances in which their ancestors nevertheless made consequential choices. The more urgent question is what today’s citizens are doing with the much greater freedom available to them.

The soul beneath the spirit

For Archbishop Gordon, the ‘spirit’ of Trinidad and Tobago is easy to recognise: its joie de vivre, distinctive speech, humour, music and readiness to celebrate. The nation’s ‘soul’, however, is deeper.

Borrowing the word from Christian anthropology, he described it as the unseen core that reveals whether a people are true to God, to their values and whom they are called to become.

He characterised the country’s present mood as one of spiritual desolation—a headwind in which progress is difficult to see. In such a period, people can turn on one another and retreat into familiar racial and class conflicts. The spiritual response, he said, is to pray, return to interior silence and remember the graces already received.

The steelpan provides a powerful national metaphor. Trinidadians took discarded oil drums and transformed them into instruments capable of carrying Classical and local music around the world. What others treated as refuse was turned into beauty and nobility.

“It might seem like we’re in a rubbish heap. It might seem like things bad,” he said, acknowledging the pressure of a declining economy. “This is not the time to turn on each other. This is the time to ask, what do we still have that we could build together a nation out of all these races that have come here and find a future together with the grace of God?”

Difference without division

The country’s name itself offers a theological image. The Trinity holds profound difference within perfect unity; similarly, Trinidad and Tobago’s ethnic, cultural, class and religious diversity need not become division.

The Archbishop pointed to the nation’s instinct for hybridity: tassa heard within the steelband engine room, African drumming at Hosay, Soca, Chutney and a style of roti that belongs unmistakably to this place.

Freetown Collective’s ‘Take Me Home’, used during the programme, helped him name the commitment now required. The song’s appeal to be “married” to the heart of Port of Spain suggested a movement beyond merely occupying the same territory.

The Archbishop described the national relationship as progressing through “friending”, visiting and living together, but not yet reaching marriage—a covenant in which the country’s development becomes more important than tribe or ancestry.

“We have one nation, Trinidad and Tobago, and we have to commit to her, to her development, to her growth beyond any difference we have,” he said. “We have talent in every field. Everywhere in the world, we have shone. Why can’t we use that talent to move past our difference to the commitment and the covenant to really build Trinidad and Tobago?”

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