The Perspective of Psychologists in Grenada

From the outset, the salutary importance of this belated project needs to be endorsed and the vision and efforts of the initiators commended. While it is merely a step toward a more inclusive conversation reaching and incorporating African perspectives even beyond the countries and experiences represented in this journal, this is a historical development. The stated mission and destiny of the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) in the United States is commendable (Grills, 2013), but it is essential that there is a clear recognition that ABPsi, representing one kind of African, can only realistically expect its definition of African-centered psychology to be one contribution to a more inclusive dialogue of definitions, missions, methodologies, theories, and techniques. There are many kinds of Africans and African cultures, both in the diaspora and in our continent of origin. We are, however, all African people who require a psychology diverse enough to encompass all of our diversity. This project might be the beginning of a truly Pan-African psychology.

Grenada is a small nation in the Eastern Caribbean with a population of which Africans make up 85% to 90%. As the people of Grenada are overwhelmingly of African origin, it is axiomatic that they are an African cultural group, irrespective of whether or not their expressed culture satisfies anyone else’s notions of the highest or purest forms of cultural Africanity. As Nobles (2013b) points out herein, “In terms of psychological knowledge and practice, the only valid perspective is one that reflects the culture of the people served” (p. 233). Psychologists in Grenada, as part of the awakening cadre of Caribbean psychologists (Amuleru-Marshall, Gomez, & Neckles, in press), are ready and willing to contribute to Rowe’s (2013) “African-centered metatheory . . . a development in the social sciences that addresses the specific sociocultural issues, contexts, strengths and preferences associated with the distinguishing qualities of persons of African ancestry” (pp. 270).

A response to the papers on natural/man-made disasters would inevitably be educated by the experience of Grenada’s almost total devastation by a Category 4 hurricane in 2004. Patterns of relative vulnerability seemed to covary with rather innocuous circumstances, such as occupation of the highest level of multilevel buildings and distance from the water’s edge and trees, irrespective of ethnicity and historical circumstances. The poor, of course, who always seem to meet storms and other disasters with more vulnerability, also live with a host of other contemporary violations, including higher rates of infectious illnesses, chronic diseases, and premature avoidable death. In fact, it is in these lifestyle chances and choices that man-made disasters, including slavery and colonialism, exercise a more selective influence. Having lived through the force of Hurricane Ivan, and then mounting emergency psychocultural rehabilitation efforts for all the island’s children, it is clear that the emergent needs of disaster survivors, such as food, water, lighting, shelter, and, most important, safety, must be the primary focus. The need for a resurgence of African spiritual beliefs and practices cannot be seriously associated with these tragic emergencies, but it is more appropriately relevant to the overall survival thrust of the African populations that were dragged across the Atlantic and forced to live in a zone of natural disasters, becoming exacerbated by the man-made disaster of global warming

Most of these articles, notably those by Nobles (2013), Myers (2013), Marriette (2013), and Hargrow (2013), despite nuanced differences, essentially recommend the same storehouse of “African wisdom and deep thought.” If these authors are prescribing these notions as indispensible for the psychocultural health of Africans anywhere, they must be careful not to confuse prescription with description. Even when one presumes to be accessing deep structural culture, it would not be found that African Caribbean culture is characterized by a common worldview that resembles that which is being advanced by American Africentric psychologists. If the point is that these ideas are being prescribed as foundational to a universal African-centered psychology, their prescriptive nature should be clearly stated and constructed within a conceptual frame that anticipates that there will be contending alternative postulates of healthier African-Caribbean psychocultural states.

Grenada is a state in which several, primarily Christian, practices coexist with some residual forms of more traditional African beliefs. An African psychology that takes its points of departure from the lived experiences of these African people must be comprehensive enough to incorporate a certain cosmological hybridity. While the understanding of their lived experiences requires a grounding in their protracted history, history is expected to guide the navigation of the present, not supersede it. Psychological interventions, with spiritual (or spirited) applications must respond to the notions and beliefs about the spirit world that are extant among the African population targeted for service. Whatever African indigenous religio-spiritual thought means, or does not mean, to different ones of us, all still African, it is at best only a potential tool of a more relevant psychology. In the words of an iconic Caribbean psychiatrist:

I, the man of color, want only this. That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. (Fanon, 1967, p. 231)