Week 6 – “Negotiating Caribbean Identities” Hall

“Silencing as well as remembering, identity is always a question of producing in the future an account of the past, that is to say it is always about narrative, the stories which cultures tell themselves about who they are and where they came from” (283). I’ve said before that I took Storytelling for the first five weeks, and again and again I’m seeing the truth of story in our lives. We define ourselves through narrative because it is the universal mode of teaching and understanding. When imperialists and colonialists told stories about their perceptions of life in other cultures, they defined identity for those people. Allowing people to tell their own stories helps them define themselves and understand their culture not against another but as its own standing identity.