Cultural contrasts.

• Author: Wade, Francis
• Position: LATITUDES

I have had the privilege of doing in-depth work in the three major English-speaking Caribbean countries. When I say "in-depth" I mean to say that I've led personal transformation courses in companies in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados.

Before leading those courses, however, I learned a great deal about myself and the people from my own country of Jamaica, by travelling to Trinidad and Barbados. These countries are somewhat like my own but not exactly the same, and as a Jamaican I've learned a great deal from visiting and working with these cultures (more, I would say, than from my years of work in the United States).

From Bajans (Barbadians) and Trinis (Trinidadians) I've learned that we Jamaicans are an aggressive, assertive bunch of people. We speak out much more; we put up with very little; we argue, fight, create conflict, curse, shout, and resist at every opportunity. They look at us in amazement. Where did we get all that "fight" from?

As a Jamaican visiting Barbados I'm shocked at how civilized the place and the people are. Politeness is the order of the day. In Barbados, when there's a traffic accident, the cars stop in the middle of the road, and they remain in place until the police arrive. In Jamaica, the same behavior would elicit loud cursing and insults aimed at the drivers of the cars in the accident. Unsolicited observations would be made about their body parts, clothing, sexual preferences, and types of behavior they should be engaging in instead of driving.

Bajans and Jamaicans share some important features. We are both a majority black Christian population with a long heritage of British colonialism and a certain conservatism, especially in rural areas. But we tend to have very different personalities. Bajans are very well educated, much more so than Jamaicans. They know to act as they've been trained to do, which is to keep quiet in public settings, and they know when other Bajans expect them to be polite. By contrast, we Jamaicans seem to revel in being rebels.

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When I led my transformation courses and asked a group of Bajans a question, it was not an unusual thing to be met with a quiet, but thoughtful, silence. I could wait five minutes in silence easily before having someone answer. Courses were invariably conducted in a kind of quiet, classroom atmosphere.

The very same courses conducted in Jamaica were noisy affairs, and...