Edmund DelSol

My First Trip

One very interesting and particularly formative activity of my youth was the first time I travelled away from my native Dominica. It was on, of all things, a banana boat. I know, that sounds like a parody of bad joke. Our hometown scout troop, both full and 'cub' scouts--to which I belonged at the time--were headed to a regional scout jamboree in Barbados.

What made that trip particularly memorable, of the many new experiences I had, was arriving in the port of Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, the following morning. The sound of people speaking creole, like we did in Dominica, but with a noticeably different accent, was mesmerizing.

The Way We Were

At home, we had movies, they were largely Westerns, and mostly spaghetti Westerns. I'd wager a guess that close to a quarter of my home town, of about 2,000 people at the time, knew of Yul Brynner, the actor, even through we did not pronounce his name correctly.

We had access in school to some documentaries. The magical and indispensable projector was still in vogue. They would reflect very foreign interpretations of the 'African Man.' I believe that same 'African Man' would agree with my assessment.

We had magazines--Life and Time were dominant, with National Geographic playing a supporting and more nuanced role. What they showed was their curated African and Black American experiences, too often conflated, and presented as largely undifferentiated blocks of the 'Negro' world. Geographical and political differences were incidental--unless there were race riots in the US, or a war, say in Biafra.

We had a lot of educational books, from Britain: they taught us all that was European. That trip predated widespread TV. Although our home was among the minuscule percentage in our hometown with a set, it was off most of the time. There was no programming to speak of. If I must be perfectly frank, at the risk of unsettling my departed parents whom I love dearly, our TV was a vanity purchase. What we saw was on it, in the snippets of programming, was a glimpse of Britannia, interesting only because it was so disconnected from our lives. Dominica was among Britain's global swathe of colonized territories.

I cannot place the time when Peyton Place arrived on TV and took over the island--for the relatively few homes with sets. But it was after that trip. Before it took over TV, it made headway via radio. Western media dominance has been long in the making.

We had radio, of course. The local news presenters gave us updates on what was already familiar. And for news about the rest of the world, where else: the BBC World News of course. A shortwave radio broadcast signal fed into the local broadcasting system delivered a quintessentially British voice that probably more than half of the island could not follow or understand. Colonial dominance wrapped in information utility. The atmospherically induced fading of the broadcast as a much a part of the news as Premier League football scores that locals bet on via mailing cards. How the heck did that work anyway?

And of course, there was the Church. Dominica remains a dominantly Roman Catholic country to this day. One related and amusing neighbourhood scenario was my mother--a sharp tongue at times--expressing annoyance at a devout neighbor who kept railing nonstop at the Church. My mother explained that the Catholic Church, in a seeming act of progressiveness, had converted some core verbalizations (the invariable parts of the Mass and accompanying recitals known as the 'Ordinary of the Mass' or Ordo Missae) from Latin to English. Our neighbour had learned those parts by heart since childhood but was illiterate. She was none too pleased about the whole change to English thing.

Who Was I, Really?

Against that informational background shaping my development, I was still unaware of the extent to which my own emotional and cultural stamping had been set by others. If you feel inclined to apply the Boiled Frog syndrome here, be my guest. So, there I was looking over the side of the boat, mesmerized. Those people looked like me and spoke like me, yet I knew more about the Hapsburgs than I did about them. I was sure the reverse was true.

The few lines in our Caribbean geography school books, unsurprisingly from the likes of Collins, British, of course, would never be mistaken for substantive exploration of ourselves as forcibly resettled people. That barren, even absent, discussion of demographics was informational negligence imposed by an inherently uncaring colonial master, and shared among the broader West Indian society--whether stamped with the British, French or Dutch variant of colonialism. Our education was always for the colonizers' good: a sort of minimal cognitive tuning to make us only as useful as necessary.

That 'morning-in-Castries' experience anchored in me, since then, that storytelling as we knew it was an entirely unrepresentative thing. I cannot recall the source of a quote that has remained with me to this day, that 'culture is simply the stories we tell ourselves.' Even before I encountered that quote, I came up against the reality that we were not telling ourselves any stories. Others were telling us about ourselves.

Once You Know, You Cannot Unknow

Now, here I am decades later, and my desire to publish is rooted in that very early experience. I have exhorted a lot of people to share their voices. I have done so verbally, ad nauseum. I have written a lot but not published a lot. Bachelor's, and master's degrees, truncated doctoral study, exposure to business at different levels and in different countries, teaching in a business school, and small business ownership and consulting have given me abundant opportunities to create, write and share.

Yet my impetus is still driven by an information gap that I experienced as a child. One that I know still exists. And the best way I can accelerate the evolution that I envision is to embrace Mahatma Gandhi's exhortation: to be the change that I want to see. What experience has done for me is clarify how I will exercise my agency: as a business writer. That's where you will find me mostly.

And when I do stray into other discussions (demographics!), there will be an unmistakable embrace of business effects, consequences, and benefits as focal topics in those discussions. Business perspectives too, represent a branch of storytelling that we need, and my story telling is pointed at all audiences. I believe that my voice can help to shape a more reasoned and universally productive business space for all.