[MH] (Caribbean by Night) Driving Miss Piggy

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Georgetown isn't that Afro-dominated. There are plenty of East Indians there.

I've certainly never been there.

I'm just going by census data around the end of Juman's stay there, when 53% of Georgetown inhabitants self-reported as 'Black/African', 24% as 'Mixed' and 20% as 'East Indian'. Also, from what I could discover, the the 1970s and 1980s, when Juman was growing up, PNC policy meant that the government posts and jobs at newly nationalized entities that made up more and more of the urban jobs available were disproportionally in the hands of 'Afro-Guyanese' citizens. So those who might be described as a political and economic elite in Georgetown at that time would consist of Afro-Guyanese people, in the main.

I certainly don't mean to imply that Juman grew up in a cultural enclave devoid of other Indo-Guyanese, just that he belonged to a demographic and economic minority where he grew up.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Very Dark skin is common among Indo-Guyanese. If you come across a fellow with the nick-name "Blackie", he's an East Indian with skin darker than the Africans. The tell for African heritage is hair. And its a big deal. Guyanese society cares about race a LOT, and that particular ancestry is frowned on by both sides.

They all have the same dialect though, at least in Georgetown.

Well, you are the one who named Zamal Juman, suggested his origin and supplied the casting photo of him.

I can't tell from this picture whether that's a very dark-skinned 'pure-blooded' East Indian / Indo-Guyanese or someone of mixed race, most likely both East Indian and African heritage. In particular, the very closely-cropped hair makes it impossible to attempt to use its curliness or lack thereof as any kind of ethnic indicator.

From a fictional perspective, however, I made the decision that Juman's exact ethnicity is deliberately ambigious to outsiders, at least to the point where he can be taken for either mixed-race or Indo-Guyanese. And, of course, in the United States, relatively few people look beyond dark skin and a Caribbean lilt to his accent before concluding 'Afro-Caribbean'.

Juman was a policeman during a period where Indo-Guyanese citizens found government posts harder to get and where the police, in particular the specific unit to which Juman belonged, have been accused to racial profiling and discrimination. I therefore decided that he dealt with prejudice by skillfully adopting the apparent fashions, values and shibboleths of whoever was in power at each time. He didn't change his tell-tale name, but he cropped his hair short enough to make it ambigious whether he had any African heritage and adopted pan-African and pan-Caribbean rhetoric when it was popular with The Powers That Be.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Hope that helps.

It does and I always welcome more background detail and colour.