Part of the culture series of articles.
Mongrality, or the understanding of the Commonwealth as a “mongrel country,” is a major theme of black Caribbean writing and discourse in the Commonwealth. It is part of a broader discourse on post-colonialism in the country, and stands in contrast to black nationalism in the United States.
The Commonwealth has shaped black Caribbean identity and writing tremendously, and accelerated the tradition already present in the Caribbean of searching for meaning in creole identities that are distinct from both black Americans and Africans. The Caribbean is incredibly diverse, and even more so in Vekllei. There are Irish speakers in Allia, French, Dutch, Spanish and English speakers, a million creoles, as well as extant indigenous languages that survive intact. A lot of the Commonwealth’s political energy originates there, and it is known as the region of poets and writers – and not just because many poets and writers relocate there from other parts of the country for the weather and pace of life.
Oslola’s history of domination and then occupation really battered its traditions of culture and criticism, and so it had a drier, functional role in the early Commonwealth. As such, a lot of the discourse in Vekllei regarding colonialism, race, civilisation, the person and human rights originates in the Caribbean rather than Oslola or the latter republics in the East Atlantic. The general themes of this discourse are very postcolonial, but in a modernist rather than postmodernist fashion. The trauma and displacement of slavery and servitude in the Caribbean – of people uprooted and dumped – closely mirrors the artificiality of the Commonwealth state, and naturally draws parallels between Commonwealth values (civilisation, personalism, subsidiarity, multiracialism) and the material circumstance of island dependency on a metropole.
There are fewer black nationalists in Vekllei than might be expected, both because it is already a majority-black and mixed country, and because those movements are closely associated with American blackness. Where American black nationalism looks backwards towards a purity origin, an essential racial basis, Commonwealth blackness is rhizomatic and expands outwards.
Mongrality has some overlap with successionism, a concept in the country that Commonwealth artificiality is precisely the basis of its advancement; a civilising of the worst instincts of human nature, which has parallels with universalism. In other words, it is a belief that Vekllei is succeeding the American republican project, which was itself succeeding European empire, which was itself succeeding feudalism. This teleology naturally has a lot of overlap with Marxism too, but is primarily a political belief rather than one focused on economic relations.