FORGING A COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: TOGETHER WE ASPIRE — KIM JOHNSON

Lately, I’ve contemplated national mottos, those of North and South America and the Caribbean. I thought that forging a collective identity was a significant component of nation-building in these parts.

To my mind, all of these countries in the New World were populated by some combination of indigenous natives and immigrants from Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and just about anywhere else. They were smashed together by European colonialism and its genocide, slavery, racial oppression, and immigration. As such, I expected all, or most, would have had a motto addressing the central identity problem we all faced, which involved building societies out of the disparate groups whose encounter was so unpleasant, bordering on traumatic.

Indeed, the yearning is there in the two I knew: T&T’s Together we aspire, together we achieve, which my cynically irreverent people sometimes rephrase as “Together we perspire, together we conceive,” and Jamaica’s “Out of many, One people.”

It turns out I was quite wrong. Some national mottos emphasize unity—11 if you count Antigua and Barbuda’s borderline. Each endeavor, all achieves. However, in a few cases, the remaining 31 motivate citizens towards quite different or even no goals.

For instance, Belize’s Sub umbra floret (Latin for Under the shade I flourish) suggests an unpleasant climate. Also solar but very different is Saint Lucia’s The land, the people, the light or perhaps Montserrat’s more earthy A people of excellence, molded by nature, nurtured by God.

Guatemala’s Libre Crezca Fecundo (Spanish for Grow Free and Fertile) celebrates a densely forested land or exhorts citizens to step up their procreative activities.

The British Virgin Islands’ Vigilate (Latin for Be watchful) encourages paranoia. In contrast, Chile’s Por la razón o la fuerza (Spanish for Through Reason Or By Force) is downright intimidating, only slightly more creepy than Colombia’s Libertad y orden (Spanish for Freedom and order) and Dominica’s sepulchral Après Bondié, C’est la Ter, which is Creole for After God, the Earth.

Panama, torn off Colombia by the US, who wanted to control the new state’s eponymous Canal, was given an appropriately cynical Pro mundi beneficio (Latin for the world’s benefit). In contrast, Puerto Rico wins the prize for sheer obscurity. That US colony’s motto is Joannes est nomen ejus (Latin for John is his name), taken from the Latin bible Luke 1:63. It refers to the fact that although the island is named after its port (Puerto Rico = Rich Port), the port, San Juan, was once the island’s name, after Saint John the Baptist.

On the other hand, Bermuda’s Quo fata ferunt (Latin for Whither the fates carry us) might as well have been Que sera sera or even Whatever.

Of course, those are the outliers. There are also references to justice and order, but the most common appeals are to liberty and, by far, to God. Eight countries, including the purportedly secular USA, reference the Almighty more than any other theme.

The USA’s unofficial motto was originally E Pluribus Unum (Latin: Out of many, one), which was included on the Great Seal by Act of Congress in 1782. However, it did not mean the same as Jamaica’s similarly-worded Out of Many, One People. Even today, many in the US do not consider all citizens to be one people, far less than in the 18th century. Instead, “Many” in the old US motto referred to the original 13 colonies that banded together as one republic in rejecting the British. Then in July 1956, in response to Soviet atheism, the US Congress declared the national motto: In God We Trust.

On first consideration, I thought that the US would have been better served by a Jamaica-type motto, even if it were just an ideal to which one could aspire. After all, the source of most of the USA’s swept-under-the-carpet problems has always been rooted in the deep-seated belief that African-Americans, Native Americans, and non-European immigrants are not full members of the society.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter when it comes to the US. Other countries’ mottos say something about them or their ideals, such as the Bajan Pride and Industry, even if it’s something trivial, such as Canada’s A mari usque ad mare (Latin: From sea to sea) or obscure like Saint Helena’s Loyal and unshakeable. But the US, where flag-pledging and anthem-singing are more prevalent than anywhere else, is also given to self-delusion bordering on psychosis. What George Orwell referred to as “doublethink”. It is a country whose 1776 independence declaration claims that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that their Creator endows them with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” while simultaneously enslaving black people and practicing genocide against Native Americans.

It was the last NATO country to establish formal democracy, having legally implemented racial apartheid up to 1964 (and felt it necessary to continue it by other means ever since). It is a country that has installed dictatorships in other client states worldwide, legalized torture, murder, and indefinite detention without giving reasons, and since 2001, proposes that peace can only be built on permanent war. Yet it considers itself to be the democratic land of the free (with the world’s highest proportion of incarcerated citizens). Maybe their motto should be taken from the Party’s three slogans in Orwell’s 1984: 

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

Kim Johnson is a filmmaker and writer.