 Over the years, the Solution National Youth Council has provided youth with opportunities to discuss national issues and what better topic to start off this amazing podcast than Emancipation. So I have my facts, Emancipation is a recognition of the freedom of a people once enslaved and looking to the future. We'll discuss, but welcome you guys to a fresh new podcast. It's called Moe Memexa, I know you say it all the time, so today you'll find out exactly what this podcast is about. I'm not the only person here with you today but my name is Franny, Fire Franny on social media, I'm a media girl, love entertainment and of course you know if we're gonna bring the vibes to you and if we're gonna teach you a lot in a fun way, we have to give you an awesome cast. So let's introduce you to the amazing people who will be sitting here with you for the next hour or so. So grab a drink, get something to eat because y'all it's all about Moe Memexa, the podcast. So welcome guys, how are y'all today? We're good, we're good, alright. Alright, so who's in the house, Joshua? Well, like she said, Joshua, you all know me from TV and media so it's awesome to be here. Giovanni Chaus, all geological. Hi, I'm Siana. Edison Lane, AKA your prophet Edison. Okay, we'll learn more about where the prophet come from, you know what I'm saying? Moe Memexa. Okay, so we're talking emancipation. For some, it's a very heavy topic and I don't want you to think that it's about to be a long, boring, drawn-out conversation. Emancipation means different things to everybody. So when you guys hear emancipation, be as honest as possible, what does it mean to you? I think that emancipation represents the liberation of physical bondage but it still has some effect today. I mean, you're definitely younger, much younger than, you know, that time that the physical bondage was very prevalent on this entire earth. So how does it mean that to you or how does it resonate with you? Emancipation I see as freedom, I see as a point of, you know, we are now treated as equals, we are now seen as equals and it's the point of us moving forward not as just black people but as a culture on a whole. Nice. Well, for me emancipation is simply African pride. Being proud of my ancestry and just being proud of my skin colour and being proud of the journey that my ancestors went through and, you know, looking at where we are today and looking at today and how we move forward from today into tomorrow. Yeah. I think to me that emancipation means progress. It basically means how do we move on from this stage? How do we try to better our lives and improve our position in society? So that's what emancipation is to me. Edison, what about you? To me emancipation in essence, it speaks more to the public display of the change of ownership that people are back and they own themselves, they're free but in the literal sense, still within an economic structure, still within a dispersion, still within many different layers of the social effect that doesn't all coincide with the one too. So it speaks to a breaking down of social fabrics to allow for the people of our race at this point in history to actually begin to reclaim what is ours and to actually begin to feel as though we are like the children, we're like the children who won, we actually sit here comfortable whereas like 400 years ago, people were just in bad, like deplorable condition having to fight on things that you wouldn't think of, they would have to think of. So now you're kind of enjoying their wealth, you're like the lucky son of the slave that revokes it. So I just give thanks for that era where we now overturn and all of that. That's really what it is like to me. You know, I think people look at the different fabrics that we still wait into overturn and they feel as though perhaps that wood is an incomplete wood. But to me, I just feel as though the fact that we're here is already proof that we have overturned a certain level of what has kept us back or what kept us back some 400 years. That's true. And you mentioned, you know, especially that it affects young people and you all know right now we're in the pop culture era, you know? It's the Lord have mercy. And sometimes I think because of how quickly life progresses right now, we don't actually stop to figure out how everything connects. So how exactly do you guys think pop culture has influenced our view on emancipation or how has it added to that or taken away from it in some way? Well, if we look at, like you said, time is flying very quickly. Youth are no longer youth. The concept of youth used to be you're young. You can engage in this. You can engage in that. Now our young people are forced to grow up faster than they intend to in a world that is gradually shifting for achievements and academia rather than self development and mental assurance with pop culture. Pop culture has changed the entire fabric of how we see a lot of things. Whereas emancipation used to be just a concept of identifying where we came from, the concept of freedom, the concept of development, the concept of the right to vote, the right to this, the right to that. Now it's just become another celebration in our calendars within this modern era. And I know this year we had a big celebration about it. But if you look at previous years, we just see emancipation as just another holiday rather than understand what it really means. So even within our school systems, you don't really hear the true depth of emancipation. You don't hear the liberation of black people. You don't hear about African descent or you hear about it's a holiday and it's when black people were free. I know the Caribbean is much different from the United States, where you know you had two different sets of emancipation and South Africa had its own set of emancipation. But you don't hear much about it. You just hear it's a day, it's a holiday. I get to stay at my home and I don't have to go to work. I don't have to do none of these things. So as a young person, when you exist within this era and you are now learning about it and you are now understanding it, you get a clear understanding that it goes beyond just a holiday. It goes beyond just the concept of black people facing racial tensions and and afflictions on their lives to adopt a European culture. But it goes to the fact that these are people who came, who were forced and who conquered despite their lives being taken. They still fought for us to be able to sit here with our chains on our necks and our hands and feet and without having to stand on the stage and be an auction to other plantations. But we're going to come to the rest of the cast, but even in the pop culture sense, that's what I was talking about, the disconnect with and the meaning behind the things that we do. We see a lot of young people wanting to be liberated. We see it in the way we dress. We see it in the music videos, the way people just break boundaries. Our grandmothers hold in their heads saying, where my mix up? You understand? You know, people hold in their heads like, oh my gosh, these young people. But isn't that liberation? Isn't that part of what emancipation means? Sometimes with freedom, you get chaos. And right now, what our ancestors would see us doing in this modern era, they would see it as chaos, though we are truly free. We are still slaves to some of the concept of our past, the way that we... I mean, now I see school children going to school and they can have whatever hairstyle they want. But even five years ago, when I was still in secondary school, girls could not come to school if they had one type of way. You could not come with fitted pants and stuff like that. Sorry, I need to correct you because some girls could, when your hair was a little straighter. Yes, but even that is a concept where it depends on what your hair texture is like and how it is right now. So even with that now, when we speak about pop culture, pop culture is changing our culture. And we are now trying to identify ourselves with what is abroad rather than be interested in who we are. I mean, why is it now Creole is not being taught within our schools when it is part of our natural language structure. And then now, children are being raised now to say that, OK, Creole is not a language that we should really use because it seems derogatory, it seems ancient. When that is part of our structure. So for me now, who's grown up as a millennial, I can understand Creole because I learned from my grandmother, but I was never taught by my parents who speak it perfectly. So that causes a cultural disconnection, which is something that was brought about even through the process of emancipation as we became free and began to interact with each other. So pop culture has changed the entire way that we speak, that we act or that we interact. Whether we see it as good or bad, it is determined by your interpretation of your life and how you see yourself going forward. But in terms, we're still on neutral grounds and we're still trying to figure out our way forward. But in terms of good or bad, that is dependent on your perspective of your country and your culture. It's true. What about you, Edison? Well, I would definitely say that, I mean, as far as we look at it at the very empirical level, like the smallest level, how does a child or anybody from the youngest experience listen to a story, listen to folk culture? How do they connect to the people who literally, though their circumstances were some of the most deplorable, I mean, in every height, every high culture, you find that some people were sold, whether by their parents or by somebody in society where there would be some level or some class who were referred to as slaves. These people still, without standing like their environments, especially in our charter slavery instance, actually fought and liberated themselves through violence, through rebellion, through a complete revolutionary concept. Like to most people being born in that era, I'm sure, they were locked out of the idea of revolt, they were locked out of those ideas and the mere fact that they were able to analyze the situation and eventually still end up in the same era where they had to literally fight in the depth of the night and relate to that because in all honesty, there's no way you will appreciate even the smallest aspect of our liberation now without understanding the degree from which it comes, especially the way we've settled in every community, how it's been built, how the families trickle down, how people travel from the South. These are the same people in all honesty who were probably working within the slave plantations, probably working for the money after being quote-unquote liberated but economically disputed against or discriminated against because people couldn't get work based on small things, colorism, they couldn't based on perhaps their lineage, they were already a slave class. So you're not gonna allow a jump into somewhere that you're not familiar with or that perhaps a society doesn't deem you fit for. So when these same people now are able to thrive, whether educationally, whether in industry, when they're able to actually do what they're doing now, it's to appreciate the degree from which it comes from because it wasn't really given, we had to take it and in the Caribbean, we have the liberty of being surrounded by each other but in the larger world, people don't experience that level of inclusion. Here we have a different type of inclusion but that speaks to the emphasis we probably should put in relating those stories, relating these experiences to each other in a way that we could embrace it because that's all it is. I was about to say in terms of the appreciation, you kind of have to know to appreciate, you know? And I think, especially as you talk about community, we have an issue with the trickle-down process in getting young people to understand things because go ahead. Another thing is like it's kind of, like it's too full because like on one hand you would say like the young people don't know anything about their culture, they don't understand anything about their culture. Actually, I'm doing a summer, well, I'm one of the facilitators at a summer camp and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that, like I started a story literally how I started it so it was once upon a time there was a cow named Copebeth and you these little children like five to eight-year-olds finished the whole story for me and I had to go in my back pockets and find another one that they would probably not know and I was really, I was inspired with hope really that the young generation, well the newer generation actually knows something about their culture. So I think it's just a matter of finding a way to bridge the gap and we find ourselves like doing a tug of war but if you can't beat them maybe you could join them. So where you're trying to struggle to get people you know, out of TikTok and into, I don't know, a flower festival for example. You could bring the flower festival to TikTok. Yeah, so like why is it that you're trying and I guess that's, it's kind of a consequence of our enslavement that we think we need to discipline people into action but you could find a compromise and meet them in the middle and try to bring the culture to the places that they spend the most time. I think for me I don't believe in compromise at all on that. I believe what I think we all know the only constant is change, right? And some change happens whether you want it to or not, right? But if I may interject on this point, even if we, when we look at our culture, we look at our identity, sometimes we as the young people, we are aware of what is our culture and who we are. But when you face a world that is filled with such negativity and you see deaf hair, this, there, that every single day, it kind of makes you want to disconnect from reality. It kind of makes you want to stray away from these type of things or stay away from these type of things because all you see is the bad all you see is the negative. So when we say young people do not care or they are not part of this it's not that we are not aware, it's not that we don't know, it's not that we don't research. It's just that how society's construct has made us become isolated and stay with ourselves and not want to take part in a lot of things because we see, you know, everything is the same old. We do this, we do that every year. And here we are now. Yeah, I understand that. Again, I told you all, women makes a lot of needs, all right? That's only the first part, you guys. Of course, we have a lot of action for you lots of entertainment, hot topics. Of course, we're keeping it local, we're keeping it solution. And of course, we want you, the youth involved in WEMMXA is the podcast. Thank you for tuning in to the first installment of WEMMXA. Of course, you can catch the next episode on Sunday, August 28th at 8 p.m. on NCN and all other media platforms. WEMMXA was brought to you by the Saint Lucia National Youth Council in collaboration with the Cultural Development Foundation.