C.L.R. James. A Trini for all seasons

“What did men live by? What did they want? What did history show that they had wanted? Had they wanted then what they wanted now? The men I had known, what had they wanted? What exactly was art and what exactly culture?” …

Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James, Serpent’s Tail, London,1983.

 

Some works and their writers are so forceful in the stance they adopt on timeless human questions that they figure in our intellectual landscape as watersheds. Leaving Trinidad for England in 1932 to pursue a career as a writer, the author of Minty Alley was ripe for capture by the ideology of the international left. Any young idealist born in the early half of the twentieth century who yearned for a better world where peace would reign and humanity prosper, would sooner or later have ploughed through the pages of two pamphlets: The German Ideology (1832) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), both penned by one Karl Marx and his fellow-writer Friedrich Engels. James would have added Marx’s Capital (1867) to his library. Later, Leon Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution would take precedence in James’s  political development until 1950 when he ceased seeing eye to eye with Trotsky.

 

If the Marx-Engels-Trotsky corpus was to determine the political career of the young Trinidadian scholar and writer, his own centrepiece, The Black Jacobins, not only catapulted a leap in black consciousness, but James, in telling the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, shifted the locus of the history of the modern world: “When Haiti became independent in1804, it was the first nation in the Western hemisphere to guarantee civic liberty to all of its citizens—a condition of which not even the United States could boast.” (Robin Kelly, cited by Paul Buhle: C.L.R. James. The Artist as Revolutionary (1988).)

 

Why C.L.R. James was not promptly dismissed as a fanciful romantic dilettante but on the contrary inspired a cascade of research and literature in intellectual circles just before and after his demise in 1989—Paul Buhle, Andrew Smith, Kent Worcester, Stuart Hall, Frank Rosengarten, Jim Murray, to name only a few—is a phenomenon which invites close scrutiny. If James is best known internationally for The Black Jacobins, he also largely figured in the forefront of socialist advocacy and black radicalism in the post-war decades, both in England and in the United States where he led a militant leftist group known as the Johnson-Forest tendency. James would hardly have blinked when he was marched off to Ellis Island in 1952 as an “undesirable alien” after a fifteen-year sojourn in the United States.

 

In an insightful article, Andrew Smith refers to essays published in the 1940s in which James signals the paradoxes of the twentieth century: “The greater the means of transport, the less men are allowed to travel…the greater the means of communication, the less men freely exchange ideas. The greater the possibilities of living, the more we live in terror of mass annihilation…The history of man is his effort to make the abstract universal concrete.” (Andrew Smith: “Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henri Lefebvre”, Identities, 27-1, 38-52, 2020). Smith’s analysis focuses on the similarities and differences between James’s radical thinking and that of the French scholar, Henri Lefebvre, whose ideas, inter alia, fuelled the student insurgence in France in 1968. Both Lefebvre and James “sought to rescue the concept of happiness from the triviality to which advertising and pop psychology had consigned it… To be aware of being unhappy presupposes that something else is possible, a different condition from the unhappy one.” The “good life” is not, never has been, merely a question of “raising the standard of living”; nor are men pigs to be fattened: happiness, argues James in his American Civilisation, cannot be reduced to material satisfaction. Would I be happier buying a new car or swimming in Valencia river? Playing football in Skinner Park or working overtime for more pay? False choices which social polices largely fail to address. James and Lefebvre were both heirs of the Frankfurt school: Herbert Marcuse’s criticism of the juggernaut of  “mass society” which impedes a person’s movement towards freedom stands as a forerunner of such later concepts as Michel Foucault’s “bio-power—a form of internalised control which takes place in the name of freedom”. (Smith, op. cit.)

 

The  teasing question, needless to say, remains how to apply such intellectual understanding to shape social policy through the democratic and electoral processes. James, in Beyond a Boundary, not only raises burning social and political questions which are more than ever relevant today, but provides solutions. If the game of cricket was structured around certain human values, all sports, all arts, all cultural forms lift people out of the inferno of enslaving work processes. They provide the only channels for the realm of the spirit. If our fellow citizen explicitly advocates sports, arts and culture as human needs just as vital as our basic needs if we are to remain human, his immense intellectual appeal stems precisely from his rigorous extra-mural scholarship. No letters behind his name, he probed, as few ever do, the treasure troves of all the great minds past and contemporaneous. James, the alchemist, sifted the substance of his immense erudition and turned his base metal into gold: “For Hegel, the ultimate truth lies in the realm of the spirit, in what he called the ‘world-spirit’ that generates all creative activity by the human species, especially as manifested in religion, philosophy and art…Intellectual historians of the 1970s and 1980s do not include James in their accounts of Western Marxist thinkers, but other intellectual historians who came on the scene a little later…have partially redressed the balance, crediting James together with Lukács, Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, and Henri Lefebvre for having rediscovered and re-explored the Hegelian premises of Marxism.” (Frank Rosengarten: Urbane Revolutionary. C.L.R. James and his struggle for a new society, University Press of Mississipi, 2008).

 

Many of us, growing up in Trinidad, easily recall a word or anecdote of our childhood which released a spring in our young mind which was to have far-reaching repercussions on our life’s journey. The key to understanding why C.L.R. James has been the focus of so much attention over the past few decades lies in his unstinting belief that resistance and revolution are not spawned by any political movement or historical forces external to our daily lives to which we may or may not adhere, but are the necessary out-pouring of  our incomplete lives, ever longing as we do for more fullness of being. By the time James arrived in England, he was unwittingly anchored to ideas of resistance and revolution from the moment he had heard his grandfather, Josh Rudder, tell his story of how he had fixed a railway engine and refused to tell the British engineers how he had done it—power pitted against counter power.

 

If James’s personal concept of revolution remains a beacon in intellectual circles today, if “Nello”,  as he was called in his Tunapuna days, dedicated his life to hold in place the centre of gravity of leftist ideology as he understood it, would we err to claim that our fellow-citizen, a paragon of erudition, owed his unique analyses of the meaning and import of revolution to his very Trini-ness? In the by-ways of the complex social web within which he had to find his way growing up in Tunapuna and Port-of-Spain where everyone was “different” but where such differences had to yield to the higher good or lose all, James was already cast in a mould of a certain Trini-ness which defeats definition but which announces Edouard Glissant’s ideas about creolisation or Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s chaos theory about the Caribbean where one and one make three to produce a certain Caribbean-ness: “We West Indians are a people on our way who have not yet reached a point of rest and consolidation.” (Beyond a Boundary.)

 

If cricket serves as an instrument to mirror humanity’s different masks in Beyond a boundary, the choice might well have been football or any other sport or art form. As a young man in Trinidad, faced with heads or tails choices between one cricket club and another where the scales were tipped by melanin pigments, James would have had ample cause to ponder over the political and social perversions triggered by racist attitudes in his community. He would conclude that there could be no hope for a humanity divided by notions of racial superiority, exploitation of man by man, ideologies based on difference or by notions which, simply, were “not cricket”. Recognising only one humanity, he was to reject ideological leanings which brought into play any notions of “difference” as he was to dismiss proposals for “Black Studies” as irrelevant to the spirit of revolution as he understood it. These attitudes both catapult James well ahead of his times, explain the charisma he exerted worldwide in terms of leadership as well as the recent intellectual interest his works have inspired.

 

Josh Rudder stood equal to anyone when he fixed the train engine and refused to tell his superiors how he had done it. The day James left Trinidad for England, his talisman was secure in his pocket—his grandfather’s spirit of resistance and independence. James’s combat was spurred by his lifelong conviction—only one dynamic thrust underlies any revolution: I, Ms Nobody, am unhappy. I know that better conditions are possible. How do I move from my present circumstances to better conditions? I myself, via my own spirit of resistance and my desire for change, carry the seeds of revolution within my own yearning.

 

Against all odds, James, Trini to the core, would also have drawn immense strength from his refusal ever to adopt the posture or the psychology of victim, both in the face of history and wherever he found himself. Interned on Ellis Island in 1952, he used his time to write Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The story of Herman Melville and the world we live in. In 1958, five years after his return to England, James heads home to find himself in the vortex of Trinidad’s pre-independence fever: Dr. Eric Williams invites his former teacher at QRC to become Chief Editor of The Nation, organ of the  People’s National Movement. Eyebrows are raised. The core PNM circles “rather frown on the excessive favour James enjoys—so much so that some even wonder whether Nello rather than Bill” was Prince of the PNM.” (Ivar Oxaal: Black Intellectuals Come to Power, 1968.) This chapter of the political history of Trinidad and Tobago is usually glossed over, even by such foremost scholars as Oxaal in his masterful account of the period.

 

The missing part of the puzzle, simply, was that James, an unparalleled scholar on par with Dr. Eric Williams, would have retained his mentoring status in relation to his former QRC pupil and held at his fingertips the full international implications of socialism for the Caribbean nations. It is all to the credit of Dr. Williams how well he understood how they were both placed in relation to each other—himself as pragmatic politician, James as romantic revolutionary, Machiavelli and his Prince in reverse roles. From his close association with James, Williams, no Fidel Castro, would both learn how best to manoeuvre in the setting of complex international politics but eventually paddle his own canoe; so much so that when Chaguaramas became an issue, Dr. Williams would not only have enjoyed the priceless benefits of coffee-table political tutelage by a trusted fellow countryman, but Machiavelli would find his prince a ready item on the counter in the trade-offs—in full blast of the cold war, the U.S. emissaries, party to the Chaguaramas negotiations, would have demanded the extradition of a person labelled “persona non grata” by the FBI.

 

Troublemakers, as we know, are only safe behind bars, exiled on St. Helena, some ice-bound gulag, Ellis Island or Carrera down the islands. Overnight, Nello falls from grace. His sentence is banishment.

 

Although James’s biographers make little of the chapter of the Chaguaramas issue and consider the US-Trinidad and Tobago negotiations as a hypothetical explanation for the 360° pivoting of Dr. Williams with regard to James’s position within the PNM, the Chaguaramas deal, at the end of the day, did involve a U.S. commitment of millions of dollars of international development aid to Trinidad and Tobago. The socialist ideology which prevailed in Cuba and Jamaica and in many pre-independence nations would not have augured well for Trinidad and Tobago with C.L.R. James in the limelight of the PNM’s striving for political leadership of the country. (Oxall, op.cit.).

 

By the time Chaguaramas had become an issue, “Bill” would have drained every mine, from the library shelves of Oxford to the chapters of Nello’s passionate outpourings, in educating himself for his future Prime Ministership of Trinidad and Tobago and his country’s role in international politics. Trinidad’s first Prime Minister could now, at no cost, dispense with the romantic revolutionary, Editor of The Nation, should the latter become a liability—a double master stroke. Yet, in Inward Hunger, subtitled precisely “The Education of a Prime Minister” and published well after the events referred to above (1969), the author is callously dismissive of James: “I would stick to the West Indies. West Indians had traditionally deserted the West Indies—Padmore for Africa, James for the absurdities of world revolution, the majority of West Indians for the traditional medicine and law. I would cultivate the West Indian garden, from Cuba to French Guiana.”

 

The question hovers—had Dr. Williams engineered a diplomatic set-up? Had James only ever been a pawn in Dr. Williams’ political strategies? After Fidel Castro ousted Batista in Cuba in 1958 and the subsequent surveillance over the Caribbean countries set in place by the United States during the Cold War, all persons with declared or suspected socialist leanings were blacklisted and monitored by big brother. When James returns to Trinidad in 1965, Williams promptly places him under house arrest. How innocent was James of the claim that he represented a threat to the Prime Minister? A legitimate question would be, again, whether his arrest was just a set-up or “pappy show” to red herring the United States authorities and safeguard Williams’s accountability to the powers-that-be. All the same, the show over, James, Stephen Maharaj and George Weekes form the Workers and Farmers Party, only to suffer a fiasco in the 1966 elections, the time being “out of joint”.

 

At the time Aimé Césaire was writing Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), James had just received £100 from friends in England and had set out for Bordeaux and Paris to consult archives and write The Black Jacobins (1938). That same year, at Oxford, a young Eric Williams, too, had been poring over the same sources to produce his D. Phil dissertation later to be known as Capitalism and Slavery. Among the many voices which clamoured in those years for the cause of emancipation and self-rule of the new emerging nations of the world were those of  C.L.R. James and his childhood friend Malcolm Nurse (alias George Padmore) who stood in the frontline of the radical left. Chapter 12 of Beyond a Boundary is entitled “What do Men live by?” The first edition of this title appeared in 1963, one year after Trinidad and Tobago acceded to independence and one year after The History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (Eric Williams, 1962) appeared. “The time was the early thirties, the period in which the contemporary rejection of tradition, the contemporary disregard of means, were taking shape. By now all of us have supped full with horrors. Today cruelties and abominations which would have immeasurably shocked and permanently distressed earlier ages are a commonplace. We must toughen our hides to live at all.” (Beyond a Boundary.) As James’s words echo down to us after more than half a century, we would do well to girth up our saddles.

 

Walk up to the West Indiana section of the Alma Jordan library. Look at the walls. Near the entrance you will see an almost life-size artist’s portrait of an elderly, spare gentleman. Let your memory and imagination flow back, first to the village of Tunapuna where Nello spent his childhood, then flit forward to the early 1960’s, those effervescent pre-independence years when Trinidad and Tobago had completed its stint as a Crown Colony and was negotiating its independence—a non-event in low-key mode, no Toussaint L’Ouverture summoned, well in keeping with the thesis of Capitalism and Slavery that the West Indies had become a liability for Britannia—under the leadership of Dr. Eric Williams and the Opposition leader Dr. Rudranath Capildeo.

 

As a teenager growing up in Trinidad, my Saturday chore was sweeping. Among the subversive volumes of literature which the wind blew off a library shelf was a small book entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. The cover had been torn off. The author, C.L.R. James, had written this work in his prison cell on Ellis Island. I often call to mind those Saturday mornings when I picked up the book, read a few dusty pages and restored it to the shelf. If I have always felt sorry for whales since then, we would all do well not to let down our guard and forget that the Ahabs of the world and their Pequods are still at large.

 

 

Cyril Lionel (Nello) Robert James rests in Tunapuna cemetery. Let me, Ms. Nobody, bow to a man among men, a Trini for all seasons.