Chapter 14 Return to El Dorado: Trinidad
Bibliography and Further Reading
ISLAND PEOPLE
David Sanson and Guillaume Sanson, Les Isles Antilles (1703). COURTESY OF THE DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION
INTRODUCTION
IN NOVEMBER 1963, Vintage paperbacks published a new edition of The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’s celebrated history of the Haitian Revolution. The book had first appeared in London in 1938, where James had arrived by transatlantic steamer from his native West Indies a few years before to launch a literary career. A quarter century later, The Black Jacobins—though already a touchstone for black intellectuals worldwide—had fallen out of favor and out of print. Its itinerant author had moved from England to the United States shortly before World War II, then had returned to Europe after being expelled from the U.S. as a subversive in 1953. Finally, in 1958, he returned to his home island in the southern Caribbean for the first time since he’d left his life there as a colonial schoolteacher.
Born in British-owned Trinidad in 1901, C. L. R. James was the son of a schoolmaster and a cultured mother whose bookcase of Victorian novels and Elizabethan drama occupied him when cricket didn’t. He grew into a radical whose passion for dramatic narrative always equaled his yen for discourse on historical materialism. (“[Thackeray’s] ‘Vanity Fair’ holds more for me than Capital,” he said.)1 Drawn to the classics and hugely ambitious, James sought to place the history of the Caribbean within the larger telos of not only modernity and capitalism but also humanity’s struggle for democracy, reaching back to the Greeks. Perhaps more distinctively, he sought always to understand the cultures of his own day—cricket matches and calypso songs, Hollywood films and radio serials—within that larger story.
James Baldwin wrote, “I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.”2 For C. L. R. James, growing up in Trinidad, this seems never to have been an issue. The grandson of slaves, he claimed from childhood not only Shakespeare but Virgil and Thackeray as his own. He embraced—and embodied in his black frame—ideas and principles customarily opposed. A passionate anticolonial who believed in something called “Western Civilization,” he was a devotee of Aeschylus who also loved pulp novels; an intellectual who also played cricket; a Marxist materialist not immune to the charms of the bourgeois stage. A thinker whose “interdisciplinary” approach to history anticipated recent academic trends by decades, his peripatetic life and political engagements embody the core dramas of a century that “he sought to embrace in its dialectical whole,” as the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris put it.3
James’s return to the Caribbean was prompted by the promise of self-rule in Trinidad and the triumph of the Cuban revolution. And it was these same momentous developments that prompted his decision to publish a revised edition of his history of the epochal slave revolt, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, through which “West Indians”—and not only Haitians—“first became aware of themselves as a people.”4
James left the main text of The Black Jacobins unchanged, except for the addition of several lambent lines about Toussaint’s sad demise. More substantively, James included a postscript “appendix” in which he offered a new interpretation of the Haitian Revolution’s significance. This new afterword’s thrust was conveyed in its title: “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” Rather than signifying “a merely convenient or journalistic demarcation of historical time,” Toussaint and Fidel were joined because each man had led revolutions that were “peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history,” no matter that they occurred 150 years apart and on different islands.5 The Caribbean was a region whose “peculiar history,” according to James, had not only produced a common culture on its islands but given them a special role to play on the world stage.
He sought, in his new afterword to The Black Jacobins, to explain why. “The history of the West Indies is governed by two factors, the sugar plantation and Negro slavery,” he began.
Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed, they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of that word, but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallel anywhere else.6
The plantation and racial slavery had been present elsewhere in the Americas. But the Caribbean, James argued, was unique. Firstly because of sheer numbers: from the early 1500s through to the end of the Triangle Trade, three centuries later, the region’s islands received some six million African slaves to their shores (England’s North American colonies that became the United States, during that time, received scarcely 400,000). And secondly, the region stood out for the particular nature of the lives its slaves lived. Those slaves, as builders of island societies made for the express purpose of providing sugar for distant tables, had from the sixteenth century on “lived a life that was in its essence a modern life.”7 They had moved vast distances to toil at industry, and helped forge a new world economy. They had “lived together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time,” learned Europe’s languages, and belonged to societies where “even the cloth [they] wore and the food they ate was imported”—in places both made for, and sustained by, international communication and trade from the start.8
For James, these facts were far from mere historical trivia; they were crucial to understanding the role that the Caribbean’s people were fated to play in world history—and in the world-historical development that would define the postwar era: the dismantling of Europe’s colonial empires across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and the emergence of its old colonies’ people as full-fledged members of the world comity of nations. It was not by accident, James argued, that West Indians had formed the vanguard of black thinkers driven to end colonialism worldwide—as evidenced, for example, by figures like Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born founder of the United Negro Improvement Association, and by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born author of The Wretched of the Earth (to say nothing of James himself). And it was not by accident, either, that the islands wherein the world’s “first truly modern revolution”9 took place (in Haiti) had also just witnessed a triumph for socialism and guerrilla tactics, in Cuba, that freedom’s lovers everywhere were touting at the time as the model for how the earth’s wretched should right history’s wrongs.
James’s arguments were driven by politics: an ardent leftist, he was also writing at a time when he, like many West Indian intellectuals, was still hoping the Caribbean’s islands might confederate into a single regional nation. But what was at stake for him in arguing that the Caribbean’s diverse territories shared a common history and culture was not merely that such an understanding was necessary for the Caribbean’s “self-realization.” It was what that self-realization might entail for the world at large. “Of all formerly colonial coloured peoples,” James wrote, there in his new afterword to The Black Jacobins, “the West Indian masses are the most highly experienced in the ways of Western civilisation and most receptive to its requirements in the twentieth century.”10 The Caribbean and its diasporas were destined, in other words, to play a special role in the development of world culture at large in the twentieth century.
Mention the Caribbean today and most people think of beaches and poverty, not of the historical anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s description of these islands, echoing James, as “modern before modernity”11—as places where phenomena we think of as belonging