This ambition was infectious. I decided to trace James’s thinking in that era as a way to then explore the work and stories of some Caribbean artists and events that spoke to them. I delved, in Jamaica, into the audio archive of the great folklorist Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett, from whom Harry Belafonte got much of his source material for Calypso in 1956. I looked, in Brooklyn and Barbados, into the form and source of the exemplary Bajan American writer Paule Marshall’s pathbreaking immigrant novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones. I researched an intriguing “cultural congress” in Havana, in 1968, when Cuba welcomed a bevy of leading Caribbean intellectuals from across the region, including James, to discuss “The Integral Growth of Man.” I examined the old and lasting question of how and why Bob Marley, with the help of the impresario Chris Blackwell and within the unique context of the stag-flationary 1970s, not only became “the first Third World superstar,” but also enjoys a posthumous stature as arguably the most pervasive musical and political icon on earth.
My investigations fulfilled certain scholarly needs. They happily allowed me, while traveling frequently between California and the Caribbean, to earn a degree. But they also convinced me, as I began also to work as a journalist reporting on many of the islands’ travails and triumphs, that the way I most wanted to contend with James’s ideas, and with the world that made him, was by writing in a more than incidental way about something I’d found to be true throughout the Antilles. In seeking out the friends or kin of the outsized global figures all the islands seem to produce in such abundance—the writers, the sprinters, the revolutionaries, and reggae stars—I was struck by it again and again: on small islands, these figures were rendered domestic. To Marley’s cousins in St. Ann Parish, in Jamaica, the reggae king was a familiar “Bob.” To the rum-drunks by the cricket oval in Trinidad, C. L. R. James wasn’t the Black Plato but rather a nerdy guy in a coat who used big words but was no more nor less deserving of respect or ridicule than anyone, in this New World Place where everyone was making it up as they went along.
In this there was something of what one finds when visiting the homeplaces of any famous person who has grown bigger than where she’s from. But there was, in the islands, something else. Not only were the larger-than-life figures made familiar; the people who comprised the familiar—the rum-drunks by the cricket oval; the attitudinal woman selling corn soup down the way—had a way of growing outsized, too, in their presentation of self, and in ways that went beyond the mere perceptions of an outsider. Derek Walcott once wrote, “All Port of Spain is a 12:30 show.”22 I suspected he was right, and that there was something to be gained from placing that fact at the center of what the great British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor described, after a swing through the Antilles just after World War II, as “the perceptible texture of [these islands’] existence.”23
From that trip Leigh Fermor produced a book that’s endured as a classic portrait of the West Indies at the start of their modern age. His The Traveller’s Tree (1952) was pitched neither strictly at scholars nor at holiday makers; it’s joined, on a brief list of such serious literary portraits, by V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (1962). Those books, by two of the last century’s most stylishly incisive writers, comprise essential entries in the Antilles bibliography. But read today, they also serve as key lenses through which to view how the islands of the Caribbean—and how one must write about them—have changed. Which isn’t to say that Leigh Fermor and Naipaul are wholly similar figures. They are in fact very different—the one a curious voyager of a Hellenist mind, whose Traveller’s Tree renders warm visions of a magical world he’s seeing for the first time; the other, an ambitious Anglophile from the colonies whose distaste for his own childhood, in Trinidad, suffuses each line of The Middle Passage (no matter that Naipaul was commissioned to write that book by Dr. Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister). But both their books couldn’t help but betray their era’s sense that these islands, whatever their maladies or charms, were thoroughly marginal to the larger story of Western civilization. “History is built around achievement and creation,” Naipaul went so far as to say in his, “and nothing was created in the West Indies.”24
One should never read statements like that, from Naipaul, without appreciating the underlying spirit of what, in his home island’s oral culture, is known as picong—an utterance meant, in its overstatement or wrath, to cut or provoke. But that doesn’t change the obligation one feels, in writing about the Caribbean now, to show how deeply Naipaul’s provocation has been buried by history. When Leigh Fermor wandered the Jamaican ghetto of Trench Town, he emerged with a quizzical account of the ropy-haired eccentrics he met there. His was a portrait of obscure cultists whose ideas were unknown beyond their island, but a half century later few culture mavens can’t recognize the iconography (and grooming practices) of a Rasta faith that Trench Town’s reggae stars made world famous—just as few followers of world literature don’t now know the name of the young writer who, forty years after penning The Middle Passage, won the Nobel Prize. The Caribbean today may in many ways remain “marginal” indeed; its fragile economies are dependent, in the main, on the fickle funds of tourists. But to visit these islands now also means meeting other travelers, or returning émigrés, who are more than aware of how the islands have crucially shaped the sounds and feel of major world cities like New York and London and thus of modern cultures everywhere.
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THIS BOOK PONDERS NOT MERELY what the Caribbean is but where it is as well. On that by-no-means-simple point, scholars and politicians all seem at least to agree that the Greater and Lesser Antilles are Caribbean: Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico line the sea’s northern edge; the Lesser Antilles, tailing off in a curving string of islands reaching from Anguilla toward Trinidad and the old Spanish Main, also qualify. But depending on who (or which tourist agency) you talk with, “the Caribbean” may also include the Bahamas and the coastal cays of Venezuela and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula; nearby nations that don’t touch the Caribbean Sea but share its colonial past (like Guyana, Surinam, Bermuda); and even Faulkner’s Mississippi or the “Caribbean city” of New Orleans—a place that certainly feels, especially at carnival time, like a kissing cousin of Trinidad and Haiti. The influential geographer Carl Sauer, for his part, termed the Caribbean “a natural region, though fuzzy around the edges,” whose territories included both the islands and “the rim of land around a Mediterranean Sea.”25
This book, though, centers on the islands. This fact doesn’t come without regret: to glean the Caribbean’s claim on its South American littoral, one need look no further than to Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude isn’t set in the Andes but rather in a place—Colombia’s Caribbean shore—replete with magic and slaves and monocrop agriculture and gypsies washed up from afar. And the concept of the “marvelous real” was invented by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban obsessed with the Haitian Revolution. But, alas: Macondo is beyond my scope here, and so are Cartagena, Costa Rica, Bluefields, Nicaragua, and a hundred other places I’d have loved to skip through with James at hand. But in a project that’s as much a journey through an idea as a portrait of this region, my focus on the Antilles has also proceeded from an understanding of the Caribbean as an archipelago: as a “sea of islands” whose status as such has acted as both a crucial shaper of the region’s history and a key aspect of the Caribbean’s grip on the world’s imagination.
In his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor described the difficulty of forging his own experience of the Antilles into a cogent book: “Short of writing a thesis in many volumes, only a haphazard, almost a picaresque approach can suggest the peculiar mood and