For several years I have been introducing students and friends to C.L.R. James’s book, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution.
Originally published in 1938, it is a study of the great Haitian slave
insurrection that began in 1791 and was directly influenced by the ideas
and actions of the French Revolution of 1789. Readers who do not know
of the book react with excitement and admiration, and there is for me
the special pleasure of watching people make a major discovery, as I
made the same discovery some time before. For in this brilliantly
written and stirring masterpiece of historical writing—surely among the
great books of 20th-century scholarship—one also encounters a genuinely
heroic as well as tragic story. Toussaint is portrayed as the other
majestic figure produced by the French Revolution (Napoleon is the
first), an illiterate slave whose remarkable intellect and capacities
for leadership won freedom for his downtrodden people, but whose failure
either to take that people into his confidence or realistically to
assess the realities of French imperialism brought about his defeat.
James’s
narrative is moving not only because it is so marvellously written,
dramatic anecdotes interwoven with masterly historical analysis of what
slavery and abolition were really about, but because it reaffirms the
value of the epic struggle for human emancipation and enlightenment. In
our post-modern age, expectations about the possibility of massive
change for the better have been lowered; local competence and expertise
seem to matter more than revolutions, and most people in the West think
of the non-European world as primitive, full of uninformed violence and
tyranny. To such deflationary impulses, James’s work is the perfect
antidote: it transforms the Haitian revolution from a provincial and
all-but-forgotten episode into an illustration of how, in the phrase
from Aimé Césaire that James quotes in the book, ‘there is a place for
all at the rendezvous of victory.’
Who then is
C.L.R. James? As Paul Buhle’s excellent new biography makes clear, he is
a centrally important 20th-century figure, a Trinidadian black whose
life as a scholar of history, political activist, cricket player and
critic, cultural maverick, restless pilgrim between the West and its
former colonial possessions in Africa and America, is emblematic of
modern existence itself.
The son of a schoolteacher father and an unusually well-educated
mother, C.L.R. (as he is called) was born in 1901, and very early in
life established two of his life-long interests, voracious reading
(especially in history and the English classics) and cricket, that most
British of games, in which, however, non-British colonials have often
excelled. As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a
metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a
focus for group effort and individual performance. Years later, in his
scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme.
Inevitably,
then, he was led to the struggle for Trinidad’s independence, and
through that quickly entered local politics. As pamphleteer and
speaker—two roles he played for fifty years in Britain, the Caribbean
and the United States—James compelled attention for his eloquence,
meticulously articulated analyses and fabulous memory. When he came to
England in 1932, he wrote columns for the Manchester Guardian and began his career as a Trotskyist activist, also finding time to begin The Black Jacobins,
which he first put into dramatic form in 1936 as a play for Paul
Robeson. He never accepted Robeson’s Stalinist ideas, but despite this
the two men remained good friends, alternating the parts of Toussaint
and Dessalines (his lieutenant) in James’s play.
Buhle
discusses James’s personal and amorous encounters allusively, perhaps
out of tactful respect for his subject’s sensibility: James is still
alive, and living in the Brixton section of London. But James is clearly
a complex, vastly energetic man, whose life sprawls interestingly in
many directions. Little is given us about his several marriages, except
that they were troubled (and produced one son, whom Buhle scarcely
mentions); similarly, after James comes to the United States for fifteen
years in 1938, Buhle analyses his complicated political work and
positions within the American Trotskyite movement, but refers only
tantalizingly to James’s association with W.E.B. DuBois, Norman Mailer,
Richard Wright, Meyer Schapiro and Ralph Ellison. One would have wanted
less about the often arid sectarian disputes James was involved in, and
more on his reading and writing, his constantly developing sense of
himself and his surprisingly generous range of cultural styles—novelist,
cultural critic, teacher, activist.
He was
expelled from the United States in 1953, a victim of McCarthyism. During
the months of his Ellis Island detention as an undesirable alien, he
produced one of his least-known but most powerful works, a study of
Melville (‘America’s Shakespeare and Marx’, in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways).
He returned to Britain and quickly plunged into pan-African politics.
He was not only close to Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, but also had
much to do with the theory and practice of anti-imperialism, in which
his friends and disciples included radical editor George Padmore and
Guyanese historian-activist Walter Rodney.
Buhle
is impressive when he portrays James during his later years as a
cultural ‘magus’ with an unabashed love of great English and European
literature. And Buhle shows how this love lifted James above the natural
resentment at the ‘white’ civilization that, as a colonial black, he
rightly saw as the cause of so much suffering in the non-white world.
Ever the outsider, James never fell into the trap of drawing rigid final
lines between peoples, or even oppressor and oppressed. As a
revolutionary champion of black struggle, he gave in neither to the
separatism of the black-power philosophy nor to the nativism of the
black-is-beautiful variety, but, as Buhle says, ‘moved to place the
great achievements of all world culture into a proper relation with each
other and with the common human fate. James, and those who followed
him, did not need to give up Shakespeare, the ultimate proper dramatist,
in order to honour reggae; they recognized that to understand each is
to understand the other bettter.’
No wonder that
such a man compels our admiration, and no wonder then that in many ways
he is the patron saint of much that is so rich and interesting about
modern Caribbean writing. Writers as diverse as George Lamming, Wilson
Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Eric Williams and Derek Walcott owe a great deal
to James’s vision, friendship and example. Despite its often telegraphic
speed in rushing over James’s personal elusiveness, Buhle’s
path-breaking work—attentive and scrupulous—is a major contribution. At
the very least it draws long-overdue attention to a prodigiously gifted
writer and political philosopher. In fact, however, it does more than
just that, which is why it is also a first-rate analysis of James’s
central achievements.