Leonard "Tim" Hector
Every now and then, I'm asked about the differences between Caribbean and other regional literatures and invariably I end up paraphrasing Leonard "Tim" Hector, one of the most underappreciated public intellectuals from the Caribbean. So, instead of twisting his words, I’m reposting "Why is our literature so different? Why?" from his blog, which has disappeared with his death in November 2002. I hope some prescient publisher will take the time to preserve his work, which should be a part of the critical canon of the Caribbean.
Why is our literature so
different? Why?
The
other day a friend of mine whom I taught literature more than 35 years ago
asked me to assist his son with a literature assignment. And suddenly I
realised Politics and Sports are the public passions. Literature with me is a
private passion. I read writers from any part of the world with pleasure. It
was a private passion, which probably began of itself. In that I was an only
child, fatherless, though I never missed him. Mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles saw to it that I never missed him. For born in straitened circumstances,
fatherless, they saw to it that I always had books to read. Books substituted
for the biological brothers and sisters I never had. When I was nine I got a
Complete Works of Shakespeare for Christmas. Later an uncle who did not live
with us gave me Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Not
that I understood all of what I read. But therein lies the root of the passion
for literature – the not understanding. Experiences later in life clarified
that which at first was not understood, but read. A method unconsciously
developed.
Why
am I saying all that? It is not a treatise on the uses of literature, which in
our all too practical age seems like an irrelevance or an academic encumbrance.
In writing for my friend’s son, it dawned on me that no people need their
literature more than we do. (More on that later.) Impressive as that body of
literature is, it is being disregarded, taught badly, that is, without passion,
and therefore it becomes academic drudgery, or worse, a burden to be escaped.
Literature
to an Englishman is to tell him of his great past: the charge of the light
brigade, marauding Drake and Mighty Nelson, of Chaucer fashioning English
“dialect” into English by way of the tales that gave pleasure and a vision of a
future, as well as a present way of being; of Wordsworth and Coleridge using
the language, English, “really spoken by men”, as opposed to pompous classical
expression; it is to tell of the few who did so much for so many in building empire,
and to sustain the British national personality after the loss of empire.
Literature
for the West Indian is much different. No other people began their history like
us. We began our history as things. Chattel. Bought and sold. Listed in
inventories along with mules, asses and horses. The “self”, or if you prefer,
“the personality” was imposed. The rigidities of the plantation did not allow
for anything other than stereotype. And so as one of the finest modern literary
critics, Gordon Rohlehr noted, we have “the role-playing Black, the jive-ass
Black, the Uncle Tom stereotype” and he might have added the Black “assimilado”
– the middle strata who imitated the life-style, or their idea of their white
colonisers’ lifestyles.
West
Indian literature could not concern itself with the latter, “the fashionable
men and women whom comfort could not bless with sense”. And that is a striking
fact. The novel, the most popular, modern, literary form, emerged as literary
form when the middle class sought to displace the land-owning class as the
leaders of society. The rule of the aristocracy lent itself to poetry, epic
poetry in particular, telling of the great deeds of mighty warriors defending
“the patria”. It made patricians look like the natural leaders in war or peace,
and so the natural rulers.
The
Novel, is about character. It narrates the strengths, the fortitude of persons
in soul-destroying situations, and their overcoming or unbecoming by virtue of
character. The middle classes used the novel, as form, to show their
superiority, by virtue of character. Jane Austen’s novels prove that point.
Even Hemingway exalting the matador, or the Old Man enduring against the perils
of the Sea are variations on the theme. Or, more to the point, the megalomaniac
Ahab in pursuit of the white whale, as an end in itself in Moby Dick, like men
pursue capital now, as an end in and of itself.
And
yet West Indian poetry and the West Indian novel broke with all those forms and
contents. The West Indian novel is about Biswas, battling to erect a house, as
fulfilment of personality. It is his becoming. That is breaking out and through
the rigidities of colonially imposed personality. West Indian literature, as
poetry or as the novel, is not about the few who did so much for so many. It is
not about any charges of the light brigade, with cannon to the left of them and
cannon to the right of them. It is not about brave Kempemfelt his last
sea-fight having been fought. We have no military history of our own. That
absence of a military history, a history of our own wars fought, lost and won,
also makes us unique. Most people have had wars civil or external. Not so the
West Indies. We have been fought about, but not ourselves fighting. Our
violence is the violence of the oppressed and dispossessed turning in on
itself.
West
Indian literature is about the fishermen, the washerwomen, and the clerk in
their morning at the office, and their struggle to be other than. Other than
the imposed stereotype. All those whom birth “brought no lucky dip/From which
to pluck a permanent privilege”. It is about those, to quote poet George
Lamming again, “who start life without a beginning” and who, therefore, “Must
always recall their crumbling foundations” of “Rushing past the affliction of
the womb’s unfortunate opening.”
As
Lamming himself put it this time in prose, in 1958:
“Unlike
the governments and departments of educators, unlike the businessmen importing
commodities, the West Indian novelist did not look across the sea to another
source. He looked in and down at what had been traditionally ignored. For the
West Indian peasant became other than a cheap source of labour. He became
through the novelist’s eye, a living existence, living in silence and joy and
fear, involved in riot and carnival. It is the West Indian novel that has
restored to the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of
personality.”
This
is a fine passage. A tremendous insight, at once literary and historical. I
have though, one reservation. West Indian literature did not “restore the West
Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality.” That presumes
that the West Indian peasantry had that status before the intervention of the
colonisers’ colonisation. And it was being restored and as such preoccupied the
novelist.
The
truth is the West Indian peasant was new. They were the first to emerge from
the imposition of the plantation, existing as it were, in opposition, if not in
negation of the plantation.
For
as the authority on the subject wrote, that is Woodville Marshall: It was: “The
peasants who initiated the conversion of these plantation territories into
modern societies. In a variety of ways they attempted to build local
self-generating communities. They founded villages and markets; they built
churches and schools; they clamoured for extension of educational facilities,
for improvements and markets; they started the local co-operative movement.”
Indeed
the West Indian peasantry was the first class of persons to emerge in our
territories, with a definite set of interests as a class. They were a new
personality, the West Indian personality, as creators. Hence they commanded
true artistic expression of themselves in West Indian literature.
The
middle classes, “the assimilados” who assimilated the colonisers’ culture and
were chosen for administrative posts in the colonial order, knowing they would
have maintained that order with the convert’s zeal. Having been educated they
saw and still see their “specific purpose”, as Lamming wrote “as sneering at
anything which grew or was made of native soil”. Such, who even today still
look outside for their literature in Harry Potter’s children’s stories, or to
Stephen King and the like, could not be subjects of West Indian poetry or
novels. Educated in the professions, or buying and selling imported
commodities, and reinforcing the old order they were entirely without
character and not fit and proper subjects for novels or verse, with the
possible exception of satire, that is, as mimic men and mimic women.
West
Indian literature, in the novel or as poetry is of artistic necessity
preoccupied with:
What
new fevers arise to reverse the crawl?
Our
islands make towards their spiritual extinction?
Remember
that word “fevers”, it is a recurring image.
For
we were born “in spiritual extinction”, slavery and indenture sought to
extinguish the African and Indian personality, at every turn, in or out of
school, church, home or work. Always it sought not just the stereotype, but the
other-determined personality as stereotype. Anything other than the
other-determined stereotype was a threat to the system to be demonised and
hounded, as if life itself depended on the reproduction of homogeneous and
uncritical persons, who elevated the imposed sacred while undermining the native
secular; the economy itself was about status and not the production and
accumulation of wealth for human development.
Martin
Carter wrote:
“For
a people like us, marooned in misery, and with naked roots, everything must be
raw material awaiting transformation. The drunk man, dazed in a gutter, the
criminal damned in a cell, the priest happy in his celibacy, the merchant
hypnotised with profit, the politician blind with power, the mother paralysed
with her child’s end, the lover ecstatic with freedom; we must accept all of
these as those who constitute the stuff of an experience, the natural order,
the given universe, out of which we must create what we want.”
This
then is the “stuff” of West Indian literature, the raw material on which our
artists must build their word images to re-arrange reality until it becomes
more real.
This
is not the stuff of the “Young and the Restless” or “As the World Turns” or
“The Bold and the Beautiful.” There one does not find the drunk man dazed in
the gutter, the mother paralysed with her child’s end, the lover ecstatic with
copulation, which substitutes for freedom there being no other worlds to
conquer. That is not the stuff of soap operas. We escape into the world of the
soap opera, the glamoured romance of the rich and famous in scheming
connivance, to escape the real world of the mother, who mothers and fathers,
three children, at age 22, and who knows not where breakfast will come from
tomorrow, let alone dinner. Our literature is concerned with the latter, not
the former.
When
I was younger, and at university my friends used to tell me that West Indian
poetry and novels were too real, “too full of the emptiness of life around us”
one wrote and “giving little by way of hope” another friend wrote to me. I
replied we grew up on the alien “daffodils” which we knew not, on cowboys’
rustlers and assorted crooks in the wild, wild west, so literature always
seemed distant. And nothing enhances the view like distance. Our own story near
at hand and familiar did not seem like a story worth telling for we thought of
ourselves as of little worth in the global scheme of the young and the restless
or the bold and the beautiful. We were then and therefore ripe, ready and hot
for American cultural penetration, with or without permission.
From: "Fan the Flame" by Leonard "Tim" Hector.
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