Since I know myself (yet another instance of a Creole idiom for which there is, as usual, no satisfactory Standard English equivalent) the past and the bewildering concept of time itself, have fascinated me. From my early teens I toyed with the idea of becoming an archaeologist, or a historian and I still feel undressed without a watch on my wrist.
Gifted with a near photographic memory and a propensity for argument, history, so I thought, was an ideal avenue to explore. Some of the attraction was, to quote verbatim from my dear old departed Papa, a sense of "being rootless and confused."
As a third generation English-born child of Russian and Polish Jewish stock, I couldn't trace my own personal history back further than the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, which led to mass migration either to America or England and brought my great grandfather Philip Levi to London along with his pregnant wife.
Raised by an agnostic Jewish father and an Anglican stepmother, I rarely met my Jewish relatives (who probably took a dim view of my father marrying a Gentile), except at the occasional funeral, where I would suffer torments of shame at being totally incapable of reading the Hebrew prayers, because I'd never learnt any Hebrew.
With time, my own rootlessness brought me to the Caribbean, not for some extended exotic cocktail holiday (as some malignant spirits have accused me), but for another life in other lands, where I've found roots and a home (without a house so far) beyond ethnicity, or religion, or nation.
This is not to say I'm a cosmopolitan (a dirty word to some) as a major part of the identity(ies) I've assumed, is the Jewish Creole moniker I created semi-humorously during my wanderings throughout the region during the 1990s.
Besides the land and seascapes, the music and the creativity of language, I felt at home and still do, with a similar existential (or very real) sense of rootlessness, displacement and lost history, which defines the Caribbean.
Now, after more than 35 years of studying and then living the Caribbean, I find myself even more exhilarated than I did the day I first opened CLR James' Black Jacobins, or skanked to Dr Alimantado in a dim basement somewhere off Ladbroke Grove, in west London. I've read copious amounts of Caribbean history but over the past four months have come to totally revise my thinking and approach to Caribbean historiography–the way Caribbean history is written, or more importantly constructed.
After the good fortune of teaching Caribbean Literature for seven years, I was presented with the El Dorado opportunity of delivering an inaugural course on Reading Caribbean History though Literature. It was a required course for BA history students, and in addition a couple of my literature students opted for the course as an elective.
I recall I was positively licking my lips at the prospect of looking at some of my favourite texts, with a small group of students who'd combine historical and literary training in our mutual discovery of uncharted territory. There was no course outline, and that was part of the challenge.
I had in mind a number of topics: foundational and creation myths and legends (The Carib creation myth, Palace of the Peacock, Carpentier's Lost Steps); readings of the Haitian Revolution (CLR James' play Toussaint l'Ouverture, Glissant's Mr Toussaint, Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, C�saire's trag�die du roi Christophe, Toussaint's letters, documents); oral and reconstructed history (Chamoiseau's Texaco, eye witness accounts from the Grenadian Revolution, Eduardo Galeano's Faces and Masks, Lovelace's Wine of Astonishment); self-conscious revisions of seminal events - Vic Reid's take on the Morant Bay Rebellion in New Day; the assassination of Trujillo in Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, the 1937 "Parsley Massacre" in Dandicat's The Farming of Bones); popular culture's interpretation of history (kaiso, film, music and dance); responses to colonialism and the plantation system (Brathwaite's The Arrivants, Guillen's West Indies Ltd, Vodou songs).
Of course there was more, but with only 15 classes and limited access to texts, we all had to improvise. But as our reading of Dennis Scott's Echo in the Bone, helped us to realise, the linearity of western historiography, was not appropriate to the real concerns of Caribbean historiography.
There were the gaps, which Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out in his seminal Silencing the Past, still afflict us, making us aware of how history is produced, and the chasm between what happened and what is said to have happened (depending on who's doing the saying). If you can remember by this time next week, we can look at some of those concerns.
�2 To be continued