“It is Toussaint’s supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves… Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition, the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.”
— C L R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
For three years now, this column has concentrated on women writers, some internationally famous, some overlooked, some publishing debut books, some self-published, some still trying to find readers, but all part of the canon of Caribbean writing by women of colour. This new series on writers now turns to male writers whose books and political and literary lives helped shape Caribbean writing. I start with C L R James.
Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Tunapuna on January 4, 1901, when Trinidad was a British Crown colony administered from Port-of-Spain by Governor Sir Cornelius Alfred Moloney. He grew up in Tunapuna, where his father, Robert Alexander James, was a teacher and his mother, Ida Elizabeth James, a homemaker.
James said in a BBC interview in 1976, “My mother had a very good library of novels,” and listed Thackeray, Dickens, Shakespeare and Charlotte Brontë among the writers in the house when he was growing up.
In 1910, James won a scholarship to Queen’s Royal College in Port-of-Spain, where boys were trained in English literature, Latin, history, examinations, debate and cricket, and where James became known both for his academic ability and for cricket. More than 50 years later, in Beyond a Boundary, he would write: “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ and “Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it.”
The Alma Jordan Library catalogue records that the C L R James Collection includes “the manuscripts, correspondence and personal and literary papers which remained in his possession at the time of his death”, together with “the books which formed his working library”, including typescripts of Toussaint L’Ouverture and The Black Jacobins, material on George Padmore, autobiographical writings, books on literature, history, politics, sociology, cricket and art, and Wisden Almanacks.
His papers include notebooks, corrected drafts, speeches, political notes, letters, newspaper clippings, and correspondence exchanged with publishers, activists, scholars and journalists in London, Port-of-Spain, New York and Accra over many years.
James started as a writer in Trinidad before he became a historian and political thinker, publishing stories and criticism, teaching at QRC, writing cricket commentary, and joining the group around The Beacon magazine in the 1930s with Alfred Mendes, later known for Black Fauns and his memoirs of Port-of-Spain, Albert Gomes, who entered politics and became Chief Minister of T&T, and Ralph de Boissière, trade unionist and novelist who wrote Crown Jewel.
In 1932, James left Trinidad for England carrying the manuscript of what became Minty Alley, now regarded as the first novel by a black West Indian writer published in Britain. Once in England, he rapidly got into anti-colonial politics, Marxism, Pan-Africanism, and the political circles in London debating empire, labour, race, revolution and fascism before the Second World War.
James worked closely with George Padmore, campaigned against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, lectured widely, joined Trotskyist groups, travelled in Britain and the US, and wrote on politics, cricket, literature, history, theatre and journalism, often at the same time.
His politics placed him outside acceptance equally of colonial T&T and later independent T&T. He was a Marxist, a Trotskyist, an anti-Stalinist, and a Pan-Africanist, and in 1937, he published World Revolution, 1917–1936, his history of the Communist International, a book that created intense debate amongst left-wing political circles in Britain and the US.
When the Italian invasion of Ethiopia became a major political issue for black writers and activists across the Caribbean, Britain and the United States, James was among those who organised meetings, wrote articles and spoke publicly against Mussolini’s war. Ethiopia became a rallying point for anti-colonial politics across the black Atlantic, and James’s writing linked fascism in Europe with colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean.
In 1938, he published The Black Jacobins, his history of the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture, reconstructing the uprising through plantation records, parliamentary papers, memoirs, French archives and political documents, and writing enslaved people as political actors in their own history.
I read The Black Jacobins as a student in Canada. It was the first time I had read in detail about slavery, plantation life, Toussaint Louverture, slave owners, poor whites, free blacks and mulattoes, and the violence and greed on which the empire was built. I was marching in protests, I didn’t entirely understand but gradually James became part of the way I understood history, power, race, Empire and the ongoing scars of slavery.
My final thesis at university grew partly out of that reading. I argued that slavery began first as an economic system, built to extract labour and wealth on plantations, and that racial theory hardened around it afterwards, providing the moral and intellectual justification for a system that had already become profitable. Race helped organise the hierarchy, but the engine underneath it was money, land, labour, sugar and empire.
James wrote in the preface to Beyond a Boundary, “This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography,” and added, “To answer involves ideas as well as facts.” He produced fiction, political analysis, anti-colonial history, memoir, theatre, journalism and cricket writing across six decades.
James died in London on May 31, 1989 and was buried at Tunapuna Cemetery on June 12 after his body was returned to Trinidad. Walton Look Lai, in C L R James’s Caribbean, records that the Trinidad government offered James a state funeral and that James’s own request had been to be buried “simply and without religious ceremony” by the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union.
I remember attending James’s funeral with my father, replete with every religious invocation by pundit, priest, and maulvi. I was open-mouthed at the boldfaced state hypocrisy of the formal political speeches, watching T&T claim a dead man whose politics, atheism, Marxism and criticism had made him unwelcome in Trinidad during his lifetime. My father’s comment that Trinidad claimed him only after Britain and the United States admired his work has stayed with me. It is an old colonial reflex. We love writers celebrated abroad, but often downgrade our own people and our own work. Hopefully, someday that confidence will come when we become the centre of our own world.
(Sources include UWI’s Alma Jordan Library, NALIS, Columbia University, BBC interviews with James, James’s own books, and Walton Look Lai’s C L R James’s Caribbean.)
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
