A Public Address from the Archives:
Vol. 14, No. 55, Pages 121–124, (July–December 1972)
Address at the Graduation Ceremony at the Cave Hill Campus, the University of the West Indies, Barbados, on 1st February, 1972
Mr. Chancellor, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I feel very much at home here. Maybe later I will be able to tell you in personal terms why I do, but I wish to say that since the federation has gone—and federations come and they go and we hope they will come again—I have always referred to myself as a West Indian, a member of that community which produced, among others, George Lamming and Garfield Sobers. There are other distinguished West Indians whom I would speak about at other times and in other places. I speak about those two because I refer to them always as friends of mine and people who belong, or I belong to their nationality and nothing will ever prevent me from saying that.
I want to say here this evening a few words about this extraordinary nationality to which we all belong. It is one of the most curious and the most extraordinary national entities that the modern world has ever seen, and what I intend to do is, first of all, to say what it is. I find repeatedly that people do not know what we are. Secondly, I want to make a historical reference to some others who care not what we are and the possibilities of what we will become in the future. To begin with, since the French Revolution, the modern world has lived differently from how it lived for centuries and we of the Caribbean have taken an extra-ordinary and notable part in the development, not only of the Caribbean but of civilization as a whole. In the French Revolution itself Toussaint L'Ouverture led the movement for the freedom which resulted in the independent state of Haiti—one of the great political events of that remarkable period. But Napoleon took France and held Europe in the throes of battle for many years and afterwards in France began the literary movement, the Romantic Movement, which followed the years of the Napoleonic war. Victor Hugo himself has told us that the persons who were responsible for that first Romantic Movement in France after the Napoleonic War were himself, Theophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas, who was a West Indian, not born and bred, but his work and his general attitude was completely West Indian, and I am looking forward to the day when in some of the University campuses here, some people will do some work on him and let West Indians know what he represented.
After the Romantic Movement in France there came the movement of the Parnassians and at the head of that movement were two West Indians. One was Le Comte de Lisle who was brought up and educated in Cuba as well as in France. The other was Le Jose Maria de Heredia from the island of Reunion which is, socially speaking, a West Indian type of island. They were white men, but for me they were West Indian. “Black" is beautiful but white is also very beautiful sometimes.
I pass on next to another great movement, another great intellectual movement in France, the Impressionist Painters, who broke completely with four hundred years of following the movement of painting that began with the Italian Renaissance. One of the great Impressionist painters was Camille Pissarro. He was a West Indian boy, educated at home, went to France, came back home and then went back to become one of the great Impressionist painters. Cezanne, perhaps, as far as I can judge, the greatest painter of the 19th century, used to call Pissarro his master, such was Pissarro's mastery of the needs and requirements of the Impressionist painting—that great movement at the end of the nineteenth century. I have one more name to mention before 1914, that is Saint Jean Perse who grew up in Guadeloupe and who became a man well placed in the French Government and who has won a Nobel Prize as a French poet. But from the very first beginning to the end of the work that he has done, Saint Jean Perse feels himself and writes as a genuine West Indian, and we have no reason to let them take him. He belongs to us; we produced him.
Now I come on to something nearer home, the tremendous development of the West Indian and people of the West Indian community as political leaders of world events. I begin with a man from the French island of Martinique, René Maran. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1921 with a novel called Batouala. It is not only of importance itself. A few years afterwards, Andre Gide went to Africa and wrote Voyage au Congo, in which the French intellectual expressed his concern and his sadness of what he saw happening to the African people. But today, when we read those books we can see that Rene Maran, who wrote the novel, Batouala, saw far more deeply into the needs and requirements and possibilities of the African people than his much more famous collaborator, Andre Gide. Then we have a list of men whom you cannot write the history of the modern world without being aware of. We begin with Marcus Garvey. Then we go to George Padmore, who was the father of African emancipation. Then we go to Aimé Césaire, the founder of the concept of Negritude, a great poet, dramatist and a great Africanist. Then we go to Frantz Fanon, one of the great political leaders of the day, and Stokely Carmichael and the rest. You cannot write the history of the last fifty years of the world without noticing that West Indians play a tremendous part. They cannot possibly be left out or put into footnotes—they have to be placed right at the very head of all the work that has been done.
I want to say a word or two about what is happening today. For my part, Fidel Castro, whether you are for or against, is a most notable political West Indian. I also refer to three writers, George Lamming, Vidia Naipaul of Trinidad and Wilson Harris of Guyana, and I want to say that I know no other country where they speak English and write it that can produce today three novelists of the quality that those men possess. When you look at these insignificant little islands and you begin to see the quality of the men they produce, you are astonished. Mr. Chancellor, I respect you, I do not meddle with the law. I do not express opinions about it in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but I have been to various places in England and I have been to Africa. I have travelled all over the United States and the question comes up periodically of distinguished West Indians and you will allow me to say, Mr. Chancellor, that repeatedly I have heard people say to me: "By the way, you have in Trinidad one of the most distinguished of living lawyers." I was not able to form a judgment on that, but they have said it so often that I keep on saying it myself.
So, that is where we are; that is what we have done and the question is—how? How the hell has it happened that from these insignificant little islands, not having more than three or four million people, very backward in many respects—I will not go into that now—how is it that we have produced this realm of distinguished men who are in the very front rank of those who have helped to make the modern world what it is? I was talking about this in Trinidad some time ago and a man told me, "Mr. James, you have only given a list of distinguished men, but that is no real testimony as to the qualities of the West Indian people." I told him: "My friend, I have two things to tell you. One—A body of backward peoples does not persistently produce a body of distinguished men. Two—If you go to England you will find there are parts of England where the medical services would fall apart were it not for the West Indian doctors and nurses who are holding them up, and furthermore, still more importantly in the educational system of London in particular, if the West Indians were to withdraw themselves, God knows what would happen to them. So that we are not only producing distinguished men but [in] important spheres of existence such as medicine and the care of children. In an advanced civilisation like Great Britain our people are holding their own and showing that the qualities which the distinguished men show spring from the general quality of the community to which we belong." The question now arises, how did this happen? Now there are many ways you can say it happened. You can say that we are bright people, etc. But I have not been thinking in that way for many years, and I have been trying to find out how did it happen and what were the circumstances that from these backward and, in many respects, insignificant islands we should produce men of this quality. I believe I have found something which a body of graduates as you are now, persons of some intellectual quality and achievement if not distinction—achievement at any rate, the distinction is up to you—will find too.
I want to say now one or two things which I want to ask you to remember. I want to refer you to an intelligentsia very much like ours, the intelligentsia of Russian society during the nineteenth and late eighteenth century. Peter the Great pulled Russia into the modern world and had to find a body of intellectuals to educate, doctors, lawyers, administrators, officials, etc.—and he could find them only among the Serfs. So he got them from among the Serfs, but the French Revolution had taken place and after one hundred years these men were all educated in the principles of the great revolution and they formed a certain body of men in the Russian society but they despised the Serfs from which they had come and they were not able to mobilise and penetrate into the Russian czarists, into the Russian aristocracy, into the Russian generals, into the Russian church. So, they were stuck between the Serfs from whom they came and the Russian aristocracy into which they could not penetrate. They were a body of intellectuals such as Europe has not seen and they produced a body of most distinguished men; the novelists—Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky; the originator of modern painting—Kandinsky; the originator, or one of the originators, of modern music—Stravinsky; ballet—Diahgilev and Nijinsky; and stage-organisation, stage management, one of the greatest names in the history of stage management—Stanislavski; and Chekov was the one who wrote what you may call the Existentialist plays and short stories which distinguished Russia before 1917. Where did these men come from? I believe, and I think it is fairly clear that they were stuck between the Serfs from whom they had emerged and the leading aristocracy into which they could not penetrate. I believe, with your kind permission, that the average West Indian intellectual, for some time, has been in exactly that situation. He has been able to learn the most advanced ideas of British liberalism, the British labour movement and the ideas that the Russian revolution has spread. He has come from the slaves whom he has turned his back on, those who have remained or who are descendants of these slaves, but he cannot penetrate fully and completely into, or for years has been prevented from getting among those who are rulers and masters of the country, so that he is in the position the Russian intellectuals found themselves in and has had to make his way using these things. At the beginning, he used them abroad with great distinction; he has won distinction among the great intellectuals that have shaken Europe and Africa and it seems to me that today his future depends on whether he can do at home, what he has done abroad in the past. That is what is in front of him now: how to use this particular situation that he finds himself in and realise where he must go, what he must do, the tremendous advantage which he holds, and which he will use or not use as the case may be.
I want now to conclude by saying two things. A friend of mine, Professor George Roy, has written a volume on the history of slavery and in it he says that two persons have been most notable in the attitude that they have had in the history of black people in the United States. He says Dr. Martin
Luther King in “Black Reconstruction” and C. L. R. James in countless speeches, articles and essays have insisted that black people in all the great movements of the United States’ development have been foremost, and he hopes that conception will also guide the future historians of the people in the United States. Now I have said where the intellectual is. I do not tell you what to do. It is not my business to do that but I tell you where I have been going all the time and what has been the result, not only in the Caribbean, but in a tremendous country like the United States which is in ferment, and I am glad to say that the work I have done and the attitude that I have to the mass of the black population is making great claim among all types of people, not only among the black people but among the white students there. That I think it is necessary for me to say. What you will do, you will do as a result of your personal subjective attitudes and impressions of history. It is not my business to talk about that, I only say what I have done and what is the result that is taking place today as a result of that work. And the last thing I wish to tell you is that my mother was born in Barbados.