I really wish al-jazeera could call on CLR James right now.

That was a comment made on Twitter three days ago by The Public Archive, a small collective of historians based at Vanderbilt University.

Like them, like many people, I’ve spent much of the past week observing from afar the astonishing events in Egypt, where hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of citizens have been protesting against President Hosni Mubarak and his government, calling for freedom and democracy. Like many people, I’ve been constantly refreshing websites and blogs, watching the stream of commentary and information (and misinformation) on Twitter, and watching Al Jazeera’s TV coverage via their website. I’ve watched — witnessed — as an optimistic, upbeat mass movement took a violent turn today, when pro-Mubarak protestors — hired thugs, according to many people on the ground in Cairo — attacked the main body of peaceful demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

And I’ve reached for Martin Carter. I’ve been reading his early poems of the 1950s — the poems, in particular, of The Hill of Fire Glows Red and Poems of Resistance. Their ferocity seems recharged by the images and stories from Cairo — “I will make my shirt / a banner / for the revolution,” “Wherever you fall comrade I shall arise” — but also their moral imperative, and their hope.

.

You Are Involved

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

Like a jig
shakes the loom.
Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!

— Martin Carter,
from Poems of Resistance from British Guiana

Dedication plaque inside the current C.L.R. James Library in London. Photograph by sarflondondunc, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Antilles has been silent the past few weeks — not because there’s nothing going on, but rather the opposite: there’s been too much happening for your Antilles blogger to keep up. The Port of Spain contemporary art centre Alice Yard — which, wearing another hat, I help run — marked its fourth anniversary with a programme of exhibitions and artists’ projects and talks. Then there was the trinidad+tobago film festival. I’ve also been keeping an eye on Carifringe, a new arts and culture festival launched in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, the CRB has been publishing reviews, essays, fiction, and poems every week — you can catch up with those here.

As we prepare to wrap up the current issue and launch the next, Antilles will return to a more active posting schedule — look out for an overview of the CRB’s special film coverage in September and October, firsthand accounts of some key Carifringe events, and our usual coverage of Caribbean literary and cultural happenings.

Finally, some good news. In the previous post, I reported the proposal to rename the C.L.R. James Library in London, and pointed Antilles readers to the online petition to stop this dismaying development. Well, enough people around the world raised their voices to persuade the Hackney Council that the renaming plan was a truly bad idea. Today it was officially announced that the new library building will continue to bear the name and honour the memory of C.L.R. James. (Now if only we could get the Trinidad and Tobago government to name a library after James in his home country . . .)

C.L.R. James

. . . it is appalling to learn that the C.L.R. James Library in Hackney (a borough of London) is going to be renamed the Dalston Library and Archives, after the neighborhood in which it is located. James was there when the library was christened in his honour in 1985. The authorities insist that, in spite of the proposed change, they will continue to honour James. But this seems half-hearted and unsatisfying . . .

Some have denounced the name change as an insult, not just to James’s memory, but to the community in which the library is located, since Hackney has a large black population. I don’t know enough to judge whether any offense was intended. But the renaming has a significance going well beyond local politics in North London.

C.L.R. James was a revolutionary; that he ended up imprisoned for a while seems, all in all, par for the course. But he was also very much the product of the cultural tradition he liked to call Western Civilisation. He used this expression without evident sarcasm — a remarkable thing, given that he was a tireless anti-imperialist. Given his studies in the history of Africa and the Caribbean, he might well have responded as Gandhi did when asked what he thought of Western Civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”

As a child, James reread Thackeray’s satirical novel Vanity Fair until he had it almost memorised; this was, perhaps, his introduction to social criticism. He traced his ideas about politics back to ancient Greece. James treated the funeral oration of Pericles as a key to understanding Lenin’s State and Revolution. And there is a film clip that shows him speaking to an audience of British students on Shakespeare — saying that he wrote “some of the finest plays I know about the impossibility of being a king.” As with James’s interpretation of Captain Ahab as a prototype of Stalin, this is a case of criticism as transformative reading. It’s eccentric, but it sticks with you.

— Scott McLemee on the campaign to stop the renaming of the C.L.R. James Library in London. He includes a link to an online petition, which your Antilles blogger has already signed.

Enthroned Madonna (2010), by Marvin Bartley; digital print on archival paper; 109.2 x 241.3 cm. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Regular Antilles readers may remember that nearly two months ago we posted a few images from and links to the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica. The Young Talent exhibition series, surveying work by emerging Jamaican artists, was launched by the NGJ in 1985, and the fifth and most recent version ran earlier this year, from 16 May to 10 July. This week, the CRB publishes a review of Young Talent V by Annie Paul, who has observed and written about the Jamaican art scene for almost two decades. Alongside the review, we publish a portfolio of works by all fourteen Young Talent artists.

For more on the show, browse through the archives of the NGJ blog, where the exhibition is extensively documented, with biographical information on all the artists and short essays by the curators. (Also check out this short video of the exhibition opening by the Jamaican artist and filmmaker Storm Saulter.)

In her review, Paul singles out the artist Ebony G. Patterson, who she argues “captures some of the seismic shifts that have taken place in artistic and other languages in Jamaica.” If you’re curious, you can read a dialogue between Patterson and Oneika Russell (another Young Talent V artist) published a year ago in the Small Axe “Vocabularies” blog, and download a PDF catalogue of Patterson’s recent solo show Gangstas, Disciplez + the Doiley Boyz. And here’s a link to an article by Mel Cooke, published in the Jamaica Gleaner two days ago, reporting on a recent forum where several other Young Talent artists spoke about their work.

Also published today in the CRB: a review by Kelly Baker Josephs of You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, which collects several public and private talks given by James during an extended visit to Canada in 1966 and 1967, together with other documents of that period. This was a kind of turning-point for James, Josephs suggests:

these lectures, interviews, and letters also showcase a James who was increasingly disheartened by the way the Caribbean’s post-independence leaders were “taking part” in West Indian politics and society, and wished to spur challenges to their continued allegiance to foreign powers. This James was not quite as confident about the potential sovereignty of the West Indies as the man who wrote the appendix to the 1962 reissue of The Black Jacobins. Having tried, and failed, to take part via the political route in Trinidad, having witnessed the failure of Federation, having been exiled by his former protégé Eric Williams, the James who lectures in Montreal in 1966–67 was perhaps less sanguine, though still positive about the change that the young people in his audience might yet engender.

The young people in James’s audience in Montreal included some who would go on to play important roles in Caribbean politics in the 1970s and 80s. We don’t know what parts the Young Talent artists will play in coming decades in the Caribbean art world, but, on the evidence of this show, it should be exciting to watch.

Lower Potaro River, Guyana, with Kaieteur Falls just visible in the distance. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

Deeply influenced by the “mythic method” of high modernists like Eliot and Joyce, Harris set out to redescribe his society sub specie eternitatis — through the lens of an historical consciousness which reached back several centuries and encompassed the racial memories of Europe, Africa and the Americas. The conventions of traditional fiction, which tended to dwell on the surfaces of things, simply could not do this. So Harris forged a style that let him delve into the interior life of a country that was both ancient — if seen as part of the continental land mass — and, paradoxically, in its political infancy as it emerged from the clutches of its colonial master. Eager to restore the lost perspectives of a landscape he had mapped as a professional surveyor, he had the intellectual courage, and chutzpah, to fictionalize his visionary intuitions without yielding to the lure of simplification.

Prodigiously well read, and dauntingly familiar with Marxist and Existentialist thought, Harris referred unblushingly to Heideggerian dasein and geworfenheit, and to “absent presences” in the national soul. Far from being pretentious or obscurantist, these concepts translated the struggle of the West Indian artist into language that could be understood on a world stage. C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott held similarly panoptic views of European culture, and they also possessed the intellectual confidence to respond to it on their own terms. In fact, his novels and cultural criticism fit squarely into a literary vision of the Caribbean shared by both of these men, and in some instances he even seems to have helped pave the way for their success.

— From “The Lost World of Wilson Harris”, the elegiac editorial in today’s Stabroek News, reflecting on the recent news of Harris’s knighthood, the immense creative ambitions of a previous generation of Guyanese and West Indian writers, and today’s “diminished cultural expectations.”