Earlier this week, the CRB published F.S.J. Ledgister’s review of Edward Seaga’s two-volume political memoir, My Life and Leadership, plus historian Patrick E. Bryan’s monograph Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica. Seaga, prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and leader of the opposition for a cumulative two decades, was the last member of Parliament to have entered public life before Independence. I must confess that, copy-editing Ledgister’s insightful review a few days ago, and contemplating Seaga’s sheer political tenacity, I was sorely tempted to title the piece after Prince Buster’s catchy 1967 song “Hard Man fe Dead”. I decided to err on the side of caution, and chose the less irreverent title “Last one standing”.

Also published this week: Brendan de Caires’s thorough, admiring, and rather naughty review of Lise Winer’s Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, a remarkable reference work that sets a new standard for Caribbean lexicography. For one thing, as de Caires illustrates in detail, “Winer is commendably open-minded about recording ‘all relevant words . . . pleasant or not’”. He goes on:

This level of exactitude in country matters may not be to everyone’s taste, but Winer’s open-eyed approach to language as it is actually used is central to what makes the DECTT so useful.

I think this is the most entertaining review we’ve published in the CRB for a long while, and an excellent demonstration that an intelligent and penetrating book review can and ought to be a fun read.

Finally, this week we publish as well two poems by the US-based Trinidadian poet Lauren K. Alleyne. “The Body, Given” and “Ode to the Belly” are both wry meditations on the eternal tensions between body and soul, and Alleyne is a poet I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from in the years ahead.

Lithograph from Puck magazine (1898), advocating US intervention in Cuba. Image courtesy the New-York Historical Society

In New York throughout the nineteenth century, new immigrant communities were formed. The numbers were still small — in the early 1860s, we learn, about 1,300 Spaniards and Latin Americans lived in New York — but they grew. Poets, intellectuals and politicians joined the merchants. A Spanish publishing industry developed as well. (An 1872 Spanish guide to New York is shown here.)

The nineteenth century’s Latin American revolutions even seemed to begin in New York, with many people fleeing oppression in Cuba and Puerto Rico. A red, white and blue flag hung here is a reproduction of the one raised by The Sun newspaper in Lower Manhattan in 1850 (the original is said to be in Havana): it was destined to become the flag of an independent Cuba, though in this case it was meant as a call for its conquest.

New York, we see, became a locus for Cuban debates for half a century, with advocates of liberation, Spanish loyalists and proponents of conquest jostling for supremacy, until the Spanish-American War overturned the playing board. Biographical sketches of major figures are imposing: José Martí, a supporter of Cuban independence, came to the city in 1880 and worked as a journalist, while establishing New York’s Spanish-American Literary Society and writing poetry.

— Edward Rothstein reviews Nueva York (1613–1945), an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, in the New York Times. The show, which runs until 9 January, 2011, explores the Hispanic cultural influence on the development of New York City over four centuries, and the roles of visitors and immigrants from South American and the Caribbean.

The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate (1833), by Adolphe Duperly. Image courtesy the Yale Centre for British Art

1 August is Emancipation Day, a public holiday in many Caribbean territories, the day when we recall the long struggle to overcome legal slavery in the Caribbean, and the rich, complex history of our African ancestors. It seems fitting today to reach into the CRB archive for the rich and complex biography of a man who overcame slavery in his own way, who refused to lose his dignity to the horrors and degradations of plantation society, and who died a free man by his own determined agency.

Maureen Warner-Lewis’s Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian — reviewed in the May 2008 CRB by Bridget Brereton — is

a brilliantly reconstructed biography of a man who was born in “Igboland” (modern south-eastern Nigeria) around 1792, kidnapped and enslaved as a child around 1802, taken to Jamaica and bought by the Monteath family, worked as a human chattel, “promoted” to headman on a livestock farm, and finally self-liberated by purchase in 1837, one year before the final end of slavery. It is the story of a man who was called Aniaso at birth, had the “slave name” Toby imposed on him as a child in Jamaica, and proudly took the names Archibald John Monteath on his baptism in 1821, when he was still human property. And it traces his spiritual journey from a deeply religious Igbo community to his conversion to the Moravian faith and his emergence after 1837 as a full-time church worker much respected by his European colleagues in the close-knit Moravian Jamaican mission.

As Brereton explains, Monteath’s autobiographical texts — produced towards the end of his life, in collaboration with Moravian missionaries — “do not fit the conventions of the antislavery discourse” and were for a long time overlooked by historians of the period of slavery and emancipation. But they remind us how many different forms resistance to slavery actually took, and how complicated individual human beings are, even under social systems designed to suppress their individuality and indeed their humanity.

This life-story is not a self-presentation of a brutalised victim, of a wounded individual, Warner-Lewis concludes. It is an account of a man’s “reclamation of a moral sense, of dignity, and of personal identity.” This was a person with agency and self-confidence, on a life-long “quest for honour lost in childhood, and honour regained” though faith, self-liberation, and religious commitment.

Read Brereton’s review of Archibald Monteath here, and find more reviews of books on Caribbean history in the CRB archive via our subject index.

Jamaat al Muslimeen leader Yasin Abu Bakr (centre, in white) and journalist Jones P. Madeira (right) on live television during the 1990 insurrection. TTT image later reproduced in the Trinidad and Tobago newspapers

“At 6.00 pm this afternoon the government of Trinidad and Tobago was overthrown.”

On the evening of 27 July, 1990, these were the words that informed a shocked nation that a group of armed insurrectionists had stormed Trinidad and Tobago’s Red House and sole TV station, and were holding the prime minister hostage, along with several dozen Cabinet ministers, MPs, journalists, and others. Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, appeared on television and calmly announced that “the revolutionary forces are commanded to control the streets.”

It was a huge bluff, of course, or a delusion. The Muslimeen never controlled more than a few thousand square feet of territory in Port of Spain. They were outgunned, had no popular support, and there was never any chance their coup attempt would succeed, though for five days there was a very real risk that most or all of their hostages would be killed. Trying to avoid bloodshed, the authorities negotiating with Abu Bakr secured the Muslimeen’s surrender on 1 August — Emancipation Day — by means of the infamous amnesty which led, after some judicial wrangling, to their walking free.

The Muslimeen would go on to become a potent and dangerous political force in Trinidad and Tobago, credited with or blamed for intervening in several general elections. Abu Bakr remains controversial, hated by most, admired by a crucial few. To this day many Trinidadians, not otherwise bloodthirsty, openly express the opinion that he should have been killed by the security forces in the aftermath of the insurrection, amnesty or no amnesty. Downtown Port of Spain is still scarred by the fires and pillaging that erupted on the night of 27 July. And many believe that the atmosphere of violence that has prevailed in recent years can be traced back to the events of 1990. As Mark Lyndersay put it, writing in the May 2008 CRB:

There’s a popular argument that the coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago changed this twin-island nation forever, that the growth of violent crime over the last decade can be traced back to that act of pointless lawlessness and the distribution of guns on the evening of July 27, 1990.

Lyndersay — who, as a Trinidad Guardian photojournalist, was perilously close to the centre of the action during those five days in 1990 — was reviewing Days of Wrath, journalist Raoul Pantin’s account of being held hostage inside the TTT building. Dennis McComie has more recently published his 1990: The Personal Account of a Journalist Under Siege, and in 1992 Eden Shand — a former government minister and Muslimeen hostage — published The Estates Within, a “docu-drama” play based on events inside the Red House during the insurrection. But, as Lyndersay wrote in his review of Pantin’s book,

The 1990 insurrection is much like the proverbial elephant described by blind men. There were so many aspects to the event that have never been publicly discussed or narrated by those who experienced them that it’s possible no one has a truly comprehensive overview of the coup attempt. After almost two decades, all that is publicly available about the Muslimeen insurrection are a few facets on a complicated and still disturbing event, little windows into what happened over those puzzling, terrifying days.

Which is why many Trinidadians were relieved when recently elected Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar announced her government’s intention to appoint a commission of enquiry into the coup attempt. For twenty years, successive governments ignored calls from citizens both prominent and ordinary for a formal probe. It is widely believed that key Opposition MPs, fortuitously absent from the Red House on that fateful Friday evening, had been tipped off about the Muslimeen’s plans, and important aspects of the negotiations over the notorious amnesty remain unknown to the public. Almost a generation later, it’s time to face the truth and its consequences.