A PERSPECTIVE
The Caribbean intellectual tradition is a complex configuration of thought and practices. The region was born and wrought within the cauldrons of racial slavery and various 15th-century European colonial projects. It was at the heart of the making of the modern world. In the 17th and 18th centuries, two of the richest colonies in the European colonial system were Barbados and then Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti). To live and create a form of human life, the enslaved African navigated the historical catastrophe of being enslaved and what Aimé Césaire calls the “thingfication” process, which shaped these societies. Through practices of refusals, rebellions, and revolution in the colony of Saint-Domingue, the enslaved created genres of political thought which were cata- lysed by practices and notions of freedom. Their Afro-Caribbean religious practices created not only new gods and loas, but new cosmologies. Music, art, and performances became rituals in which the black body was self-fashioned and humanised. These are some of the grounds which shape the intellectual history of the Caribbean—a history of thought and practices from the “people below”.
Caribbean subaltern thought begins in these forms: Afro-religious practices in Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, and, of course, Haiti and elsewhere reshaping the work of the spirits while creating specific contours of Caribbeaness. In the political domain by the 20th century, ideas of black nationalism took form, and, in some instances, elements of Ethiopianism lived alongside black nationalism as well as other conceptions of nationalism and socialism. The early 20th century witnessed forms of radical blackness from Afro-Cubanism in art; cultural, literary, and anthropological studies in Cuba; and the explosion of literary journals in the Anglophone Caribbean. This period of the 20th century also witnessed in Haiti the publication of Jean Price-Mars’ So Spoke the Uncle, and the consolidation of modern Haitian art. These were seminal moments in the history of radical Caribbean thought.
Outside the region, the Caribbean diaspora, whether in London, New York, Paris, or Amsterdam, was engaged in deep conversations with each other and others from continental Africa, creating a network of conferences and cultural and political activities in the various colonial metropoles. Their names are too many to mention, but there was Otto Huiswoud and Anton de Kom from Suriname, Aimé Césaire and the Nardal sisters from Martinique, George Padmore and CLR James from Trinidad, all of whom belonged to a generation of thinkers who, in the early 20th century, reworked the Caribbean intellectual tradition. Two overarching impulses of this tradition during the colonial period were sovereignty and forms of freedom. Today, these two conceptions, which influenced the character of Caribbean life, remain alive.
The early 20th century provided another set of grounds for Caribbean thought, specifically the centrality of the literary, in which George Lamming was one pillar. Not only did Lamming edit Bim for a while and was an early writer in this journal in the 1940s, he was always a figure that was a touchstone for the Caribbean, a region which in his view had a distinctive set of possibilities. His passing in June 2022 marked a moment in the history of the region. The region will miss that voice and his ideas about the possibilities of a different postcolonial Caribbean.
Over the last few years, the passing of Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott as well have marked the closing shadows of an era in the history of Caribbean thought, one in which literature was a defining feature. What defines the Caribbean today? At the popular level, it is said that the music defines the region. As performance and sonic language, musical genres from steel pan to calypso, reggae, and others, are forms of popular languages. If words are “public tools”, then the sonic language of various
Caribbean musical genres is not just a view of the complexities of the Caribbean world, but perhaps more importantly a view from “below”. But is this a complete definition of the region? Lamming, for whom this issue is dedicated, once remarked that one of the most profound challenges that faced us was how to control “the burden of history and incorporate it into our collective sense of the future”.
Today in this period of deep neo-liberalism, it is sometimes said that there is no serious Caribbean tradition and that the halcyon days of the 20th century marked a moment which has passed. What might have passed is the push of aspects of the tradition to make deep social and political changes. And even that is debatable. What has not passed is the everyday search, the impulse to live and make life, for the ordinary Carib- bean person. In this regard, both music and art become critical terrains of the tradition within the present. So perhaps what Caribbean politics demands today is a dose of the imagination which catalyses music and art.
This issue of Bim opens with a series of tributes to George Lamming, our doyen of Caribbean letters and thought. In a moment when Caribbean sovereignty is fragmented and horizons of possibilities seem limited, we present various offerings here.
The volume is divided into segments. Following the reflections on Lamming are a set of essays which seek to elaborate aspects of the Caribbean intellectual tradition. It is important to note that many of the offerings address the work of female Caribbean thinkers. The essays are followed by a selection of poems and short stories. This edition fittingly closes with images and an essay about the work of Haitian abstract painter Renold Laurent. Fitting, because the Caribbean intellectual tradition recognises all forms of art as the deepest conversations between the present and the past; to the extent that, as the late Wilson Harris once noted, there is a philosophy of history which resides within the “arts of the imagination”.
This issue of Bim does not include all aspects of the Caribbean intellectual tradition, but we hope that the conversations within it illuminate how we grapple with the various problems of Caribbean life. The ground of the history and practices of thought which we have created ourselves are the necessary inventories about who and what we are. In 1999, Lamming collaborated on and then edited with the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies a publication called Enterprise of the Indies. In the editorial, he wrote, “What is the Caribbean…? ...[T]he vocabulary of taste and sound and sight may vary the…ethos remains [and] repeats itself. The sea registers a recurring theme…every- thing is multiple here….” This complex polyvocality is perhaps a defining feature of the Caribbean. “The unity is the submarine,” insisted Kamau Brathwaite. This is about how history, culture, and the performances and products of the imagination have wrought us into a singularity punctuated by difference and integrated complex networks of movement and diasporic gatherings.
Today that movement is greater than ever, generating a new circuitry of what constitutes the Caribbean. There are no “pleasures of exile” here, but instead a grappling with the world both at “home” and “abroad”. The offerings in this issue, written by a com- bination of those at home and abroad, hopefully opens up a space where we can begin another necessary inventory of who and what we are.
Anthony Bogues & Maziki Thame
Kingston, Jamaica July 2023