West Indian intellectuals in Britain

Front matter

West Indian intellectuals in Britain —

STUDIES INT IMPERIALISM general editor John M. MacKenzie

Established in the belief that imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies, Studies in Imperialism seeks to develop the new socio-cultural approach which has emerged through cross-disciplinary work on popular culture, media studies, art history, the study of education and religion, sports history and children’s literature. The cultural emphasis embraces studies of migration and race, while the older political and constitutional, economic and military concerns are never far away.

Contents

General editor’s introduction — page vi List of contributors — page viii Acknowledgements — page x

Introduction: Crossing the seas Bill Schwarz What is a West Indian? Catherine Hall

‘To do something for the race’: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples David Killingray

Introduction

Crossing the seas Bill Schwarz

There exists a moving photographic record of West Indian emigrants arriving in British cities in the 1950s, first by steamship and steam train, then later, by the end of the decade and into the 1960s, by plane. We still see, in our own times, these images of men and women who, for all their apprehensions, were stepping across the threshold into new lives, bringing with them a certain presence. These are images which evoke a sense of hardships in the past overcome and hardships just around the corner yet to confront. They give form to the dreams which had compelled a generation of migrants to pack up and cross the seas. And they capture too a sensibility founded on the conviction that these dreams were rightfully theirs: a dream, in other words, of colonials who believed that the privileges of empire were their due.!

These photographic images, and those of the flickering, monochrome newsreels which accompany them, have now come to compose a social archive. They serve to fix the collective memory of the momentous transformation of postwar migration.

At the same time, however, their very familiarity works to conceal other angles of vision. We become so habituated to the logic of the camera-eye that we are led to forget that the vision we are bequeathed is uncompromisingly one-way. The images which fix this history as social memory are images of the West Indians. The camera is drawn to them. The moment they enter the field of vision, the focal point adjusted, they become fixed as something new: as immigrants. The camera, in other words, organises the collective vision not of the West Indians but of the native Britons. There are in the public domain no reverse-shots, in which — from gangplank or from railway station platform — we see, through the eyes of the emigrant, the huddles of journalists and onlookers, police and social workers, white faces all. Without this perspective it is difficult to grasp that white Britons — ordinary people, doing the shopping or waiting for the bus — were, whether conscious of it or not, part of this drama of migration. They too were actors in the larger history of empire from which the imperatives of migration to the mother country had arisen. To catch sight of the native population from the perspective of the disembarking migrant is to bring this deeper history into the light of day. Reverse-shots, or their historiographical equivalents, not only offer the virtues of an unfamiliar vantage; they may also provide a perspective which is more fully historical. After all, it was the migrants, especially, who carried with them the knowledge that: ‘We have met before’.”

These contacts between migrant and native Briton, on the home ground of the metropolis, offer more than just another chapter in the progressive rise of ‘multicultural Britain’. The emigrant experience cast a new way of seeing, in which consciousness both of the imperial past and of the inner forms of the imperial civilisation of the British assumed a new intensity. That this vision cohered is of the first importance, analytically, for the British themselves: it allowed the British to step outside themselves, or outside their own culture or habitus, and to see themselves afresh, through new eyes. What previously might have looked familiar, the natural way of doing things ordained by the peculiarly providential history of the old, ancestral nations, might, instead, come to look unfamiliar. From such dislocations new things might happen.

These analytical consequences of the encounter between West Indian and Briton form the conceptual core of our explorations in this volume. The figure who came closest to formulating our defining hypothesis was C. L. R. James.* James believed that it was through the encounter with the formerly colonial peoples of the Caribbean that native white Britons were first able to see themselves in their true historical light: what previously had happened elsewhere was now happening here. There were many occasions when he hinted at this. It is one of the themes running through Beyond a Boundary.‘ It is most explicitly stated in his eightieth birthday lectures, delivered in London in January 1981 on the eve of a momentous recasting of black life in Britain. Here James offered a characteristically Hegelian rendition, elegantly turned inside out, in which he imagined the slave finally settling accounts with the master. But this was a settling of accounts in which the slave, forced by a profane, unforgiving history to do what the master himself cannot do, creates a future in which both slave and master discover new freedoms. In its local, specific setting, when former-colonisers confronted former-colonised in the conflagrations on the streets of metropolitan cities (in Brixton, Toxteth, Bristol), these were powerful and unusual words.

No one who has lived through the subsequent years in Britain, and who now witnesses the unfinished, continuing emergence of new lives specifically styled as ‘black British’, can fail to be moved by James’s comments, for this process carries the promise of new possibilities for all: for former-colonisers and former-colonised alike. This is a project which still unfolds. There is today so much obeisance to the idea of multiculturalism that those domains in our lives which remain trenchantly untransformed, still subject to a racial or colonial logic, are too frequently forgotten, or lack the requisite vocabularies which make them speakable. In his own time James was not unaware of these tangled outcomes. One great virtue of his thought, however, is that it offers us historical depth of field. This, really, is critical. He reminds us (as did an entire generation of West Indians) that in these unfolding new lives, both black and white, the presence of the old empire is exactly that: a presence. He tells us that the history of empire is still of our time. Britain’s colonial possessions, of course, are long gone. But inherited collective instincts may possess a longer life. End of empire runs along many different historical times, not all of which have reached their due, punctual point of termination. This is a difficult problem to discuss, for it asks us to ponder phenomena which are not easily observable to the naked eye. It requires us to unravel the-past-in-the-present, to see and listen to those pasts in this present. It requires us (all of us) to confront our own memories and mentalities. In a word, it demands that we think historically.

Implicit in James’s thinking is the conviction that the West Indians of his generation played an active role not only in the decolonisation of their home territories in the Caribbean but also, through many displacements, in the rather less visible process of decolonising metropolitan Britain itself. This in turn (in James’s thought) raised a further question: what memories of the historical past were required in order to think through the destruction of the old colonial order?

From long before the arrival of Windrush in 1948, West Indian emigrants came from societies well advanced in the prerequisites of breaking from colonialism. They arrived with long memories, recalling events which, in the collective imagination of the British, had slipped into forgetfulness.° The typewritten novels and poems in their suitcases, their mimeographed manifestos, their music: all were testament to the depth of emergent anti-colonial sensibilities. Formally or informally, explicitly or implicitly, the case for West Indian independence (and, indeed, for federation) registered in the public culture of the metropolis.’ As they unpacked their bags, hawked their manuscripts around the little magazines of the capital, went on the stump agitating against injustices in far-off islands, they were improvising new lives for themselves, creating new possibilities for those whom they encountered, and decolonising the world about them.

Perhaps the prototype for such determinedly modern figures as these was John Jacob Thomas, who arrived in London from Trinidad in 1889, and who ensconced himself in rooms close by the British Museum in order that he could engage with the intellectual culture which had formed him.* His continuing renown derives from the fact that he took on the great imperial figure of J. A. Froude — disciple of Thomas Carlyle and regius professor of modern history at Oxford — and, with a relentless, lively irony, mashed him. In 1887 Froude had published The English in the West Indies. Thomas’s riposte, appearing two years later, took the memorable title Froudacity. West Indian fables by James Anthony Froude. This spirited rebuttal was the formative text of black West Indian intellectual self-determination. Its influence was profound. James, especially, loved the fact that Thomas, a barefoot, backwoods schoolteacher from his native Trinidad bettered his distinguished metropolitan opponent. It was exactly the kind of guerrilla movement, in the field of ideas, which was guaranteed to delight him.’ In 1968 it was a return to Thomas that prompted James’s own essay on ‘The West Indian intellectual’.

This work of John Jacob Thomas, the Trinidad schoolmaster, without European or university education of any kind, shows that the impact which the West Indian writers, our writers of fiction and the politicians and political writers of the day, have made upon the consciousness and civilisation of Western Europe and the United States, is the result not of the work of certain brilliant individual men, but is due in reality to our historical past, the situation in which our historical past has placed us. This historical situation has produced a particular type of social and intellectual activity which we can definitely call West Indian.!°

James’s recourse to history is emphatic. Only by knowing themselves as historical individuals (he argued) could West Indians come to terms with their predicament; and, conversely, later generations can only appreciate the power of West Indian thought by appreciating the degree to which it embodied this deeper movement of history. The significance of Thomas is that he was the first (in James’s eyes) to personify and express this history. This too carries James’s Hegelian cast of mind.

I have long believed that there is something in the West Indian past, something in the West Indian environment, something in the West Indian historical development, which compels the West Indian intellectual, when he gets involved with subjects of the kind, to deal with them from a fundamental point of view, to place ourselves in history.

James’s belief that West Indians ‘are a people more than any other people constructed by history’ may seem eccentric. But the premise on which it is based is not. Critically, for James, what made the Caribbean distinctive was not colonialism, but the fact that since the inauguration of the slave plantation West Indians were, above all else, a modern people. They lived in subjugation. But they experienced modernisation — in the Middle Passage and on the plantation — at its most dynamic, at its highest pitch and at its most brutal.'* This, according to James, instilled in Caribbean peoples a distinctive, immediate connection to the historical past.!%

To be conscious of history in this way was to confront memories of slavery and the continuing imperatives of race. These were not matters which in Britain, in the first half of the twentieth century, were easily recognised or speakable in public. Even in the colonial Caribbean, affiliation to the protocols of Britain made racial difference — despite the ubiquity of its ritualised exclusions — awkward to articulate. Nonetheless, the West Indian presence, after Thomas, created new possibilities within the metropolitan culture for these issues to be spoken.

James himself had arrived in Britain from Trinidad in 1932. We are fortunate in that he has left a remarkable account of his first impressions, in which he contemplated the unanticipated strangeness of the imperial centre.'* In Trinidad he had already authored an attack on what he perceived to be the moral and civic lapses of the colonial authorities, as well as some short fiction.'* He brought with him a manuscript novel.!° He had too some draft material on cricket and, more particularly, on Learie Constantine, who had been influential in persuading James to make the journey to Britain.!” In 1933 Leonard and Virginia Woolf abridged some of his earlier writings on colonialism, republishing them as The Case for West Indian Self-Government.'* To hold together these commitments to anti-colonial politics, to sport and to literature was unusual. But as James himself later indicated, their common inspiration lay in an elevated aesthetic and moral sensibility whose origins lay precisely in the codes of England in which he had been formed. As he looked back on these early years he remembered his arriving in England ready to ‘enter the arena where I was to play the role for which I had prepared myself. The British intellectual was going to Britain’.!? Even at this early stage, though, this was an idea of Britishness riven by ambivalence, in which his critique of colonialism was animated by the language of the colonial civilisation he was attacking. James never lost his regard for the culture of those whom he always believed to be the imperial oppressors. But over the next few years he gravitated to a firebrand variant of marxism, to Pan-Africanism, and to a much deeper understanding of what was required to break the power of colonial authority. In part, this shift in allegiance was abetted by his reacquaintance with his old childhood friend, George Padmore, who was instrumental in piecing together a new conception of anti-colonialism, in which the historical resources of blackness — as an active agent in the making of the modern world — were to be given an insurrectionary twist.” And in part as well, larger events in the colonial world took effect, heightening the tempo of anti-colonial sentiment, both in colony and metropolis.

The invasion of Abyssinia by Italy in October 1935 had an immediate, cataclysmic effect on black peoples throughout the Americas, and worked to reinspire and unify disparate strands of anti-colonialism, especially in the Caribbean. London, in its unofficial capacities, served as a principal source of communication for those in the West Indies eager to know, day by day and week by week, what was happening across the ocean. From their London base, James, Padmore and other West Indians of marxisant sympathies were tireless both in the cause of Abyssinia, and in imagining a revivified Pan-Africanism. Yet anger at the abandonment of Abyssinia by the democratic nations was not just the prerogative of militant marxists, however heterodox. It was above all a colonial issue — perhaps the colonial issue — and it entered the souls of all those who had been touched by colonial politics. Thus from a very different stance from James or Padmore, Una Marson — feminist, inheritor of a humanitarian ethics, committed to the founding principles of the League of Nations — gave herself unswervingly to the cause of Abyssinia.*! It ‘took over her life’, in the words of her biographer.”

Of yet greater significance were the riots and insurrections which swept through the Caribbean in 1937-38. In the recounting of the cumulative European catastrophe of these years, the devastation in the West Indies is sometimes accorded a footnote, or a sentence, in the established historiography. But this is to miss too much. The collapse of the Caribbean economies triggered an authentic imperial crisis. In the aftermath of the riots great volumes of official inquiry were produced. In page after page of steady prose the dead, wounded and indicted are calibrated; damage itemised (the number of shop-fronts smashed, of cars set ablaze in smart precincts, of potatoes pilfered from fields); and causes examined (Garveyism, gangster movies, Bolshevism, even chronic dispossession).”* Yet none of this dispassionate prose conveys the deeper sense that the colonial Caribbean had changed forever. Indeed the juridical or actuarial remit of the various commissions worked to conceal the greater truth: that the real casualty was not the consequence of this or that violation, but the edifice of empire itself. In this extraordinary drama, West Indian exiles in London once more played a decisive role. Through Padmore and his coterie information was co-ordinated and news circulated. Lobbying of sympathisers in Britain was incessant. New (if shaky) alliances were struck between seasoned agitators in London and an emergent new generation of labour leaders in the Caribbean. What drew them together was the crisis itself, in the common realisation that for too long Britain had abdicated its responsibilities in its West Indian colonies. New voices could be heard in the Caribbean, declaring that allegiance to the tenets of British civilisation could be maintained by West Indians without the services of the British themselves. From the late 1930s, the forces pressing for independence became a powerful, immovable political reality.

From our own vantage in time if we look again at the old images of West Indians arriving in Britain we can see many things. But insofar as the camera-eye saw only an immigrant, so the complex, embodied memories of these Caribbean pasts came to be effaced. Immigrants, it seemed, had no past, coming into life only at that moment when they entered the line of the vision of the native, ‘host’ population. And yet the great majority of those West Indians who arrived in Windrush and after would have witnessed, as adult or child, the crises of the 1930s, and experienced the aftermath. Many, indeed, made a conscious choice to escape from the situation of continuing economic collapse which the insurrections had done little to forestall. Few were intellectuals in the conventional sense, and fewer still thought in terms like Padmore, intent on breaking the power of empires. But this does not mean memories of these events, and of the longue durée of the Caribbean itself, were absent. The history which binds the insurrections of the 1930s to the emigrants of the 1940s or 1950s is a discontinuous history, not least due to the agency of those determined that they depart from their homeland. Even so, those who made this journey were not without history, nor ‘just’ immigrants. In their speech, in their dedication to a certain styling of the self, in their music — let alone in the more formal artefacts of their literary culture — they brought their history with them.**

This was a history composed not only by Pan-Africanism and by Abyssinia, and by the attendant politics. It carried much further, across many contrary dimensions of lived experience. Of all Britain’s non-white colonies, in terms of formal, official cultures the West Indian nations were closest to the mother country: in language, religion, schooling, literature, sport. Pride in these affinities to Britain ran deep, and affiliation to the British way of life, during the century from emancipation to the insurrections of the 1930s, was always of the first importance. But at every point these collective sentiments, for all their depth, vied with vernacular, blacker, more fluid cultures which constituted the traces — or more — of slavery, of other diasporas, and of a long history of racial mixing. (Or what Kamau Brathwaite, in Bakhtinian mode, designated ‘belly centred bawdy’.}*> The irresolvable, continuing and dynamic conflict between these symbolic and lived polarities lay close to the heart of the West Indian intellectual life for the entire period we discuss. As

James remembered this: ‘We lived in two worlds. Inside the classrooms the heterogeneous jumble of Trinidad was battered and jostled and shaken down into some sort of order’.”° The force of these contradictions unsettled every aspect of ‘the British way’ in its Caribbean transplantations. The institutions of British culture, irredeemably syncretic, could never boast that taken-for-granted quality that they possessed on their home ground. Even when working to their fullest authority and effect, at any instant they could be experienced as second-hand or inauthentic. In one of his fictional voices, V. S. Naipaul gives this a practical, semiotic reading: ‘I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers’.?’ In the movement from metropolis to colony, these signs, and the ideas they represented, systematically acquired new and unpredictable meanings. The complexities of this past made the reverse passage, from the Caribbean to Britain, a multi-layered phenomenon, which turned on the interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the homely and the unhomely. The final reckoning between imperial Britain and its West Indian colonies can, in the field of culture, be properly understood as overdetermined. In part this was due to the fact that the last phase of the encounter between West Indian and Briton took place not only in the colonial territories but also in the metropolis itself. And in part it was due, precisely, to the proximity of the respective official cultures.

For West Indians to ‘become’ postcolonial they were required to destroy the external authority of the British. But they also had to effect for themselves a separation from an interior culture constituted by the ideals of those whom they felt compelled to deem their enemies. These instances of a decolonising impetus moving from the imperial margins to the imperial centre represent only the most concrete dimension of the passage of intellectual cultures which concerns us. Of equal significance, for our purpose, is the encounter itself. From the 1940s an accumulation of individual experiences was worked into a collective story of mythic properties, whose familiar forms and repetitions we can still hear today. This represented the moment when the emigrant came face to face with the lived realities of the civilisation in whose name he or she had been educated into adulthood, as distant subjects of the Crown. As the literature confirms, this transformation released a whole array of perplexed, painful musings on the unhomeliness of the imagined homeland. This is not a matter of ‘ideas’, narrowly understood. It is more an issue of the lived encounter between two conceptions of reality, each at odds with the other. Time and again we hear the home civilisation of the British described by West Indians as being ‘unreal’, the immediacy of the encounter redoubling the already existing, anxious sensation of strangeness characteristic of colonial life. To be an immigrant, in this context, was to live up against a discrepant reality, in which dislocation between expectation and experience was fierce. At the outset this was puzzling, thence — progressively — menacing.

Many aspects of this encounter proved difficult to comprehend. There was no language to hand in which this simultaneous sensation of homeliness and unhomeliness could be conveyed, or in which to articulate the experiences of a culture in which contrary perceptions of reality coexisted. This was not a metaphysical problem, dreamt up by the philosophers. It was a daily experience, at bus stops, in shops, at work. Much could not be spoken, or could only be perceived in terms of individual pathology. Race was particularly resistant in this respect. Unspeakability continued to shadow the life of the immigrant.”®

And yet amongst the multitudes who made the journey to Britain there was a handful who had fled their home towns and villages with one driving purpose in mind: to become a writer. In the years after the second world war this seemingly personal, individual aspiration — to leave home and head for literary London — became a collective phenomenon. The emergence of the West Indian novel, as a form, coincides with the great migration of the 1940s and 1950s and, to a degree, was a consequence of it. The West Indian novel displayed a passionate concern for the West Indies — or more properly, perhaps, for the author’s respective island nation. Worrying away at the puzzle of Britain was something of an incidental theme: necessary, but not where the writers’ true energies lay. For our purposes, though, principally concerned as we are with Britain, this incidental theme offers a rich intellectual resource. The story of Caribbean peoples, as a modern people, has been one of movement. To narrate this story necessitates telling of many farflung destinations. Britain, in the postwar world, proved to be one such destination. A generation of writers faced the challenge of devising a language which could make sense of the dislocations and make speakable the unspeakable. Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners marks the comprehensive inauguration of this sub-genre of the West Indian novel, and in so doing, invented a new diasporic realism.”’

‘Poetry’, according to George Lamming, ‘is a way of listening.’*° The West Indian emigrants who travelled to the metropole — familiar strangers, simultaneously located inside and outside the cultural field-force of the imperial civilisation — listened to Britain. We can see an early instance in Lamming’s own novel, The Emigrants, published shortly after his arrival in 1954. He describes an imagined encounter between Collis, a Trinidadian student, and the Pearsons, a white, married, native couple, comfortably off, and inhabiting — one assumes — an anonymous pocket of the English suburbs. Collis is invited to lunch, and receives fastidious attention from his hosts. But from the outset two realities collide.

The room seemed a persistent rebuke to the rudimentary shelter which Collis had found at the hostel. It was not only a habitation, remote and warm as the womb. It was an entire climate. The conveniences were natural elements by which the life of the Pearsons was nourished. Mr Pearson did not sit in the chair. He belonged to it. When he left it to serve sherry, it was not only unoccupied. It became incomplete.

In this habitus, communication between Collis and the Pearsons was perpetually on the verge of collapse, vulnerable (in Collis’s mind) to invisible fluctuations in the atmosphere of the living room which he could barely sense. The hospitality of the hosts is measured out in unconscious rituals, which to the visitor appear merely bizarre. (He wants to watch television, which he had never seen; Pearson believes a tour of the garden more appropriate.) Intervention from outside disturbs these domestic rites. The phone rings. There has been ‘trouble’ at Pearson’s factory, and the malefactors (it seems) are West Indians. The atmosphere turns chilly, though courtesies are maintained. Collis retreats to the lavatory, where he sits smoking, periodically flushing the toilet. On his return, although the polite rituals continue as before, an air of menace has descended. Pearson ‘moved about you like the weather which you might avoid, but which would not be altered by the devices you had invented to protect yourself against it’. At the heart of this comfortable English domestic interior lies an unspoken sense of lives interrupted, of a culture which — inexplicably — is losing its authority and, ultimately, an apprehension that violence lies close by.*!

This represents a single, momentary micro-encounter, imagined by a writer of fiction. Its value as historical evidence needs to be seen within these limits. Yet even so, it’s clear that Lamming was attempting to find a way of putting these silences into words. Striking about these few pages is his reluctance to condemn outright the anxieties and prejudices of the English hosts. It’s not their opinions which are at issue, for these are only be surmised. It is rather the enclosed, unconscious apparatus in which their lives are set — the hospitality, the sherry, the garden, the naturalised assumption of rightful possession of the world about them — which constructs a sense of reality from which the unspeakabilities of race and apprehensions of violence ensue. This was not the sort of racism which stalked mean streets in the dead of night. It was, Lamming suggested, something more pervasive than that, operating deep in the collective imagination of the English.

Lamming’s reconstruction of this historic encounter between West Indian immigrant and indigenous whites was conducted in poetic vein. But it is plausible enough, and in its essentials can be confirmed by other kinds of contemporary testimony.* For all its poetry, it’s also representative. If this is so, there are consequences which bear directly on the defining theme of our volume.

It’s evident that Lamming’s attention was drawn to politics in its broadest configurations. Committed to independence and to West Indian federation, he possessed as well an acute knowledge that independence demanded more than the transfer of political power from London to the respective island capitals. If West Indians were not merely to achieve self-government, but to create new societies free from the legacies of colonial mentalities, they needed to renovate the civilisation in which they themselves had been formed.

Given conventional views of the time, in which culture led an autonomous life free from the profane exigencies of political strife, thinking of this kind marked a significant shift. It’s too simple, fifty years on, to suppose that such insights have always been with us. In the epoch of decolonisation a generation of West Indians found themselves wrestling with the ‘deep’ — symbolic and cognitive — systems of England. This comprised coming to terms with the formal curriculum of the metropolitan culture, internalised through the institutions of colonial schooling, and manifest in Britain in a powerful national literary imagination, in an ever-present written and remembered historical record, and in an array of prestigious institutions of learning and letters. At the same time it also meant coming to terms with the lived, everyday culture of the metropolis, in its many variations, at street corners and in shops, in schools and sports grounds, in churches, or when invited for a glass of sherry and a stroll around an Englishman’s garden. It was as much in the social relations of this latter world (Lamming implies}, even when at its most benign, that the silent authority of colonial mentalities continued to be reproduced.