Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical's Story (review)

Writing about the life of someone recently deceased is only slightly less challenging than writing about someone still living. In the former case, the subject can still cast a shadow that threatens the scholar's ability to shed light. Add to this the sense of deeply-felt loss on the part of the writer who thoroughly admired his subject, and achieving a full and proper "warts and all" portrait becomes trickier still. As if this were not daunting enough, by definition a lately-deceased subject inhabits a history so recent it might be better labeled journalism, confounding the quest for historical perspective, even—or perhaps especially—in regions like the Caribbean where history hangs heavily on the present-day.

Paul Buhle's biographical tribute to Antiguan intellectual and radical Tim Hector courts all of these dangers, and while making a contribution of some note, evades none of them fully. Hector, who passed away in 2002, was a major if often overlooked member of the post-independence generation of West Indian intellectuals and leaders that included Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop. Buhle came to his study via his immersion in the life and ideas of the giant of Caribbean letters, C.L.R. James, whose protégé Hector was. In studying the mentor, Buhle became friend and comrade to the apprentice. Indeed, long stretches of the book read more like a study of James than of Hector—and the tone in both cases is often more eulogy than biography.

Within the eulogy, however, there is elegy, both in the bittersweet arc of Hector's career and of the visions it was spent pursuing. In this, Buhle captures two central aspects of what might be called the Caribbean dilemma. The first is the range of difficulties facing small, often-isolated islands in a big and globalizing world. The second, as scholars of the region have long noted, is the raw irony of the Caribbean's role: as a kind of historical template for that very globalization that now threatens to leave it behind. Buhle contends that James and Hector, through their ever more nuanced refinements of socialism and Pan-Africanism, possessed a vision of regional unity and societal reorganization that might have overcome these obstacles. The book thus offers an inadvertent reminder of the ghost that haunts Caribbean discourse to this day: the failure of the postwar regional Federation, the one scheme of "unity and reorganization" that had arguably the greatest chances of success. The reader surmises that Buhle would disagree about the Federation; the James-and-Hector presented here were figures whose vision might have led the Caribbean to a different destiny. Buhle credits Hector with staying home in Antigua to fight rather than waging the battle from abroad, though he treats Hector's assessment of the Caribbean conundrum in a strikingly uncritical manner. It is true that Hector's and like-minded prescriptions were, in the event, given little chance to succeed. But it is also true that those that have been enacted, in Cuba or Venezuela for example, have yet to prove their long-term sustainability. Buhle nonetheless demonstrates the same faith in such projects that his subject did. In so doing, he perhaps offers another echo of the way in which Hector's Caribbean was, in Buhle's moving chapter title, "beyond tragedy."

Buhle's tribute to Hector is thin on original primary research, beset by the occasional but striking factual error, made slippery by definitional imprecision, and possessed of a tendency to meander. As a result it reads disjointedly, though in its weaving course it does offer some useful vignettes and telling anecdotes. Specialists will likely learn little new. However, they and non-specialist readers alike will appreciate the book's purpose—to present "the political and cultural world of the Caribbean and beyond through Tim Hector's eyes" (p. 21)—and will appreciate the sound job Buhle does in recovering Hector, one of...