Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics

2. The Utopic Popular: Trinidad's Carnival

2 . T H E U T O P I C P O P U L A R Trinidad’s Carnival . . . to go downhill From here was to ascend. —Derek Walcott, “Laventille,” Collected Poems Like the withheld kiss, C. L. R. James’s triumphs are small gestures of the performative—those of the “›ea whose itch . . . make[s] all Power wince,” as Derek Walcott brilliantly puts it in “The Spoiler’s Return.”1 James was thoroughly captivated by the uniqueness and mastery of Caribbean style. His constant veneration of the historic specialness of Caribbean identity made him, even as an old man witnessing the corrosion of the postcolonial promise he had helped frame, praise even the smallest of West Indian gesture simply because it was West Indian. Nothing appeared to escape the catholicity of this vision, one that could embrace the revolutionary George Padmore as easily as it could the Thatcherite author V. S. Naipaul. At the end of his life, living largely off the generosity of friends (many of them women admirers), James himself was all style. Those who met him in his last days in London, handsome and well kept despite the physical in‹rmity of age, still brimming with the intelligence and con‹dence that made him spar, as a young, unknown black colonial, with the venerated Bloomsbury cultural dowager Edith Sitwell.2 James was always a man of energy and talk. One has to have a sense of him in the ›esh to appreciate how his sheer display of elegance and intellect could charm even his most recalcitrant observer. V. S. Naipaul’s thinly disguised portrait of the aged “Lebrun,” a “Trinidadian -Panamanian communist of the 1930s,” is all James. He was born to talk. It was as though everything he saw and thought and read was automatically processed into talk material. 71 And it was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked of music and the in›uence on composers of the instruments of their time. He talked about military matters. I had met no one like that from our region, no one who had given so much time to reading and thought, no one who had organized so much information in this appetizing way. I thought his political reputation simpli‹ed the man. And his language was extraordinary. What I had noticed in Woodford Square was still there: his spoken sentences, however involved, were complete: they could have been taken down and sent to the printers. I thought his spoken language was like Ruskin’s on the printed page, in its ›uency and elaborateness, the words wonderfully chosen , often unexpected, bubbling up from some ever-running spring of sensibility. The thought-connections—as with Ruskin—were not always clear; but you assumed they were there. As with the poetry of Blake (or, within a smaller compass, Auden), you held on, believing there was a worked-out argument. It was rhetoric, of course. And, of course, it was loaded in his favour.3 Naipaul’s prose shows the extent to which intellectual disagreement and ideological difference is so easily blunted by the sheer weight of James’s historical presence. James was old and in‹rm in London, a national hero who had no nation, an anticolonial intellectual whose old-world rhetorical styles and narrative languages showed his indebtedness to the very colonial icons he had spent his life critiquing, an eminent West Indian with no audience to venerate him. To a large degree, the complex allegiances of Naipaul’s passage characterize James as something of a historical conundrum. However shaped by his Victorian and Romantic antecedents, he was no mimic man: James was the product of a rare and remarkable meeting of Europe and Africa; he was his own best example of what was exemplary about the Caribbean product. It is not with malice that Naipaul counted James among the “shipwrecked”: “He belonged to the ‹rst generation of educated black men in the region. For a number of them—men as old as the century—there was no honourable place at home in their colony or in the big countries. They were the inbetween people, too early, without status; they tried to make their way” (116). If there is a sense of tragedy’s air surrounding James’s 72 CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS last days in a small Brixton apartment, its melancholy is contained by the sheer extravagance of his performance: James was the ignored hero...