“To be Liberated from the Obscurity of Themselves”: An Interview with Rex Nettleford

West Indian history is a modern thing and tradition is something we have to foster and create and its development is a deliberate act of intelligence.

—Norman Washington Manley, 1958

Preface

To have a "sense of reality" in one's description or analysis or appreciation—or indeed, in one's judgment—of human action in history, the late Isaiah Berlin urged, is to display in one's mode of comprehension a particular capacity for imaginative understanding, a particular capacity for grasping the textured and tangled, the distinctive and unrepeatable, in human affairs. Such a sense of reality, Berlin argued, stood out in contrast to the variety of metaphysical determinisms in which—and by means of which—human action in history was derived from and made to conform to an immutable "logic" or "system," one that required only the discovery of some infallible key the application of which would finally and forever rescue humankind from the misery of injustice and want, and ignorance and folly. Opposed to this determinism, Berlin's sense of reality constituted a mode of thinking that honored the irreducible complexity and unforeseeable contingency and inescapable imperfection of human action—great and small—in history.¹

This view of Berlin's—of the texture and indeterminacy and fallibility of human being—was of course connected to a larger and properly moral conception of human action in history, namely pluralism, or more specifically, value-pluralism. "Out of the crooked timber of humanity," Berlin was fond of quoting Kant as saying, "nothing straight was ever made."² And indeed, for Berlin, human life was constituted by a diversity of colliding ends or values, many of which were not harmonizable or combinable, or even reconcilable with each other, and whose satisfaction in consequence entailed the loss of other equally important, equally held ends or values. One simply can't have everything; finalement, il faut choisir. And therefore, the utopian idea of a world in which all the Great Goods are brought into perfect alignment was not merely unattainable but incoherent; and to hold it as the guiding doctrine of one's moral and political behavior was to court inhumanity and barbarism. For Berlin, moral and political questions could not be resolved in advance by the application of abstract formulae, however noble or benevolent their intent, but could only be approached through the laborious work of ongoing compromise, provisional settlements, temporary trade-offs, and above all, a commitment to the avoidance of extremes of human suffering.

There is, I believe, a significant line of connection between these central views of Isaiah Berlin's—this sensibility toward the texture of human complexity and the unavoidable moral conundrums stemming from the diversity of human ends—and those ideas Rex Nettleford has been advancing and commending over more than four decades of an engaged intellectual-artistic life. Because it seems to me that one way of reading the span of his work—in cultural history, in cultural performance, and not least, in cultural policy—is through its commitment to a humane and textured pluralism, a pluralism open to the "agony of choice" entailed by the fact of inextinguishable difference. Of course, the connection to Berlin is hardly surprising since after all Nettleford was his student in Oxford in the 1950s (he was there in the audience at the Schools Building on 31 October 1958, when Berlin delivered his famous inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty"). Still, the connection I perceive is scarcely a merely pedagogically derivative one. Its sources and idioms and affiliations and occasions owe as much to an altogether different background and milieu of wrongs and harms than those that inform and shape Berlin's distinctive teaching.

Nettleford's attitude toward pluralism is cultivated in the cultural-historical context of Caribbean diversity, and the traditions of theorization of that diversity (no serious reader can miss the traces in his thinking of...