Resistance, Oil, and Awakening: Textual Responses to the Butler Strike and Its Aftermath

The 1937 Trinidad oil field labor uprising, commonly known as the Butler Strike, has come to be seen as a watershed moment in the nation’s history by the various poets and prose writers, indigenous and exogenous, who have sought to represent and define Trinidad as a place. Collectively, they present a broad conceptual range of Uriah Butlers (the strike’s leader or figurehead), as well as the events associated with his name. Their individual articulations of the Butler strike are conditioned by their overriding aesthetic projects, genres of choice, political ideologies, and subject positions. This paper argues that while there is no definitive textual Butler Strike, the ways that the strike and its major players are represented keenly evince authors’ ideas regarding Trinidad’s emerging postcolonial identity, Négritude/black power, and the confluences of class, racial, and anti-colonial struggle. From C.L.R. James’ would-be proletariat hero hampered by religious zealotry to Eric Roach’s Toussaint l’Ouverture manqué and V.S. Naipaul’s racial fanatic adrift in large historical currents he cannot successfully navigate or comprehend, Butler and the struggle he embodies are enduring subjects through which authors seek to comprehend in historical and cultural terms the complexities and contradictions of late colonial and early postcolonial Trinidad.