By LLOYD BEST
The following review of the Montreal Black Writers’ Congress of October 1968 was published as Tapia Booklet No. 11
ONE imagines that the poet was speaking for all men when he wrote that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. There was nothing at the Black Writers’ conference to suggest that even the most militant blacks would dissent. Whatever the colour of its preoccupations, it is certain that the conference will be long remembered for the elegant expositions offered by C.L.R. James and the oratory of another well-known Trinidadian overseas, Stokeley Carmichael.
James was his usual self: magisterial, incisive and lucid without ever being systematic. He spread his wings here, there and everywhere, resting at whatever time or place in history suited his purpose. Unbound by discipline and uncommitted to action in any specific arena, he ranged from Aeschylus to Fanon, from Toussaint to Castro, from Robespierre to Lenin.
But always the fluency of exposition and the command of word endowed his presentation with a poetic logic that transcended all mundane inaccuracies of fact, inconsistencies of reasoning and innocence of practical constraints. Such is the power of beauty.
After a weekend of frustrations and an engaging overture on the Monday morning by the poet, Ted Jones, the athlete, Harry Edwards of the Panthers, and James Foreman of SNCC Stokeley was the last speaker to come on stage.
He occupied it as if it were indeed, a stage. He acted out a role of leader-man come to the royal city with glad tidings; black is beautiful, black is beautiful. Employing geste and voice and timing to enchant us, he turned our tension on and off at will. It was sheer theatre and larger than life.
Those whom he failed to hypnotise might have felt that he recounted the facts with a little too much of the poet’s licence, that he contradicted himself too often to be persuasive, and that he was too unmindful of the moral ambiguities of revolutionary change to be trusted.
Yet one doubts that there was any whom he left so detached and indifferent to his cause. Not even the distortion of fact and oversimplicity of formulation could impair the moral cogency and force of the statement - a coherence and power derived from the harsh facts of black degradation in North America and the imperatives of revival among an entire people.
We laughed with Stokeley, and sighed with him. Some no doubt, even wept. We accepted that for the black minority fighting a rearguard action in North America it is wholly reasonable to divide the world into two simple categories of black and white. We agreed to forget Nigeria and Biafra, to ignore Tshombe and Lumumba.
As a first pledge against “the system” we took it that American capitalism had to be replaced by socialism. For in the context of the struggle for human rights in the United States, we knew very well that these raw formulations were hardly more than an initial redefinition of perspective.
On that continent the blacks have never had power and it is going to be some time before they get it. Oversimplification which would be unspeakably irresponsible if they had had power is, in these circumstances, just the opposite. They provide the clearest possible guidelines for a people to prepare themselves for full responsibility.
For a beginning it is important that they should define the world as it suits them, that they should be bold enough to contemplate ultimate solutions against the odds, and that they should be totally unconfused about where to draw the lines of solidarity.
As we left, elated, with Stokeley’s exhortations ringing in our ears, we knew that we had witnessed a performance which had been witty and graceful, elegant in its directness, simplicity and force; one which had been beautiful in its authenticity, a genuine reflection of both the psychological confusion and the moral resurgence which are apparent among the blacks of North America today.
Yet some of us had to reflect beyond the immediate needs and the narrow concerns of the blacks in the United States. One of the gravest risks of movements for radical change is that they tend to take too short a view.
A related problem is that the needs of blacks in the rest of the world may be subordinated to those of blacks in the American metropole. Paris tends always to dominate the provinces, as it were. It will be a very fine irony if the imperial pattern re-asserts itself in the form of a domination of blacks in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa by the interests of Negro North America.
The symbols and preoccupations of the civil rights movement in the U.S.A. may well take on a spurious universalism of the kind which led Marxism outside of Western Europe to ride rough-shod over local sentiment, to ignore local possibilities and local limitations, and in the end to inhibit rather than to promote radical reform.
In the Caribbean, for example, there is already much loose talk about black power when clearly there can be no simple division between black and white, where it makes little sense to advocate organised violence or even to provoke confrontation with the police.
The blacks already are in control of the political system in the Caribbean. If anything prevents them from creating an economy appropriate to their own needs, it is the state of their own consciousness. In particular, they overestimate the ability of the Americans to thwart popularly-supported programmes of radical reform.
The African problem is something else again. To be sure, societies on that continent have all been dislocated by colonialism and their elites are as mesmerised by the technological achievements of the West as are elites. anywhere else.
But among Africans black power is no rallying call. Blacks already control the polity and most of the economy; it is the blacks who define what is legitimate in their-culture.
In so far as they appear to be dominated by Europe and North America, it is not a problem which can be solved by any transfer of power. It is a problem of the mind, a reflection of a complex psychological relationship between the colonised and the colonising cultures.
To identify a solid basis of international solidarity between blacks then, what is needed is a more precise marking out of the common ground which underlies the concept of black power. Here, we have first to acknowledge that there are many differences in situations even after much shared experience in relation to the coloniser.
We may then find the lowest common denominator in the self view and the world-view that we all have. Have we not accepted interpretations of the world which regard the European as the subject of history and us as the object?
It is on this point that one expected a real contribution from the non-North American participants at the conference. Presumably they were sufficiently outside the swell of the American movement to be able to afford the detachment required to cope with the larger issues in a longer and more reflective perspective.
In his paper on “African History in the Service of Black Revolution” Dr. Walter Rodney identified the problem posed by “the use of historical knowledge as a weapon in our struggle”. But when he suggested that the re-interpretation of history “must be directed solely- towards freeing and mobilising black minds” he seemed to be adopting the very attitude he intended to deplore.
Is it not a capitulation to the false standards set by some of European thought to place human history in the service of a single group in the quest for power? Might not this approach blind us to the whole picture and to the virtues of other men by encouraging the use of phony two-sector models of Cowboys and Indians, of developed guys and under-developed guys?
But by what stretch of the imagination is it valid to lump the many varied cultures of Africa into a single class? - unless it be to provide a rationalisation of rapine and plunder throughout the continent.
Why, moreover, is a man whose mother is from Europe and father from Africa, a black man? - except that the simple definition is convenient for one fascist oligarchy just as the simple definition of him as a white man could become a convenient designation for another.
An authentic decolonisation of the mind points first to a disavowal of these crude formulations and of any notion that minds are something to be mobilised. The constructive attack we are to make on the European philosophical hegemony is by proceeding to differentiations which acknowledge the individuality of particular men and particular cultures.
Simple groups such as the “Third World” and the “Developing Countries” and all those other categories which are scarcely more than divisions of the world into we and they have to be abandoned from the very start.
C.L.R. James had a feel for this important point, as for so many others. He put it to the conference that what we require is a philosophical revolution. He noted that the limitations of the Cartesian statement had been systematically removed by the later work of Newton and Leibnitz in particular. But that it remained for Hegel and Marx to add the dimension of conflict within society to the traditional emphasis on the antagonisms between man and society on the one hand, and God and nature, on the other.
James then intimated that somehow the existentialist philosophers and the anthropologists of our own age seem to be once again broadening the scope and the relevance of philosophical enquiry.
But then he lost the direction of his argument. He went off on a tangent to show that, quite incidentally to his probings of the European mind, Levi-Strauss had challenged the still prevalent conception of Africa as a dark continent with little or no history of high civilisation.
The point to which James seemed to be leading however, is that existentialist philosophy, whatever its aberrations, has placed the focus squarely on individuality while modem anthropology has been insisting on the comparative study of societies and cultures each in its own terms. In both areas the trend has been against subordination of the individual to the group and towards a view of people as subjects of history and not as objects.
These are the premises from which the re-interpretation of history must now be undertaken. It is therefore a pity that at the conference itself this approach was almost totally rejected. Speakers such as the Jamaicans, Robert Hill and Richard Small, confined themselves to the kind of propaganda which we have come to expect from that breed of West Indian who substitutes rhetoric on the metropolitan stage for concrete commitment to some place for which he ought to assume responsibility.
Even James in his analysis of the economics of Negro slavery and of black revolt in the New World failed to avoid certain propagandist confusions. For example, he conducted discussion of slavery in ancient Greece without ever pointing out that it was altogether a different phenomenon from slavery in the New World. What is more, he seemed unduly anxious to prove that the blacks “brought something with them” into American slavery.
This defensive approach may be excusable when adopted by that inter-war generation which was so militantly represented at the conference by Richard Moore. But it is warranted only if one yields to the ludicrous notion that the Europeans alone brought significant cultural assets to the New World.
lt is a truism that the blacks brought their philosophical heritage and their social and technical skills with them. The question, as Freyre has long since posed it in Masters and Slaves, is: What blacks actually came? With what particular cultural traits? And, in the clash of cultures, what were the adaptations which have led us to the present situation?
Much work towards the answer to these questions has already been done and is being carried on by an expanded number of younger scholars. In spite of his glorification of “action”, Dr. Rodney’s paper showed the value of specific research. He offered a quick overview of the little-known attributes of the highly organised and exceedingly humane cultures of traditional society in different regions of Africa.
Once this re-interpretation of the past is pursued in terms of people as subjects of history, it will readily be seen why the notion of “Africa” must be refined out of existence; and why, by the same token, the construct of “Europe” must be modified. The distinctions within these groupings are so important and the relationships between the two so utterly entangled that the dichotomy is misleading. We have, one fears, to take our stand on a large patch of mixed greys.
Moreover, the shift in consciousness has to take place both among those who have profited from the old formulations and those who have suffered from them. Certainly, the Europeans need to appreciate how fanatical they have been in their deprecation of other cultures and in their comparatively uncritical adulation of ancient Greece and Rome.
But the other cultures need also to put themselves in the existential position of Europe, and to concede that even if such an interpretation of history is not excusable, it is at least comprehensible in the context of the medieval experience and the subsequent crusade against Islam.
One suspects that there are lessons here for both the metropolitan countries and the Third World. And if we have here reverted to the simple two-sector division of the world, it is a way of recognising that important though it may be to deny the usefulness of the classification for some purposes, for others it is more beautiful than valid.
