Part II

Herbert G. De Lisser -- Born 1878 in Jamaica. Died 1944. Publications included Jane's Career: A Story of Jamaica (1914), Susan Proudleigh (1915), Triumphant Squalitone (1917), Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica (1919), The White Witch of Rosehall (1929; 1960) Under the Sun (1937), Psyche (1952), Morgan's Daughter (1953), The Cup and the Lip (1956), and The Arawak Girl (1958).

H.G. de Lisser was a prominent figure in Jamaican society. Working upward from relative poverty he became editor of the Jamaica Daily Gleaner -- a post held for forty years. His series of novels reveal a knowledge of West Indian history and understanding of Jamaican dialect.

The White Witch of Rosehall sets on a slave plantation in the early nineteenth century. The owner Annie Palmer is an Irish woman who used to live in Haiti, a mysterious island.

From England Robert Rutherford comes to Jamaica to be a book-keeper at Rosehall. He is sought after by both Annie Palmer and Millie, a free native. Annie uses witchcraft and casts a spell on Millie, which leads Takoo, a Guinea man and Millie's grandfather, to intervene.

Takoo's magi fails and Millie dies. Rutherford realizes Annie is a ruthless woman and is about to expose her when an insurrection breaks out. The Europeans put down the rebellion but Takoo strangled Annie Palmer. Rutherford is sickened by Jamaica and returns to England.

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 Banana Bottom is also a "protest  against the insensitive imposition of European values on West Indians."

McKay was a great contrast to de Lisser: he was black and poor and he was forced to leave Jamaica in order to seek a living.

In  Banana Bottom, the heroine is Bita Plant, a black West Indian. Brought up by missionaries Reverend Malcolm Craig and his wife Priscilla, Bita is sent at their expense to an English university, a continental tour included. Bit becomes a disappointment as a religious experiment: she does not return to Jamaica and marry the local pompous Herald Newton Day, the promising student at the Tabernacle Theological College.

Instead, Bita trips herself of the acquired European polish which she finds "unnatural and irrelevant in a west Indian context. Ritually, she destroys the photographs of her university and "marries the good and strong workman Jubban." Banana Bottom provides a "vivid picture of Jamaican life in the 1890s." The "honest values and a spontaneous openness to experience," characteristics of a true Jamaica, make Bita's "rejection of European fastidiousness and inhibition a credible act of emancipation."

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Cyril Lionel Robert James -- Born in 1901 in Trinidad. Died 1989 in south London (Brixton). Educated Queen's Royal College, Trinidad. Publications included The Life of Captain Cipriani (1933), The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933), Minty Allen (a novel, 1936), World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937), A History of Negro Revolt (1938), The Black Jacobins: A Study of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; 1963), Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), Party Politics in the West Indies (1962), and Beyond a Boundary (1963).

In McKay's Banana Bottom the author's awareness of Europe leads to the assertion against it of a vital and spontaneous local culture: in "La Divina Pastora," a short story by the Trinidadian C.L.R. James, it is as if the author is unaware of Europe. The story is set in Trinidad and is based upon a local custom. The author takes up the stance of neutral narrator of an extraordinary tale. Already in 1928 in this story by James, as in his novel Minty Allen published in 1936, James introduces the "unselfconscious . . . local life in West Indian narrative."

A History of Pan-African Revolt (1995)  / Facing-Reality  (2006)  /  C.L.R. James on the Negro Question  (1996)  /

Marxism-Our-Times-Revolutionary-Organization   (1999)  /  State Capitalism & World Revolution   (1986)  / 

 Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution  (1978)  /  A Majestic Innings: Writings on Cricket  (2006)

C.L.R.James: A Life (2001)  /  Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James: Theory and Practice (2006)  /

Special Delivery: The Letters of C. L. R. James to Constance Webb, 1939-1948  (2007)

Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity (2007)

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Source: Kenneth Ramchand, West Indian Narrative: An Introductory Anthology. London, 1966

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Audio: My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)

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Ghosts in Our Blood With Malcolm X in Africa, England, and the Caribbean By Jan R. Carew Carew, an activist, scholar, and journalist, met Malcolm X during his last trip abroad only a few weeks before he was killed in 1965. It made such an impression on Carew that he felt compelled to search out Malcolm's family and friends in order to flesh out the family history. He interviewed Wilfred (Malcolm's older brother) and a Grenadian friend of Malcolm's mother named Tanta Bess. Comparing his family's experiences with that of Malcolm X, he gives the most complete picture yet of Malcolm's mother. Carew also offers a tantalizing glimpse of Malcolm X's transforming himself into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a man less blinded by his own racial prejudices yet as committed to the betterment of his race as ever. Just before his death, Malcolm X became convinced that a U.S. agency was involved with those trying to kill him, and Carew here reveals the evidence Malcolm X gave him to support these beliefs. The mystery of Malcolm's death remains unresolved, and we are once again filled with regret that he was cut down before he could fulfill the promise of his later days. While this book will not replace The Autobiography of Malcolm X (LJ 1/1/66), it is an important supplement. All libraries that own the autobiography should also purchase this one.—Library Journal

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The Flowering Rock Collected Poems, 1938-1974 By Eric Merton Roach This collection brings together for the first time the work of one of the Caribbean's major poets. It collects the poems published in journals between 1938-1973, Roach's early pseudonymous work and a substantial selection of his unpublished poems from manuscript. The collection is edited and introduced by Professor Kenneth Ramchand.—Publisher, Peepal Tree Press, 1992 This is an extremely important book. Before its appearance no literary historian or critic, let alone lover of poetry, will have been able to measure the full richness of West Indian poetic creation. One always suspected that Eric Roach was one of the major West Indian poets. This book consolidates his name in a pantheon which includes at least Claude McKay, Derek Walcott, Louise Bennett, Martin Carter and Kamau Brathwaite.

I think what I respond to most is Roach's passion for the land and the people, both of which are so clearly and categorically West Indian. The intense feeling that informs his best poetry - and so much of the poetry is good—expresses a very specific yearning for a shared identity which will leap over island isolation and bind together our fragmented historical consciousness into a coherent whole.—Ian McDonald

The most splendid voice of the Caribbean Renaissance (1948-1972) . . . precious confounded Yeatsian & still utterly Caribbean statements.

—Kamau Brathwaite

This first publication of Roach’s poetic corpus is quite simply a major literary event.— Laurence Breiner

 

Source: Peepal Tree Press

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Black Yeats Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry By Laurence A. Breiner In this impressive and much-needed book, Laurence Breiner sets out to present a study of Eric Roach “as a publishing poet . . . concentrating on how Roach in fact presented himself—or found himself presented—before the world of his contemporaries.” This means that while the work of Roach the Tobagonian playwright, fiction writer, and journalist exists as a sort of sunk context surrounding or permeating much within the scope of Breiner’s consideration, by the time page 279 (or page 297, for those who read endnotes) is reached, Roach stands forth from the crowd of named and unnamed tragic Caribbean figures who have pre-empted their natural time, forcing the sea to swallow them up (his suicide was in 1974)—to be known as himself, as much more than the author of the occasional anthologised federationist verse or the “hurt hawk” subject of posthumous tributes . . .

It is through his literary skill as writer and reader, working with his historical knowledge, that Breiner establishes his interpretations of Roach’s evolving sense of self as a federationist poet, and the tragedy of this rural Tobagonian whose voice did not find itself heard in time for the times according to which it launched song and endeavoured speech.—Vahni Capildeo, Caribbean Review of Books

Laurence A. Breiner is the author of An Introduction to West Indian Poetry and a member of the African-American studies faculty at Boston University, where he teaches Caribbean, postcolonial, and 17th-century literatures. He lives in Boston.

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  /  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  /  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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