THE RENOWNED Barbados-born Caribbean novelist and social commentator, George Lamming, has sounded a warning against ‘political amnesia’ of convenience as they relate to the slaughter of thousands of Haitians, and also the assassination of the famous Guyanese historian, Walter Rodney. Lamming’s warning came in his closing statement at the just-concluded Bocas Literary Festival 2012 in Trinidad and Tobago, as chairman of the panel of judges for the event at which the Trinidadian novelist, Earl Lovelace, won the first prize in the literary award for his book “Is Just a Movie”.
Noting that this year’s festival revealed a “remarkable display of organization”, Lamming said writers can creatively draw on the work of other writers. In this context he pointed to the Puerto Rican Loretta Collins-Klobah’s “brilliant collection of poems, “The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman”, that refers to her Haitian neighbour, Edwidge Danticat’s story of the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
In Danticat’s story, she said, “Haitian women needed to remember that baptism of blood their mothers received in the massacre at the river” on the order of the then dictator, President Rafael Trujillo, in his crusade to expel all Haitians, including those who were born there.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island whose border is the river that now painfully carries the name “Massacre”. And, as Lamming reminded his audience of intellectuals, writers and artists, and others who had participated in the Bocas Literary Festival:
“One of the grimmest chapters in our Caribbean history is (now) received in absolute silence in the curricula of most Caribbean schools. It’s as though”, he declared, “there was a desire to institutionalize this amnesia with a passing nod of apology…”
Walter Rodney
Recognised as perhaps the foremost political novelist of the English-speaking Caribbean, Lamming recalled that “a similar erasure (of the memory) helps to obscure the assassination of Walter Rodney, a superb scholar whose academic authority was always humanised by his personal involvement in the daily struggle of the humblest citizens, a commitment which cost him his life on June 13, 1980….
“Today”, Lamming added, “just 30 odd years later, there is a generation of Guyanese youth who do not know that name…”
And reflecting on Edwige Danticat’s story of the 1937 slaughter of 30,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Lamming quoted a familiar line: “They admitted how little they knew; though living just next door, as islands go…”
These lines, he stressed, “are a sharp reminder that we are a people who do not know the house we live in. We are familiar with the room we inhabit….the room Trinidad and Tobago; the room Jamaica; the room Barbados; or the large room Guyana. But we do not know how these rooms relate to each other…
“Nor do we understand”, he lamented, “how this collectivity of rooms defines the house we call the Caribbean—a region which is now in its deepest crisis of fragmentation”.
Lamming then appealed to his audience at that closing session of the Bocas Literary Festival—originally established by ‘One Caribbean Media (OCM)—to reflect on the generations of intellect and imagination (Jose Marti, Aime Cesaire, CLR James) who have invested, each in a lifetime, in this enterprise of our generation, and leave here with the conviction that it will not be allowed to fail”.
On May 19, Lamming is scheduled to speak in St Maarten on “Walter Rodney and the Concept of Labour” at the invitation of the “House of Nehesi Publishers”.
The event has been organised to coincide with the 70th birth anniversary of the famed Third World historian who was killed by an assassin’s bomb at the height of political unrest in Guyana against the then People’s National Congress regime of the now late President Forbes Burnham.
The PNC is currently the dominant party in the parliamentary opposition, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), which includes the Working People’s Alliance. Rodney was quite instrumental in the formation of this party.