MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 14 March 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Michael Norman Manley, son of Norman Washington Manley, a father who could arguably be acclaimed the father of West Indian nationalism was without doubt, a world historical figure of his time. Among Caribbean figures Michael Manley ranks only with Fidel Castro, and among world figures of his time, only Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and perhaps the late chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt, can be mentioned in the same breath.
To put it more simply, no group of three eminent persons to look into any of the world’s major problems could easily have been selected without the name of Michael Manley being mentioned. Few Caribbean personages, if any, have achieved any such stature in the region, let alone in the global village.
But I want to posit that Michael Manley, growing up the son of Norman, the great barrister and statesman, and Edna, the sculptor and artist, easily one of the most distinguished couples in Caribbean life, is an astonishing person. Michael Norman Manley had the courage in politics to commit class suicide and be born again to become what all concede: the foremost apostle for social justice in his time and space.
Permit me to hesitate or tarry for a moment. Michael Manley carried the weight of a famous father on his shoulder, in his own Calvary.
As a swimmer and athlete at school, Manley it was said “was terribly nervous.” Michael himself said “Every time it was me on the line, I became so obsessed ... That I might fail and they would laugh at me, and say your father was never a failure.”
Even more painfully Manley related this:
“Dad’s thing was so legendary, you just couldn’t move anywhere at Jamaica College – bowling average, three years; scored the most goals in soccer, three years; champion athlete; vice-captain rifle shooting team. Everywhere you turned you saw his picture. It was just too much for Doug and myself.”
But there were two unusual compensations. Michael spent his youth at Drumblair “a rambling, deep verandahed house, sat among wide, tree-studded lawns and stands of high grass.” T.A. Marryshow the very fine Grenadian and West Indian leader noted that Drumblair “was comfortable, but by no means ostentatious” and quite free of the conspicuous consumption which characterises Caribbean wealth.
There were at Drumblair, the house of Michael Manley’s youth said Marryshow “just a few bits of furniture in good taste, not costly divans, Persian carpets and such things” Marryshow concluded that there was “character pervading the home.”
There were other compensations which shaped this most astonishing English-speaking Caribbean citizen and citizen of the world, Michael Manley. At age 11 he remembered being in his mother’s studio, observing her:
“with ferocious concentration, hour after hour, chipping away and the excitement of the chips. I can remember the chips rising, rising, and this is a very, just early, almost visual, sensual, tactile memory – and you’d watch the thing go on for hours. I remember her face utterly intent, this obsessed thing that an artist gets when they’re working, where they are totally unconscious of everything else.”
Manley was not to learn of art. He was weaned on it and initiated into an artistic life. His own life became a work of art, carefully chiselled, that you could see the chips rising and rising.
As a fifteen year old Michael Manley tried his hand at poetry, and wrote a poem, on November 24, 1940 which he entitled Poem, in imitation of Shelly, I think, and one stanza of Michael Manley’s Poem reads like this:
|
And as I dreamt these dreams |
He was certain he had a destiny, manifest or otherwise, but one which required not ease, but courage for the future, no doubt in pursuit of strenuous liberty.
I often reject the pseudo-psychology, which is the modern American religion, and in which every modern biography wallows. Wash and be dirty. But I happen to think that Manley’s rebellion against the Jamaican order and the World Order he found began very early, at school, in Jamaica. Manley hated the Boarding School he attended, the school of privilege. Both the ‘privilege’ and the ‘bullying’ that went with it, Manley rejected absolutely. Space does not allow for elaboration, but his rejection is among the finest things you can read, recalling James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young man, but thoroughly Caribbean. Here though is Michael Manley in summary:
“I can recall my own years at school as providing not one single course or class which was designed to give me an attitude [progressive] about anything. The structure of the language, the dates of Nelson’s victories, the laws of motion and the properties of metal were taught with varying degrees of energy and skill, but no one asked me to consider whether there was any reason why I should be my brother’s keeper or he mine. Social responsibility, government, political method or public morality were not even words to be wondered at because the school provided no books in which these questions were examined.”
Incidentally, this was written on January 31, 1941, by Michael Manley writing to his father.
I want to say now that this passage is the essence of a charter for modern Caribbean education. How to educate a person to be his brother’s and sister’s keeper, and how to make arts, games and science, in a word, technology, serve that end. If there is a lesson to be learned from Michael Manley’s early life, I would choose that one. It is absolutely indispensable to propel Caribbean civilisation to new heights in the struggle for the beginning of a truly human history.
I want to point out now that the young man Michael Manley who left the Caribbean, despite the limitations of his schooling in Jamaica which he adverts to, was a fully formed Western intellectual. By the way, Michael Manley found university, the prestigious London School of Economics, boxing and deadening and dropped out for a year.
In November 1945 Michael Manley wrote to his father from England noting that he had listened to a tremendous amount of Beethoven and observes, “it is from that I have learned the most”. Michael also noted that he had learnt “from and about Van Gogh, Cezanne, Velazquez, Brahms, Vermeer, Bach, Purcell, El Greco, Donatello, Angelo and Roman art, Cesar Franck, Murillo – just those so far.” Only those so far! Most Western intellectuals never reach so far, let alone further.
But on Beethoven Manley had this to say, and it is essential to understanding his politics, in fact, his being in the world, as Heidegger would insist. Wrote Michael Manley:
“First I listened to the symphonies as concertos, the big Sonatas etc. Then I listened to the experimental sonatas and finally to the Last Quartets. With records and concerts (lunch hour ones too) you can get to hear a lot of Beethoven. I think that much of Beethoven is invalid, bad if stood by itself... But again if you have got even a breath of the meaning of the Quartets then the symphonies or elements thereof become valid because they themselves are unconscious statements of the very nature of growth.”
Dear Reader, I want you to note something absolutely compelling in this passage whether or not you have paid attention to Beethoven’s symphonies or his majestic Last Quartets, one of the singular achievements of the human mind. It is this: Manley the colonial subject, from a little, even tiny, Caribbean colony, does not stand in awe of one of the giants of western civilisation. He is not looking up in uncritical amazement. He is looking eye-ball to eye-ball and pitting his own mind and perception being, in exacting criticism of this mighty corpus of work.
Such a man would be ready, willing and above all willing to throw down the gauntlet to the whole mighty armies of the Western Capitalist world, which had enslaved his forebears, colonised him, and declare that much of what confronted him was not only invalid and invalidating, but “bad”. That is a hindrance, a definite hindrance, to him being his sister’s and brother’s keeper. And, not only demand it be changed, but himself set about to change it.
Michael Manley, was not pursuing Angelo and Roman art, or Shelley or Eliot, or Pound or Vermeer, or his favourite at the London School Economics, Harold Laski, for the sake of intellectual sophistication as those belongers of the international middle class do, or seek to do in order to conform and to separate themselves from the masses – the further the better. He was, on the contrary, incorporating into himself the whole previous history of western civilisation, in order to change it. Michael Manley understood, as Marx had so definitely and persuasively argued before him, “that philosophers had analysed the world in diverse ways, the point is to change it!”
There then is the essence of Michael Manley’s life, the incorporation into his personality of this whole previous history of humanity, in order to change the world, beginning from where he was in space – Jamaica and the Caribbean.
When I said that, I do not wish to leave the impression that Michael Manley only operated and incorporated the rarefied world of Purcell or Elgar, Matisse or Picasso, Einstein or Werner van Braun, it included boxing on which he is as good as on cricket, not to speak of tennis or roses or coffee, or Worrell, Weekes and Walcott, or sugar-cane, or bauxite, or the spin of Valentine, or Mohammed Ali’s use of the ring, or the front-foot play of Vivi Richards, or peasant farming on a banana plot and the nature of work, as farming being, in all those varieties of occupations.
I could be wrong, but not likely, when I say that I doubt that any more cultivated person, with so broad a sweep and range had put his tremendous abilities at the service of the working people in the Trade Union Movement. Certainly not in the 50’s and 60’s.
So it was then in 1959 Manley led one of the biggest sugar strikes ever, which led to the setting up of a commission to investigate malpractices of the all-powerful planters. It was subsequently revealed, as Manley had contended, that the sugar companies had failed to report over U.S. $4 million in profits between 1945 and 1950. The old plantation order now knew for sure that in Michael Manley it was being challenged in a fight of grand proportions, if not a fight to the finish.
It is then that man, so formed, who became of all things a Trade Unionist in Jamaica. It was a natural to him as he wrote in his youthful Poem of 1940, as:
|
The music of the sunlight |
Whatever resources of knowledge and of experience Manley had acquired he was determined to put that at the service of the poor of Jamaica, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa, and too of Europe and Asia. The Non-Aligned Movement was tailor made for his particular attributes. He put the Caribbean at the very pinnacle of its councils and activities. In him and through him the Caribbean became a major voice, as champion of the world’s poor.
Socialism was his métier, as only that could be, though it was the socialism of Bernstein, and not Lenin or Gramsci or his much admired C.L.R. James. But it was not exactly milk and water socialism, which preached benefits for the poor, firmly kept in their place, without self-activity, but deriving decimal degrees of patronage, which would be called welfare, if not socialism. Manley had no such limited view or purview.
As he himself was to note in A Voice from the Workplace, about the Jamaican society he returned to, as one where “class relations were stark in their intolerance. There was no subtlety, and little mobility because a man’s class was stamped upon his skin as much as upon his clothes. To middle class eyes the working classes were an opaque mass – without individuality and without rights – because they were without humanity.”
There are few more cogent observations about class perceptions in the Caribbean than this. If the Socialist International to which Manley belonged wanted to eschew class struggle following its founder Bernstein, the reality of Jamaica compelled Manley to see differently and to face reality with sober senses, namely that in Jamaica class and race, often ellided, if not collided, with varying shades of black or white, denoting status, with an aristocracy of the skin at the top. Manley naturally rejected his natural place in that aristocracy. Few in the Caribbean make that quantum leap. Fidel Castro is another.
It is little known, and would hardly be thought possible, that Manley dreaded a political career, because of guess what? He could not speak, and did not think he could manage public speaking! That I am sure surprised you, but I will not bother to quote him on his fear of public speaking.
Demosthenes, one of the great orators of ancient Greece, overcame a speech impediment by putting sea pebbles in his mouth and speaking.
Manley’s overcoming is instructive. His was not as simple as Demosthenes. It is in the Trade Union Movement, in the relation of intellectual to worker, that Manley became a great speaker, one of the finest. As Island Supervisor of the National Workers Union of Jamaica, he went everywhere with a loudspeaker, and it is in that particular and peculiar symbiosis, that is, in response to workers and workers’ response to him, that he became a great among great speakers. There was nothing like his wonderful voice, Caribbean through and through.
But I must pause again to remind that not only was he a writer on a variety of subjects, he was a fine writer with some finely honed thoughts. Here is one of my favourite, and one of the exceptional definitions of colonialism. Michael Manley wrote:
”Colonialism be it enlightened or repressive, is a state of dependency in which the destinies of people are wholly beyond their control. In such a state there can be no incentive to effort, for effort is a function of will and will can only be exercised where it is possible to choose from amongst comprehended alternatives. Colonialism permits of no choice.”
Every word is carefully and thoughtfully slotted into place, but there is cadence of rhythm which is especially Jamaican and definitely Caribbean. Marley in song was to make that same cadence international.
Michael Manley, by voice, and in struggle, also took it to all parts of this great globe. It is fair to say that Michael Manley, a man from a small, even tiny, Caribbean island, bestrode the world like a colossus. As Vice President of the Socialist international, established since 1898, with its home in Europe, Manley became its most credible voice. A former Caribbean colonial was leading Europe! Manley thus made African peasants in Africa proud, not to speak of Jamaica and the Caribbean.
It is therefore no accident that when news of his death reached rebels in Zaire storming Kisingali, the rebels observed his passing by waving their AK’s as he had waved his rod of Joshua against neo-colonialism.
(To be continued in next issue)
Last updated on 14 February 2022