Nicole King. C. L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Paul Buhle

Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 163 pp. $40.00.

The field of literature C.L.R. James, all but empty during the lifetime of the great Pan-Africanist (I confess to penning the first biography, and the first collection of essays), has been filling at a rapid pace since. Nicole King's expanded essay is a worthy new addition, despite its problems, because the author has a fresh angle of approach. The "conversation ... that goes on in James's head" about race, class, and gender reveals contradictions, and contains multitudes of fruitful insights yet to be explored.

The less interesting elements of King's discussion reflect the old paradox much discussed by James devotees: How could a native Trinidadian, jet-black at that, regional nationalist when young, key activist of Pan-Africanism during the 1930s-40s, and ardent supporter of Black Power in old age, define himself, his intellectual life and tastes, so often in European terms, from Shakespeare to cricket? The answer is elusive, and King writes around it. Contrasting Minty Alley, his path-breaking novel written in the 1920s, to a film (La Rue Cases Negres) produced in 1985 presents material so dissimilar as to make the commentary on James's fiction highly dubious. If the working-poor neighborhood of Port-of-Spain described in the book's title is "one-dimensional," it is the best one-dimensionality achieved in literature anywhere in the contemporary Caribbean, with the possible exception of poetic giant Aime Cesaire's Martinique.

But happily King has a lot else to say on assorted topics. For instance, she effectively reads into The Black Jacobins (and its forgotten counterpart, a drama written for Paul Robeson in the 1930s) a multiple agenda. James the Marxist in dialogue with James the Pan-Africanist, representing the actions of Toussaint L'Overture and others in words and actions, subtly but evidently places a diasporic sensibility of transported Africans against the mere Europeanization of the age-old rebellious impulse.

Similarly, King sagely investigates the intersections of James's chaotic private world and his literary creations at the moment of one of his least well-understood works, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953). James was struggling to elude deportation from the U. S., his political group had broken apart, a marriage was on the rocks, and although King does not say so, he was so overwhelmed by the East-West political divides of the day that he fell briefly into a Cold War rhetoric otherwise alien to this dedicated anti-capitalist. A larger text, American Civilization, was never completed and remained unpublished in his lifetime; Mariners sunk into obscurity and, despite an edition of the 1980s, has only come into prominence among scholars recently. King sees the glitter of the very fragmentary quality, and close readers will be rewarded by her insights.

Some of King's other best contributions here also have a fragmentary quality, as if there is too much to explore, or perhaps so much explored by so many hands that she wishes to add to it with small strokes. In her Coda, she looks to James "as a dynamic voice of contemporary creolization," terms that he never did and never would have used for himself. But they may be useful, for all that, because James's work and life remain such a vivid part of unfulfilled tasks, incomplete and sometimes apparently enigmatic agendas likely to be understood better at a moment in the future.

Paul Buhle

Brown University