Rex Nettleford: The Canepiece, Labour, Education and the Caribbean Intellectual

Abstract

To establish his own identity, Caliban, afier three centuries, must himself pioneer regions Caesar never knew.-C. L. R. JamesFor this reason . . . beautiful in the midst of. . . misery, man finds his greatness, his measure, only in the Kingdom of this world.-Alejo CarpentierA preambleI BEGIN WITH TWO EPIGRAPHS. The first, by C.L.R. James, is taken from Beyond a Boundary, James's remarkable text on cricket, art and autobiography. Today, I am of the view that the Caliban trope is of limited value as a way to think through and around colonial power, so the section of the citation I am preoccupied with is that which speaks to pioneering, into regions Caesar never knew. To engage with the new, to redefine self against the dictates of power, is a venture which calls up in us qualities which are rare. But it is in exercising these qualities that, in the words of the second epigraph taken from Alejo Carpen tier's Kingdom of This World, we as humans find our fullest measure. I begin with reflection on these two epigraphs because in preparing to write this essay I had to anchor myself. This was not an easy task. Because in writing I am called upon to revisit shards of memory, to reach for a cluster of ideas and to grapple with the loss of a lived; to remember someone who was a deep personal friend with whom I shared many ideas, moments of laughter and disagreements. As I made a dramatic shift from being a leftist political activist to a scholar/writer preoccupied with intellectual and cultural history, literature and politics, Rex helped shaped those preoccupations. While I was in politics we began a habit of meeting early in the morning to discuss matters of state particularly as they related to issues of government's cultural policies. In my transition from activist politics to what Hannah Arendt would call a life of the mind,1 we continued to meet, although with less frequency, but this time our topics circled around history, politics, literature, art, dance and philosophy. To write this essay, then, is to say adieu to Rex. But it is to say adieu to one whose works (and can we call his vast polydisciplinary corpus 'works'?), whose very presence has been a response to our experiences of human living in the Caribbean.The Caribbean intellectual traditionAny reflection should begin with an attempt to situate the 'works' and figure of Rex. In this context I want to situate him within the Caribbean intellectual tradition. In doing so we ask ourselves - to what stream of this tradition did Rex belong? Secondly, we need to ask about, and then to grapple with, his specific contributions to the tradition, and of course to query, in what ways did he extend or challenge the tradition? In thinking about these issues, in the end one has to return to a critical element of Rex's thought - the historic role of labour in the constitution of Caribbean society and thought. But before we do, let us turn to another matter. George Lamming, in a lecture on Western education and the Caribbean intellectual, observes the following about the historical formation of the region. He states:I do not think there has been anything in human history quite like the meeting of Africa, Asia, and Europe in this American archipelago we call the Caribbean. But it is so recent since we assumed responsibility for our destiny that the antagonistic weight of the past is felt as an inhibiting manacle. And this is the most urgent task and the greatest intellectual challenge: how to control the burden of this history and incorporate it our collective sense of the future.2One stream of the Caribbean intellectual tradition has taken up this challenge, to quarrel with our history yet simultaneously work through that history to make it a part of the region's collective sense of itself and prospects. This stream of our intellectual tradition cannot simply be called historicist, because of its preoccupation with history. …