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Canongate Books - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

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318 pages

English

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Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing AwardsClustered together in azure-blue waters are a collection of little islands whose culture, history and people have touched every corner of the world. From the moment Columbus gazed out at what he mistook for India, and wrote in his journal of 'the most beautiful land that human eyes have ever seen,' the Caribbean has been the subject of fantasies, myths and daydreams. It was claimed, and its societies were built to enrich old Europe, and much later its beaches were splashed across billboards advertising fizzy drinks, its towns and people pictured in holiday brochures. But these islands are so much more than gloss, white sand and palm trees, they form a region rich in colour, beauty and strength. Home of the Rastafarian faith, Che Guevara's stomping ground and birthplace of reggae, the Caribbean has produced some of the world's most famous artists, activists, writers, musicians and sportsmen - from Usain Bolt to Bob Marley and from Harry Belafonte to V. S. Naipaul. In the pages of Island People we hear the voices of the Caribbean people, explore their home and learn what it means to them, and to the world. In this fascinating and absorbing book, the product of almost a decade of travel and intense study, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro strips away the fantasy and myth to expose the real islands, and the real people, that make up the Caribbean.

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Histoire

History of the Americas

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	26 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782115601
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0520€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Harper’s, the Believer, Artforum , and the Nation , among many other publications. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas , and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. This is his first book.
‘Allows the Caribbean to stand on its own and shine . . . A celebration of culture, music and literature . . . shows the magic of the people of the Caribbean . . . infused with passion, love and vibrancy’ SHARMAINE LOVEGROVE, Monocle Arts Review
‘A creative hybrid of travel writing and in-depth reportage . . . Its balance of skepticism and enthusiasm is driven by both wide knowledge and a bracing sympathy for the oppressed . . . He has a journalist’s flair for interviews and is as deft with chance encounters as with pop idols. Above all he finds dignity as well as excitement in this beautiful archipelago’ COLIN THUBRON, New York Review of Books
‘This book illuminates, like no other I’ve read, the startling history and the complex present of the nations of the Caribbean. Written with passion and joyful music in the prose, Island People will become an indispensable companion for anybody travelling to the Caribbean – or dreaming of doing so’ SUKETU MEHTA
‘Many have tried this before – to get hold of, in its entirety, the volatile, beautiful, relentlessly shifting Caribbean. Nobody has succeeded as dazzlingly as Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’ MARLON JAMES
‘One of those rare writers who bridges worlds – between deep scholarship and lively and accessible writing, between islands and mainlands, between big ideas and precise details, between history and possibility’ REBECCA SOLNIT
‘Joshua Jelly-Schapiro possesses both a humanist’s irrepressible empathy and a journalist’s necessary skepticism. He reports carefully, researches exhaustively, cares deeply, and writes beautifully’ DAVE EGGERS
‘Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s grand book on the Caribbean is so striking in form and vision that it amounts to something new – a constant surprise . . . An important book filled with many truths’ HILTON ALS
‘A marvel of a book . . . Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a superb young writer who brings to this sea of dreams a scholar’s authority, a novelist’s way with character, and a top reporter’s talent for stumbling into exactly that tale, however improbable and fantastic, that most needs telling’ MARK DANNER
‘Sensitive to the power of place to anchor or disturb identity, Josh Jelly-Schapiro maps the Caribbean through its myth and its music, its history and its intellectual tradition. Erudite, reflective and savvy, Island People is as much a pleasure to read as it is an education’ GAIUTRA BAHADUR

This paperback edition published by Canongate Books in 2018
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, 2016
First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 562 5 eISBN 978 1 78211 560 1
For my parents and for island people everywhere
The indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians, living by their own lights long before the European adventure, gradually disappear in a blind, wild forest of blood. That mischievous gift, the sugar cane, is introduced, and a fantastic human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported crooks and criminals, defeated soldiers and Royalist gentlemen fleeing from Europe, slaves from the West Coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans, and Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on an unfamiliar soil . . . in an unpredictable and infinite range of custom and endeavour, people in the most haphazard combinations, surrounded by memories of splendour and misery, the sad and dying kingdom of Sugar, a future full of promises. And always the sea!
—George Lamming
We’re all in the Caribbean, if you think about it.
—Junot Díaz
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I: The Greater Antilles
Jamaica: The Wages of Love
Chapter 1 Branding
Chapter 2 Badness
Chapter 3 Redemption Songs
Cuba Libre
Chapter 4 Cuba Sí
Chapter 5 Cuban Counterpoints
Chapter 6 Autumn of the Patriarch
On Puerto Rico
Chapter 7 Boricua and the Bronx
Hispaniola: Mountains Beyond Mountains
Chapter 8 The Massacre River
Chapter 9 The Citadel
Chapter 10 Haiti Cherie
PART II: The Lesser Antilles
Sea of Islands
Chapter 11 Heading South (Cayman, Barbados, Grenada, Barbuda, Montserrat, Antigua)
Chapter 12 Au Pays Natal: On Martinique (and Guadeloupe)
Chapter 13 The Last of the Carib: Dominica
Chapter 14 Return to El Dorado: Trinidad
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography and Further Reading
ISLAND PEOPLE
David Sanson and Guillaume Sanson, Les Isles Antilles (1703). COURTESY OF THE DAVID RUMSEY HISTORICAL MAP COLLECTION
INTRODUCTION
IN NOVEMBER 1963, Vintage paperbacks published a new edition of The Black Jacobins , C. L. R. James’s celebrated history of the Haitian Revolution. The book had first appeared in London in 1938, where James had arrived by transatlantic steamer from his native West Indies a few years before to launch a literary career. A quarter century later, The Black Jacobins— though already a touchstone for black intellectuals worldwide—had fallen out of favor and out of print. Its itinerant author had moved from England to the United States shortly before World War II, then had returned to Europe after being expelled from the U.S. as a subversive in 1953. Finally, in 1958, he returned to his home island in the southern Caribbean for the first time since he’d left his life there as a colonial schoolteacher.
Born in British-owned Trinidad in 1901, C. L. R. James was the son of a schoolmaster and a cultured mother whose bookcase of Victorian novels and Elizabethan drama occupied him when cricket didn’t. He grew into a radical whose passion for dramatic narrative always equaled his yen for discourse on historical materialism. (“[Thackeray’s] ‘Vanity Fair’ holds more for me than Capital,” he said.) 1 Drawn to the classics and hugely ambitious, James sought to place the history of the Caribbean within the larger telos of not only modernity and capitalism but also humanity’s struggle for democracy, reaching back to the Greeks. Perhaps more distinctively, he sought always to understand the cultures of his own day—cricket matches and calypso songs, Hollywood films and radio serials—within that larger story.
James Baldwin wrote, “I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.” 2 For C. L. R. James, growing up in Trinidad, this seems never to have been an issue. The grandson of slaves, he claimed from childhood not only Shakespeare but Virgil and Thackeray as his own. He embraced—and embodied in his black frame—ideas and principles customarily opposed. A passionate anticolonial who believed in something called “Western Civilization,” he was a devotee of Aeschylus who also loved pulp novels; an intellectual who also played cricket; a Marxist materialist not immune to the charms of the bourgeois stage. A thinker whose “interdisciplinary” approach to history anticipated recent academic trends by decades, his peripatetic life and political engagements embody the core dramas of a century that “he sought to embrace in its dialectical whole,” as the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris put it. 3
James’s return to the Caribbean was prompted by the promise of self-rule in Trinidad and the triumph of the Cuban revolution. And it was these same momentous developments that prompted his decision to publish a revised edition of his history of the epochal slave revolt, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, through which “West Indians”—and not only Haitians—“first became aware of themselves as a people.” 4
James left the main text of The Black Jacobins unchanged, except for the addition of several lambent lines about Toussaint’s sad demise. More substantively, James included a postscript “appendix” in which he offered a new interpretation of the Haitian Revolution’s significance. This new afterword’s thrust was conveyed in its title: “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro.” Rather than signifying “a merely convenient or journalistic demarcation of historical time,” Toussaint and Fidel were joined because each man had led revolutions that were “peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history,” no matter that they occurred 150 years apart and on different islands. 5 The Caribbean was a region whose “peculiar history,” according to James, had not only produced a common culture on its islands but given them a special role to play on the world stage.
He sought, in his new afterword to The Black Jacobins , to explain why. “The history of the West Indies is governed by two factors, the sugar plantation and Negro slavery,” he began.
Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed, they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of that word, but West Indian, sui generis , with no parallel anywhere else. 6
The plantation and racial slavery had been present elsewhere in the Americas. But the Caribbean, James argued, was unique. Firstly because of sheer numbers: from the early 1500s through to the end of the Triangle Trade, three centuries later, the region’s islands received some six million African slaves to their shores (England’s