Dialogue with the Dead:

Sequel to Parts 1 and 3 of

Morant Bay Triptych

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Good day quaint, old descendant of mine! You have taken me by surprise with your not too subtle critique of the decision I made, lo these many decades, to leave Scotland and emigrate to Jamaica. By so doing you have violated the post mortem dictum, Rest in Peace. I am now quite agitated and ready to engage, thanks to you!

You speculate with some accuracy that the business of family was my primary concern and that my beloved Mary Ann, a woman of surpassing beauty, possessed of the gentlest demeanor, had a hand in convincing me of the merits of casting my fate into the Jamaica project.

Before my father William died in 1853, he spoke of the successes and setbacks of his two older brothers who had left Scotland in 1825 to go to Jamaica. He admired the ambition and the courage that Thomas and John had displayed in their decision to break free from the limitations of rural mediocrity to meet the challenges of the Industrial Revolution in the Colonies.

I do not expect that you will show much understanding of the many nuances of the era of Colonialism, removed as you are in time and from those events in Morant Bay which you have invoked: events which unfortunately as you have stated put my conduct ‘on the wrong side of history’, as you express it.

Would you have had me die, decapitated by the cutlass, the poor man’s guillotine, as you express it, so as to be able to have you congratulate me for leaving you a legacy of ancestry on the ‘right side of history’? Had the labourers at Morant Bay emerged victorious and the rebellion become a full fledged revolution, (as in Haiti in 1804) and had this revolution given the Morant Bay rebels the status of nation builders with no prior experience in governance, would the current status of Haiti as ‘failed state’ in the twenty first century be also the fate of twenty first century Jamaica? If so, Jamaica as we know it would be quite different, and you, my twenty first century descendant, would not exist. Your blood line would likely have been extinguished by the death of my uncle, John Girvan, your great, great, grandfather, himself a member in good standing of the militia and a Custos in the parish of Clarendon. John’s honorific roles granted to him by the Jamaica Assembly, make him a lackey of the British Colonial Government in Jamaica. On the right side of history, my friend, you do not exist, you have no voice!

History,  you must accept, is far from the simple binary, the 2 sided opposition that the term ‘wrong side’ suggests. History is a dynamic, multi faceted chameleon which shows itself in many guises. The events embedded in the matrix of history are rarely settled. They have an elastic quality, stretching across the decades and centuries, morphing, metamorphosing, subject to the opinions of the scribes recording the narratives, subject to the conceits of the age and subject to the vagaries in the human condition, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, prejudice, avarice, ….

The past then, is still unsettled. Bits of the narratives are still being discovered and as such, those parts have been untold. Consider the recent discoveries in your land of the bodies of young indigenous people on grounds where religious institutions existed. The contours of the brutality and unconcern on the part of European settlers are still expanding in your age and in your lands. The ripples from Europe’s expansionary ambitions are still spreading across the globe. When will the reckoning take place? When will the Moral Arc of the Universe deliver justice to the victims? Probably never! The many entangled threads of history will dangle unresolved and like the epidemic will flare back into focus to disrupt the peace, create disorder and upend governments. History is a chain of events concatenated, linked as on a chain with other threads and joined and clustered: linked to create a never ending saga of narratives of the story of humanity.

You would have to have been in Ayrshire, Scotland at the time of my youth to feel the excitement of expanding possibilities for the individual…We were propelled by an optimism, a moronic optimism you may say, and by an arrogant conviction that our enthusiasm to spread our growing enlightenment would result in elevating the human species, moving the species out of the darkness of ignorance, into the blessed light of knowledge.

This unbridled optimism was initiated and propagated by the leading Nation States who were engaged, among themselves, in full blown competition for material and military ascendancy, whatever the cost. The arms race and the Cold War of the twentieth century come to mind as a way to describe the hunger for power and glory and wealth, the material manifestation of power and glory.

The State and the Church, with very few notable exceptions, were prominent voices  creating permission structures to encourage and facilitate policies and actions in the domain of global affairs. Listen to this advice given to the United States in the 1890s by prominent writer Rudyard Kipling to keep control of the Philippine Islands after they (the Americans) defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War.

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The White Man’s Burden

Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Rudyard Kipling

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By contrast to the racist cheer leading of the C0lonial authorities of our times, the defining spirit of your age reflects a zeitgeist of shrinking resources on an exhausted, moribund and depleted globe: a world disputed among cantankerous populations bent on mutual destruction: a globe where the greed of some overwhelms the needs of many: a globe where vulgar and increasing material inequality breeds desperate waves of humanity moving blindly across oceans, stepping over and across invisible national boundaries to escape a life of impoverishment and squalor, wishing to emerge into some perceived nirvana whose inhabitants, inundated with needy émigrés, are pushing back against this perceived invasion.

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Miscellaneous notes relevant to the post above on Morant Bay and Thomas Girvan

What is History?

Thoughts on History as a basis of Judgement

In a world where “Facts are fungible and reality is negotiable”. (David Mamet, Playwright)

Include the reference to past as foreign country… The examples of black and brown individuals in the exploitation and suppression of African Chattel slaves: Jamaica Observer article: Jamaica’s Best Kept Secret

–History only comes alive after it has been ‘corroborated’ in some fashion. Until then it can be described as conjecture or rumour and discredited or denied. History must be and will be contested.

–History (usually termed causes and effects of events) versus  ‘facts from the past’ reportage minus the factors that led to the fact. The factors are not extraneous but may or does contain some conjecture which will introduce bias.

-“History”: some interpretations:  … as purveyors of the past, historians recognize that the bedrock is really quicksand, that bits of each story are yet untold, and that what has been told is colored by the conditions of today. (K. Kris Hurst)

Writer Rebecca O’Dwyer, defending re-enactment in contemporary art against charges of conservatism, reads it instead as an active form of remembering through which we can establish a new relationship to the past, a past understood as being in a constant state of flux.

–James Joyce

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” (Ulysses)

Edward Hallett Carr

“History is … a dialogue between the present and the past. (originally: Geschichte ist … ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit.)” (What Is History?)

The historian should work to help transform society (Values and context are important ingredients in discussions about the past.) Zeitgeist as context. (The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history Wikipedia)

Voltaire

“History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” (French original) “J’ay vu un temps où vous n’aimiez guères l’histoire. Ce n’est après tout qu’un ramas de tracasseries qu’on fait aux morts … “

Personal Thoughts on History through Thomas Girvan’s Experience

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Reflections:

-We carry the taint for the suppression of legitimate protest and the brutality of the suppression of the rebellion by the Colonial Government: we have been altered through the hand-me-down culture we received from our ancestors, we carry in our humanity, a burden of conscience: trapped between binary boundaries, in a zero sum game we lose on 2 sides.

-But if we can escape the binary trap, we avoid the narrowing of perspective inherent in the zero sum analysis and arrive at a kaleidoscope of emerging variables, a universe composed of diverse elements.

-Race and gender cannot be simply legislated into binary oppositions.

-We are currently experiencing echoes from our troubled past: We seem unwilling or unable to learn and apply lessons from the past: some deep seated, primitive urges seem to dwell close beneath the veneers of culture and civilization. They erupt volcano-like, spewing the molten magma of intolerance and hate. Reflux from undigested, unresolved received culture and knowledge carried forward from he past …Some of that baggage from the past is treasured, venerated and sanctified and sometimes  becomes the basis for intolerance, persecution and hatred in our times.

-Binary judgements reduce variety, forcing it into 2 molds and ignoring the evidence that may contradict the prejudged outcomes.

-Time is a continuum: The present is the pinch point, a conflict zone, on a continuous horizontal line where the past and the future are negotiated.

I am, I have been and I remain a creation of a colonial  origin. I was born within its outreach and lived 15 years steeped in its values. Early in my adulthood I was unable intellectually to break the mold into which I had been poured and shaped. I used strategies invented within the colonial domain to emerge from problems created within the colonial domain in a kind of circular logic to escape from alienation and anomie (lack of purpose).

I have frequently opened the vault containing the carefully curated preconceptions of the culture that I ingested through acculturation. I have made significant modifications to these gifts from the past, although I still retain some of its general values: decency, civility, generosity, humility, a respect for personal and societal  growth through education and/or general curiosity through continuing investigation and inquiry.

Bits and pieces of ideas to be pursued

-The Moral Arc of the Universe (How pretentious is this!) -Intersectional analysis of the Eyre Commission Report Text from many angles/facets as follows:

– Buckra: functional analysis of the term: meaning (power, privilege, prestige, gendered, economic success, colour, success, dynamism in business, mover and shaker (who can be Buckra) -Moral qualities: Religious affiliations (Baptists vs. other Christian denominations) 

-Sense of belonging:and/or empathy for the underclass. Paul Bogle, William Gordon vs. Samuel Shortridge (Stories of Shortridge, Bogle and Gordon)

-Is the status of Buckra acquired, earned of assigned? Is it reputational? (The Black rebel foresees a time in the very near future when he and the other rebels will topple the incumbent buckra and replace them.)

-Can a woman be buckra?

-The Jamaican Assembly and the Colonial Government. (Parochial positions Custos, Magistrate, Justice of the Peace etc.

-Fanaticism and faith: Suspension of doubt, suspension of judgement, abandonment of agency, eschatological outlook as confirmation of faith

-“Of the overseers of the slave plantations in the West Indies three out of four are Scotsmen and the fourth is generally observed to have very suspicious cheekbones.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1812

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