It is one of my regrets that I never got a chance to meet CLR James; we have never met in a press box; we have never been on the same continent at the same time. When he died in 1989, Times (London) called him ‘Black Plato’, but such comparisons only served to diminish him. He was too big to be squeezed into a single analogy.
Two of his books have been all-time favorites. across a border, the best book on cricket and life, and The Black Jacobins, the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the only successful slave revolt in history when the tiny island of San Domingo (later, Haiti) triumphed over France, Britain and Spain.
The Welsh writer John L. Williams has brought together the various threads of this unusual personality, painting him with greatness not limited exclusively to politics, art, music, literature, philosophy, activism, theater or cricket, all areas where he was among the best. to have breathed, as a theorist, interpreter or critic. Williams celebrates the contradictions and consistencies of this amazing man celebrated in so many fields in a recent biography, CLR James: A Life Beyond Borders.
Previous biographies of CLR James tend to limit the personality of a man who bursts through and beyond these books. CLR – addressing him by his initials seems as natural as turning his name into an adjective to denote a range of values – it was huge, it contained crowds.
Already at school, he was known as the smartest boy in Trinidad. Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott emphasized how difficult it was over the years for CLR “to be so brilliant and yet be thought of as a brilliant black man”.
CLR played cricket with West Indian great Learie Constantine (he went to England to write his autobiography), debated Trotsky (visiting him in exile in Mexico) and Bertrand Russell (“I rolled him in the dust and won the public votes comfortably,” CLR later said), was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, co-starred with Paul Robeson in a play CLR had written, and interacted with a variety of people while traveling widely. He was quite a serial seducer and financially ill most of the time. Complexity and fragility coexisted, not always peacefully.
As Williams points out, “So many of the ideas we take for granted now—about the importance of identity and culture—start with his work. He is practically an academic subject in his own right – no discussion of postcolonial studies can take place without his work being front and center.”
As countries in Africa and the Caribbean gained independence, CLR associates became Prime Ministers and Presidents: Kawame Nkruma in Ghana, Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago and, to a lesser extent, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania.
Historian EP Thompson said: “The older James got, the more dangerous he became.” Three decades after his death, CLR is back among us thanks to this passionate, well-researched and necessary portrait.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
