 Gweithio. Mae'n Molly Rosenberg, director of the Royal Society of Literature, ac rwy'n ddweud i'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithfeydd CLR James yn y partyn o'r event ar y Royal Society of Literature, y Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, NGC Bocass Lipfest, ac Curtis Brown Heritage. Ychydig o'r special event ar James's Life and Time ar Trinidad a Tobago's premier literature festival, the NGC Bocass Lipfest, a mae'n ddweud i ni i gael'r cyflwyno'r gweithio i gael gweithio'n gweithio'r llyfr y Prinodadiad yn y Rhysgol, hi'n llyfr hwnnw, CLR James. Ar y dyfodol y Prinodadiad yn y Rhysgol, Ayana Lloyd-Banweyf, James'r cyflwyno ar Margaret Busby, a James''r wedi'i dod yn y Cyflwno a'r ymlaen i'r Llyfrgell, i'r llwyth gyda James'r hyn sydd yn ymgyrch ar y ddweud yma, sydd yn ymgyrch ar y ddweud yma i'r ffyrdd yma, sydd yn cymdeithasol ar y ddweud. Minti Alley, Mariner's Renegades i Castaway, ac ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Yn gyflawni i gydag i gydag i'r ffyrdd, mae'n gyflawni Llyfrgell yng Nghyrchu Cymru, ymgyrch yn ymgyrch Carybun, Nicole Rochelle Mor. Nicole Rochelle has led courses on Andrea Levy and Toni Morrison and worked closely with New Beacon Books and the George Padmore Institute. She co-edited Dream to Change the World on the Life of John LaRose and contributed the recently published In Search of Mamiwata, Narratives and Images of African Water Spirits. Nicole Rochelle, over to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Molly. Really good to be here. Thank you Boca. Thank you Royal Society of Literature and of course the British Library. So tonight we are celebrating and discussing CLR James who was born in Caryny Trinidad in 1901 and his family they moved to Tunapuna which is in the east and I always, Tunapuna is a place I love more because of the name than the actual place. It's not to offend anyone from Tunapuna but I just love the word, Tunapuna, Amerindian name. In 1932 CLR James arrived in England and actually stayed with another famous Trinidadian, Larry Constantine, who was to go on a great cricketer and he was to go on to become ambassador here for the Trinidad and Tobago. James, CLR James has a prolific body of work and certainly by the time he came here in 1932 he had already tucked up under his arm what would become the novel Minty Alley and that was published in 1936 but we'll get into that a little later. He was involved in a number of movements and he was associated with what people describe as other black anti-colonialists of the time, most clearly George Padmore, they were close colleagues and friends. And CLR James is also a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and wrote very profoundly on cricket and later on in the 60s was to give us that wonderful, wonderful text beyond a boundary. He left in 1938, he left Britain and moved to the States and he stayed there until 1955, he was in fact imprisoned on Ellis Island for being subversive and we'll talk a little bit about that later on as well. He came back to London and then relocated to Trinidad in 1958 on the invitation of the person who would become Trinidad and Tobago's first Prime Minister Eric Williams and then he returned again to England in 1962. Maybe a few days before Trinidad and Tobago became independent and he settled in London for the majority of his remaining years and eventually passed over as we would say to the realm of the ancestors in May 1989, so just a little bit about him but we will find out more. So with me this evening we have Ayanna Lloyd-Banwell who is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago, she's a graduate of the University of the West Indies and holds an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she is now a creative and critical writing PhD candidate. Ayanna's work has been published in local magazine in small acts and in pre among others and shortlisted for small acts literary competition and so on, but there's a lot I can say about her, but the thing that I want to really say about her is that we met for the first time last month when she sat in conversation with me at the British Library along with another Trinidad writer Anthony Joseph and we discussed Ayanna's debut novel, The Wonderful Wonderful, when we were born. So Ayanna Lloyd-Banwell, welcome. Next, you're very welcome. Next we have a wonderful woman and someone I regard as a friend Margaret Busby, major cultural figure here in Britain and indeed around the world, born in Ghana, educated in the UK. She graduated from Bedford College London University before becoming, how many times have you heard this line Margaret Busby before becoming Britain's youngest and first black woman publisher when she co founded Alison and Busby in the late 1960s. At Alison and Busby, she published notable authors, including C. L. R. James, among many others. Writer, editor, broadcaster, literary critic Margaret has written drama for BBC radio and the stage. She has interviewed high profile writers, including Toni Morrison and Guggy Wath-Yongo and Ben Ochre. She has judged the Booker Prize, among others, and served on the boards of such organisations as a Royal Literary Fund, Tomorrow's Warriors, Nubian Jack Community Trust and the Africa Centre in London. Margaret is a long time campaigner for diversity in publishing. She's an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a recipient of several honorary doctorates and awards, including the Bocass Henry Swansea Award, the Royal Society of Literatures Benson Medal, and the Royal African Society's inaugural Africa Writers Lifetime Achievement Award. Margaret Busby, welcome. And finally, Selma James. Welcome, Selma James. Selma is an anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist campaigner. In 1972, she put forward wages for housework, WFH, as a political perspective that redefined the working class to include all who work without wages, starting with women, the primary carers everywhere. The International WFH campaign that Selma founded, which in fact celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, coordinates the global women's strike. With her husband and colleague, CLR James, she worked in the English-speaking Caribbean for independence and federation from 1958 until 1962. Selma James' first anthology, Sex, Race and Class, the Perspective of Winning, was published in 2012. Her second, Our Time is Now, Sex, Race, Class and Caring for People and Planet, was published in 2021, both by PM Press. So there you have it, a stellar line up, a galaxy, a wonderful woman, can I just call you all WW, a wonderful woman here with us tonight, so welcome. So we're here, celebrating CLR James, and of course the three works cited for this evening are Mintiali, The Black Jackabins and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. But, you know, in an earlier conversation, Margaret and I were chatting, we were saying, well, we can, you know, we can talk about other things, we can talk about other, you know, other texts as well. But let's start first with Mintiali. Do any of you remember sort of like the first time you read Mintiali if you, you know, and if you did how you felt about it, what your feelings were about this novel? Ayanna, you want to have a go there with your CLR t-shirt? You know, I knew this t-shirt was going to get me in trouble. I'll tell the story of this t-shirt a little bit later if it comes up. But I believe that Mintiali, the first time I might have read it, might have been at school. I'm trying to think back now. It was one of those books that my grandfather would have had in his collection, and you know, you sort of go through and you flip through all the books and you say, ah, I don't know right there. You know, there was a point when I was, you know, quite young. You know, I wanted to read R.L. Stein and Christopher Pike and, you know, so grandad's serious looking books. And, you know, but it was a book that I think followed me throughout for quite a long time because it kept, it's like how loveless books keep kind of coming up in your life until you're ready to sit down and read them. And I believe I read Mintiali at school at secondary school at the Bishop Hans D for the first time. It was one of those books that was on our CXC syllabus. They give you this, it's a long syllabus of all of the possible books that they would say, okay, you know, you should cover, you should have read between form one and form five, and Mintiali was one of those books. We did not study it at school, but because I was such a reader, by that time I started looking for more, maybe I might have been 14 or 15, looking more directly for Caribbean novels. And I wanted to read more Caribbean fiction because that simply was not the fiction that would have been on the shelves in bookshops, not in your commercial sort of fiction. And I felt like, where is it? Can't it just be at school? And I started, you know, looking, and it's one of those texts that you find more and more every time you read it, the older you get the more, I suppose, my political awareness developed so much more of this novel. I saw much of it related with his other work and I'll stop there. Anybody else wants to jump in? Selma? Well, I read it in the early sixties, which was the first time I'd seen a copy. They were very scarce indeed. And I knew George Lamming's work, I knew Mundyne Paul's work, I knew other West Indian writers, Wilson Harrison in particular. And this was news to me, and I realized very quickly that this was an earlier attempt, and I knew it was Nello's apprentice hand. He was trying his hand at literature, at fiction, and the attempt was very good. And we were very excited when one day we were walking along the street in Port of Spain, and he said that's the nurse. And we quickly ran after her and tried to get a glimpse of her, but there was a character from the novel walking in the street in front of me. And I knew all about her because we had discussed it in detail, and it was kind of an amazing experience. I think the book is deceptively deep. He was working out how to do fiction. He was going to be a writer. And this was his attempt doing it about fiction as opposed to what he did later which was theatre and history and all kinds of journalism. And he was also working out what the class relations were in Trinidad that he had lived through. And in the course of writing the novel you could see he worked out the relationship and understood at least what the questions were, not the answers, but how people who were educated were going to relate to their country women and men. And how you write for the public so that it is across the board rather than one particular sector. So I saw the process of a CLR's development in the course of reading Mintiali. I knew what he had done with it at a later point in his life. It was very interesting to me and I made comments as I read it. He was not well and I was in the bed next to his reading the novel and commenting. But Nello, you said this here. What did you mean at that kind of thing? It was fun. Wow. Oh gosh, Margaret. Any thoughts? I can't remember when I first read it. It may have been sooner after it was published by John the Rose, by New Beacon Books, which was in about 1971. But I was very aware that it was probably, I think it was the first book to be published in Britain by a black Caribbean person in 1936. And so it had that sort of importance as a landmark, as well as the vitality of the actual words. And I had the audacity to turn it into a radio drama in 1998 for BBC, I think it was Radio 4. And it actually won the award, but it's much better to read it as a novel than to... I haven't listened to my drama for, you know, since 1998, but it was a challenge and it just brought home to me what sort of skill he brought to developing those characters in Mintiali. I mean, it's, yeah, I don't remember how old I was when I read it, but I was a young woman and certainly I was reading, you know, the one, the edition published by New Beacon Books, which I can't find at the moment. And so the copy that I do have is a first edition from 1936. And I got the impression reading somewhere some time ago that he didn't actually mean to, he didn't really think about having it published. Am I right, Salma? He didn't actually think about having it, but he was just kind of, it was like an exercise, as Salma has told us. It was an exercise for CLR James in writing fiction. And I think when he sort of mentioned this, but Salma, you can correct me here, when you kind of mentioned this, was it to Mr Warburg? He was like, what? You've written a novel, let me see it. And he said, oh, well, what do you want to see it for? I don't think he intended at all for this book to be, you know, it was nothing, for him it was nothing more for quite a while than just his exercise. Well, what happened was that his, it was either World Revolution or Black Jackabins, which was published by Fred Rollroad. And Fred said to him, have you written anything else? He said, well, I have a novel. He said, let's see it and they accepted it. But you're right. He had not written it for publication and had not mentioned it to the man who had agreed to publish him. It came out because he thought that he had a good writer in his stock of writers. And he was right, but Nello didn't continue along the same drain. He did a thing, so we have what he did then. Yes, I mean, he never wrote, I think there was a sort of promise of another novel, but another novel never actually came forth. And it was this, it was that fact, the fact that Mintiali was the only novel. But there was, but in Beyond the Boundary, there are sections of Beyond the Boundary which could be fiction in the sense that the story is related in a way that you want to know the end and you want to know the beginning. And the whole thing, it is clearly the skill of a novelist that is being displayed in telling the story of the man who was not chosen for the team. Yeah, I mean, and we could probably say the same thing, maybe when we speak a little later about the Black Jacobins, because I can in terms of it sometimes reading like a novel, you know, it's history, but anyway, we can come to that. Yeah, I mean, Mintiali being then his only sort of published novel in 2014, there was a read-a-thon, you might remember this summer, there was a read-a-thon, there was a 12 hour read-a-thon, CLR James read-a-thon, and it was put on by an organisation called World Bites. And so I don't know how many of us, I kind of represented the George Padmore Institute at the time and so on. And I, by that time, was already in love. I had read Mintiali quite a while before that, but it was really in love with it and thought I'm going to read from Mintiali and then turned out to be the only, it was the only, it was the only kind of reading of the novel. Everybody else kind of went through the other, you know, kind of non-fiction and political and so on, but yeah, I think it really holds its own and has such a very special place. And the republication of it, you know, most recently has been very, very welcome, you know, the Penguin Republication. I think it's a very important novel really. He also wrote short stories, didn't he, Selma? And it would have been good to know what else he would have done had he continued along the line of fiction. Yes, I mean, Triumph and one or two others are very striking and he was encouraged to be writing, but a lot of things happened in the 30s and one of them was that he got politics, something like People Get Religion. And any time his mind was not on that any longer, he was with the world, he said that the world became, went political and he went with it and that's absolutely what happened to his career as a writer. It took him down of politics. I think the thing about Minty Alley that is why I think it remains such an important work is that I think for me in retrospect, thinking back on it, you know, there's this sense that you could, you know, I don't know how people get this idea that you could somehow divorce. There is narrative or there's characters and there's story and then there's politics and somehow these two things are separate and these two things don't always have anything to do with each other. But you know, you did say that it's almost as though you can see him working out how in this in this yard in this place that is really a sort of a microcosm of working Trinidadians of Indians and Africans in this yard that was almost like a testing ground or a reflection of okay, this is how the politics. This is how it looks. This is how ordinary people enact and work through those kind of tensions. There's race, there's class, there's gender. There is the question of the educated middle class person who is kind of outside the worlds of the people that he is attempting to, I guess, speak, not speak on behalf of but the world that he wants to make better for them. He's not part of that world and it's such a fascinating outsider insider perspective that I think Haynes and of course you know we can dispense with saying okay Haynes is not CLR genes but for the purposes of the discussion I think you know there's an interesting dynamic where you can see similarities in the positioning of how Haynes is positioned also is positioned as well and I think that you know you were saying somewhere that the world was doing politics and you know so he went that was his passion that's where he went but this is such a political work. It's such an intensely political novel as well. He had already written on the case for West Indian self government. It wasn't that he had been on political before but once he became political, his motivation was different. He was interested in organizing with other people in a way that changed the world. In a very fraught time the 30s Hitler came to power in 1933, and the Spanish Revolution was bombed in 36 in Danica that Picasso did that famous painting about. So that was a different kind of connection with politics that was he himself involved and trying to involve others and working out what to involve people with and for what to have what impact in the world. That was a very different skill and a very different interest and therefore a very different kind of writing. Yes. Yes. I came across a quote. It was from an interview that he gave and and it's about. I think that the interviewer kind of commented on the on the novels humanity and see at our James said the human aspect of it which surprises so many people is the basic constituent of my political activity and outlook. The day I recognize that my instinctive response to any political situation is not a human one. Then I know that my time for retiring has come since all that I would do afterwards would be bureaucratic and fraught with mischief. And so you know that's that for me kind of reading that quote it's it's like going back to what I am I said it's it's CLR James kind of saying well actually yeah this is a political novel. You know it is a political novel. And yeah it's a very, a very special, a very special novel. I think it's significant that's dedicated to his mother. Yes. Yes. But yes it's. Yeah. Anyway, yeah I'm just thinking about what what else could have come from him I don't know if anybody I have not read Lativina pastora the short story that he that was published. About Lativina pastora being published in the beacon magazine and and and also the other short story triumph which I haven't read either but I, I, you know have read about it, and know that again it kind of it focuses on people who are seen as like at the, you know the bottom of the economic ladder. And always that kind of that kind of Claire sort of association with those people, the working classes, even though one of the, I guess one of the critiques of mentality that I came across some time ago was was just what I am I spoke about the kind of middle class person that Haynes is being sort of a little bit apart but to me that was a very deliberate. It was very deliberate on on James's part to Haynes was always going to be a part and that is, and in making him so that is being very real to, you know, as we say the kind of the societal milieu, if you like, you know, of Trinidad, but but that was seen as a kind of by by one critic anyway that I read as a kind of a weakness but I didn't, I don't, I don't agree with that. I think in this edition, I think Kenneth Ramchans introduction he says he calls that distance he said the what is what what basically is the use of that distance is to show how that distance impoverishes both both sides. Yes, you know, if we can't if we're not intimate with each other what what do we lose so. And it's just real. Yeah, and it's just real it is a real, you know, that's a real thing there is that distance, perhaps even more so now in Trinidad, you know, perhaps even more so, but that's a whole other, that's a whole other, that's a whole other evening. And so would anybody like to say anything else about mentality or can we move on. It's just it's just very clear that he was a good observer and his observations about the connections between class and community and the ways that we actually all the things that we share as well as the things that divide us is really important. Selma, I am Margaret has reminded me I'm looking for that little note. I came across something while throwing papers out the other night, getting rid of lots and lots of superfluous bits of paper, but I came across some notes I made in 2013 at the oval. And he's reminded me because Margaret said he's very good observer and that's what you get from mentality. And Selma actually have a quote from you where you say he was a great listener observer and listener. And you said that in 2013 you probably don't remember, but I wrote it down. We were all at the oval. We were at the oval celebrating 50 years of beyond the boundary. Yeah, so everybody was there talking about CLR and new beacon books. My sister Janice Durham and I were womaning a new beacon books stall there. So, yeah, it's very, I don't remember saying it, but it's absolutely what I believe and what I saw him do. He was very engaged in the US and in on a day to day basis in politics and I saw him sit down with people and ask them questions about their lives and how they did things and what they thought and the rest. And this would go on for a half hour or 45 minutes and then later he would say, you know that guy said this and talk about what he heard and asked me what I thought about what I had heard and he was excited and interested in how people lived and what they thought about their lives. And what they were likely to do about it. He was fascinated by that and therefore he was always an interesting person because he was interested in the people that he spoke with and therefore they spoke brilliantly because there was a listener. There was someone who was truly interested in their lives and what they thought about it. And, you know, most people don't have that. Most people's lives go on and they are in a way neglected. I mean, people are not respected. You know the Black Lives Matter movement put its finger deeply on part of our lives, all of our lives, that our lives actually matter. And most of us are not encouraged to believe that. As a matter of fact, we're discouraged to believe that they don't really matter. And that's part of the terrible thing of living in this moment in time, but it's been true for quite a while. And he was one of the people who worked in the opposite direction because he was in the opposite direction. He did think that each life mattered. He was a true Marxist, which is why I really cared about him and why he was such a good political leader in our organization. I learned so much and I think all of us did from his approach to what politics was about and how to enhance what we were doing and enhance the relationships with the people we were doing it with. Thank you so much for that. I mean, it's a great attribute when someone is able to really listen and to be fully engaged and wanting to find out. And I think he is one of those people, I guess, you know that, you know, there's some people you describe them as when they're talking to you, you feel as though you're the only person in the room that kind of thing where they're really deeply engaged with you. And yeah, that would always be a plus. That would always be a plus. But also, he knew what to ask because he was hearing what was told to him. And the fact that he was genuinely interested meant that people told him many profound things that they would not have said otherwise, constantly. Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say that because of course I keep, I keep thinking, I mean, as the novelist, I keep thinking about Minty Alley and thinking about how that character of Mr Haynes becomes a person that everyone comes and tells their things to. He's one who, you know, they feel like they can come and confide to when he listens and he takes their challenges seriously. There isn't any looking down in a very strong way of the, particularly the woman, I think, in Minty Alley. I think are so finely drawn because of that observational quality and that ability to sort of listen. One of the characters that I think I remember always feeling so fondly towards is Maisie, who I think, you know, now we talk some respectability politics is like a kind of a buzzword now. And, you know, there's so much that he is able to sort of see in this young woman who is not interested at all in being anybody's good wife or good. No. He gets a bad rap sometimes. He gets a bad rap. No, looking at this character, this is somebody who was fully invested in being herself and fully invested in her own ability to transcend and succeed and not be weighted by these expectations of what her femininity or her womanness or her childness or whatever it is was supposed to sort of be about. I can't help but think about that quite a lot. And that same listener ability that made Sierra James such an excellent politician and organizer and leader is also what made him an excellent writer, an excellent, an observer and crafter of people and of characters. Yeah. Maisie is a, yeah, I mean, definitely Maisie gets a bad rap, like, as you're saying, talking about her now, I'm suddenly thinking of another female protagonist in another novel. The Book of Night Woman, Lilith. Lilith gets a bad rap, but it's that same. It's a similar kind of, you know, in, you know, real investment in being herself and so on. Yeah, interesting, interesting. The Johnson Forest tendency, Selma, can you speak to us a little bit about that for people who don't know because I didn't really know that much about it. And James is kind of, you know, his kind of making of it and his role in it and, you know, the politics around it. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was during his time in the States? Well, what CLR did was to go back to what Marx had been, what Marx had said and what Marx had meant before Stalinism. I'm so sorry, I have to be political, but when the Soviet Revolution was destroyed by Stalinism, what happened is that there was a kind of corruption that entered the left wing movement. And it was as true in the West Indies, for example, as it was in Europe and in the United States and in fact everywhere in the world, because they felt they had reason to convince us that we needed a vanguard party and that this leadership, this vanguard had to lead us in order to win. And the CLR, he said, no, that's not Marx's zone. And when the cricket season was over, he had the whole of the winter and the beginning of the spring before the bats came out to read. And the first time he did that was in 1933 or 34. And he said these Stalinists are the greatest liars that have ever lived. And he came out against them, that is, in his own mind and understanding. And he worked very hard in a number of ways, which it's really too complicated to go into here, to find out what it was we as a movement should be doing instead of the vanguard party. And he says, how do we organize ourselves if we are socialists and want to change the world for the whole world? That is for the industrial world and for the non-industrial world. How do we do it? How do we organize? And by the 1946 or 47, after a whole number of experiences and also after a reading of Hegel and Lenin and Marx and being in the United States, which was much more conducive to wider thinking, less hidebound than Europe had been in his experience, he began to develop conception or at least began to put forward what Marx had put forward as a conception of when we do join an organization or when we do join a movement for change, what happens to us? How are we dealt with? Are we dependent on a vanguard to teach us? Or do we bring to the movement our own experience and is the organization we form representative of that experience, of all the experiences of those of us who join movements to change the world? And he developed ways of organizing. He said that in every organization there is a deep grassroots which really presents itself as the abilities to change things, to look at things more deeply, to struggle to organize. But they are often sat on and repressed and we have to build an organization that's based on the grassroots and not merely repress it but find what the leadership should be leading to. That is leadership, real leadership takes you where you want to go but it has to find out where that is and this whole relationship was what Nella really did so much work. I have to say that I was, pardon me, a young woman in Johnson Forest and I really didn't read very much. I had a high school diploma but no university, by the way, he had no university degree. I have to say that, that's why he speaks so clearly it seems to me and writes words of one syllable for anybody to understand who is ready to find out. And I used to read none of the documents on the Russian question or the other question, but I read his every speech that he gave, which was transcribed or everything that he wrote about how to build an organization. I was absolutely fascinated by what he was saying. I knew him of course, he was the leader of an organization that was not big, my sister had worked as his secretary, so I had met him when I was about 13 years old when he was a very old man and he was at least 40, you know, when you're 13 years old. That's very, very interesting. And I was truly determined to understand how to build an organization and I come to the right place. This was the man who was himself developing and a highly developed and brilliant person and an educated Marxist. And here I was to find out how to build an organization and I just, I loved it. I just, I really was, I was really getting the education of my life. You're giving us education right now. And you are. And, you know, and I can just, I'm feeling that kind of passion and the excitement and in hearing you describe, you know, your experience of being part of Johnson Farreth and learning from CLR James. And you know here, I remember, I was about 15 then, that's when I began to be seriously involved with Johnson Farreth and we had a class on Negro history, that's what it was called then, but it was really the history of the Civil War and the history of the abolitionist movement. And in fact, our anti-racism was based on what he and others knew and had worked out and had paid close attention to the abolitionist movement, which supported the slave rebellion, which in fact, Du Bois describes, I'm sure some of your listeners will know about Du Bois who was really said there was a general strike of slaves and that's what won the Civil War was. The slaves won the Civil War, they just walked out the plantations and said take it and I'm going to join Union Army and that was, that was the end of their ability to govern. And he spoke about that and you know, I was, I think we were all absolutely dedicated to the education that we got as political people and our minds were, I mean, were truly open to what popular movements, in this case, people who were slaves who decided not to be any more, but it was always, it was always the movement of the grassroots, how they did it, how they dealt with defeat. That's another question. This has dominated, I suppose you can see that, has dominated my life ever since. And I'm not exactly a young lady. And this has been my interest and I learned, I got my start with him and we went beyond that of course because the movement of the 60s took us in another direction, but Johnson Forest was our foundation and we were dedicated to that organization. There were not many of us, there were about 70 of us, which is very small, it was multi-racial because the Johnson was a man from Trinidad, then there was the Russian woman, Raya Donetskaya, and then there was Grace Chin Le, whose parents came from China, and she was the third person who was kind of the triumvirate who were. And just for people to understand that Johnson is, of course, that was the kind of, if you like, a kind of almost like a pseudonym for CLR James and Forest was a pseudonym for Donetskaya. So, and in talking about the slaves and, you know, kind of like downing tools and saying we're not having it anymore, this is probably a good, good point for us to kind of go into a little bit about the black Jacobins, which, of course, is one of CLR James's most red works. And I do remember the first time I read it, I was possibly about 13 years old, I was around 13, and it read to me like fiction, like I kind of knew that it wasn't, but it read, which is what it's kind of like the point I was making earlier. I really thought it was just like, oh my God, he wrote it, he wrote it like a novel to my mind, you know, it was, it was a detailed informative story of strength and resistance, rebellion, defeat, you know what you said just now about learning to organise learning, you know, how we deal with defeat. And there was a lot, you know, we know that that Haitian, what people just talk, they talk about it, you know, sometimes people just kind of mention it, the Haitian Revolution, as it was just this, it just happened, you know, like over the span of like a year, it was long and hard and bloody. And I mean, what an amazing text, can I have some of your kind of your feelings or thoughts of like, when you first read, read it. Ayanna Lloyd-Banwo, Ms CLR James' t-shirt. You know, I'm actually just thinking, so I studied, I studied history at A level. But this was, this was before Cape was introduced, so this was, this was a Cambridge A level that we did, and I remember this was, I mean the Black Jackabins was not on our syllabus. Right, so it was more the absence of it that I found so interesting to think back on, it was not on our syllabus. Now, capitalism and slavery was, but I remember, this was maybe by the time I went to UWE and I continued studying history there also, thinking how much easier the teaching would have been if Black Jackabins was on our syllabus, not just because of the approach, as you said, intensely readable, intensely interesting. But I think it totally neutralized this idea that history is some sort of neutral sort of thing, that you know you just put these facts together, and then you place that when you say, oh, well, what do you think? It's like, no, this one, that you know the thing about the Black Jackabins that continues to stir in me is that there is the idea of neutrality when it comes to injustice is ridiculous, it's not as ridiculous, it is, it is, it is its injustice in itself, and you know the writing of this text is so, something that I think we would take for granted now, the idea that African people said, no, absolutely not, this is not happening anymore, we're not doing this anymore. We're organizing, we are, you know what I mean, and this is something that I suppose you would take for granted today, but so it's only at the time this book was written for him to put forward this premise of the idea of resistance and revolution and organized strategic revolution was probably even more, more in a little. Seemed it seemed fantastical, I think. Yeah, and certainly being 18 and 19 and studying, studying West Indian history, I find it to be even more of a crime now that the Black Jackabins was not, you know, a main text at the time for Caribbean students to be examining a period of history that continues to be a kind of a blueprint for understanding the understanding the Caribbean relation to the wider world. It's, you know, I almost can't believe that it wasn't there, I suppose I should say I can't believe that it was there. Yeah, we know why. Well, the reasons are levels in terms of the reasons why. Selma, your thoughts on the Black Jackabins and, oh, and I found that same piece of paper that I was furiously writing notes on in 2013. Anyway, tell me, tell me your feelings and then I wrote something that you said in 2013 at the Oval. But yeah. Both me so I don't contradict myself. Oh, right, never know. You said, and I quote, he wrote it, the Black Jackabins, as a weapon in the struggle. Yes. That's what you said. It's the day of the 23rd of November 2013. That's, that's absolutely true. And it's not the only weapon, but it's certainly that he wrote. It is certainly the most effective weapon, you know. Was so tremendous Frederick Douglass, who was the great leader of the of the abolitionist movement in the US who had been born a slave. He said, we colored people I'm using his language, we colored people, none of us would be free now, were it not for the Haitians. You know, I'm just overwhelmed by that statement from that from that man really had been through it. And they have been punished ever since. And it has been our job to make sure that we support them. And I just got a letter. Is it yesterday, yesterday from Mrs Aristide, Mildred Aristide, President Aristide was one of the most extraordinary political leaders that I've known and even heard about. And his wife of Haitian descent is a fantastic woman who is modest beyond belief. She's the mother of two children who has she has been raised in this melee of the American government and the French government and the Canadian government gouging the Haitian people and trying to repress them and trying to regain what they lost with the great revolution that the Haitians made. And it is just an extraordinary experience for us to be in touch with those people. We we've met them and we the campaign, the Waitress for House for a Campaign has been supporting them to the degree that we can all the time. They've built hospitals. They've built school. Look, he's just an extraordinary person. And he told me that when he was in exile in South Africa that what's his name? Tavon Becky told him that when he read Black Jackabins, that's when he knew that they would beat the hell out of the whites and gain their rights. Yes, because had that impact wherever it has been read. I mean, he does mention this, I think in the maybe prologue of the addition that I have to Black Jackabins CLR James. He talks about, you know, how humbling it was for him to be kind of for people to kind of approach him and say how much the book has helped them in organizing how much the book has helped them in regard to South Africans, you know, Black South Africans in their relationship with those who were deemed and they still sometimes call themselves as colored South Africans, you know, the mixed race South Africa, you know, but the Black Jackabins was a kind of. Yeah, it was really a kind of tool that they used and understanding and kind of exploring more deeply the relationships between those particular groups. Yeah, it continues to be. Yeah, what Margaret, I should bring you in here now. Black Jackabins. Yeah, I'm fascinated listening to Diana and Selma, but I ought to say that I was. Well, first of all, my connection with CLR goes back a long way and it comes through my father because my father was at school with CLR James so, and they were friends for seven decades. The fact that most of CLR's books were out of print when I became a publisher in the late 60s. It was extraordinary to me because I can't remember when I first knew of him or read his books because they were part of my father's reading as well. But in the 70s, I decided as part of Alison and Busby to reissue a lot of the books. And we started by putting together some selected writings of CLR's the first book was called the future in the present. And we also published a book that had not been published before called Incruma in the Garden Revolution in 1977. And it was, there were all sorts of connections being made because my father, although he'd grown up in Trinidad and had gone to the same school as CLR Queensville College, had won something called the Allen Scholarship, which meant that he could go abroad and have further education. He came from a humble background, but he was bright and won the scholarship and studied medicine in Ireland, factors in East London and went to Ghana. And Padmore was also a friend of his, so all these connections were feeding into the fact that I wanted to make CLR's work available. And even Black Jackabins, this iconic, this masterpiece was out of print in the 70s. And that was why I had to try and bring as many of CLR's works into print as possible. And Black Jackabins was published in the Aspen Busby edition in 1980, I think, with a new forward by CLR James. But I think it's telling that it took so long for Britain, if you like, to catch up with what was so important about CLR's books. Because I don't think he was out of print in America. But for the decade from 1977 to 1987, we published books, including Black Jackabins, including Notes on Dialects, including Mariners, many things in castaways, things that should have been never out of print. So I would love to hear more about what you thought. So, you know, just, I don't know what era you were, you were stopped talking about Diana about not having those books in Trinidad, but it's to be extraordinary that Trinidad should not have known. The thing is, just to be clear, that A level history syllabus, remember that's a British syllabus. And when I did A levels, we were still doing the Cambridge exam. So the syllabus was certainly not a West Indian or Caribbean developed history syllabus. I mean, we did, so Harvard was divided at the time there was West Indian history, there was European history, there was American history and you had to choose which to. So I think in my year, we did Caribbean history, West Indian history and European history. But Black Jackabins was not a set text. And I didn't actually discover it until I was in, discovered for myself anyway, I mean, until I was in university. And it was, I went to Yui. So it was, of course, one of the books that I would have come across in Yui. And, you know, there's something I just remember the first time I read it, it cracked me up so much and it's, there's a part in Black Jackabins when he's describing. He's describing the early sort of days of the revolution. And, and this was what this was the sort of the, the, the, the, the, I want to use the word not vengeance that the justice that was dispensed. On the colonists, the planters, etc. And he says that they did, in other words, they didn't do, they could have done worse, and they didn't. And that was almost like a camp. I wish I could remember, I wish I could remember the exact part, but the footnote is what I'm talking about when he says, the footnote to that says this statement has been criticised. I mean, if I can remember, if I can remember the exact line I'm talking about. This statement has been criticised, but I stand by it. Right. In other words, what's the justice that was metered out on the plantations by the Africans in vengeance was nowhere close to the suffering that they had endured. It was nowhere. It paled in comparison. And, you know, there's a little footnote and it says this statement has been criticised, but I stand by it. And I think I remember being in the library cackled. I said, damn right, stand by it. There was a courage and a bravery for me in my early 20s to be reading this book and saying, yeah, you don't agree, well, guess what. So, and not just out of, because it was true. It was true. I'm with you there. It was true. But it had to be said. It had to be said in a book and defended. And the thing about Blackjackabins from the first page, he is with the slaves. And that was what made it different from the others. There was no justice on the other side. There was only justice in the slaves and there was only their activity on their own behalf, which freed them. They were not freed by Lincoln or even by Toussaint Louverture. They were freed by themselves and that tradition remains in Haiti. That is what we must support and make sure that people know what that struggle in Haiti is about. And that is the struggle that all of us, all of us need to be involved in. Invested in, yes, I agree. I'm very aware that we're going to be, we finish it at, oh my gosh, at 845. And it's just after half eight now. And we have an international audience out there in online land. Is that what you say? No, what is it? Futurals in online land. And I have a question so I'm sure there are questions. I have a question from a lady called Jocelyn Watson and she asks something about Minty Alley. And she says, Minty Alley uniquely explores the plethora of issues that face women then and now without reaching any simple conclusions or simplistic characteristics. Do you think this is one of the major contributions of Minty Alley particularly in the time when it was written? So issues that faced women then and faced women now. Jocelyn, thank you for that question, by the way. Thank you. Any takers with that in answering that? Do you think this is one of the major contributions of Minty Alley particularly for the time that it was written? I think that he put the situation very boldly. And I think that once he's put it there, it's very hard to back away from the issues. So yes, it's a contribution. I don't know if it's the major one, but it definitely counts. I think I would agree with that. I don't know if it's the major one, but certainly. I mean, I think one of the things that you can't get away from is not only is he talking about the lives of women, but women on property, which I think remains for me one of those particularly in my work that I'm looking at now, to have a character like Mrs Rouse, who not only owns the space, but kind of doesn't also because she's tied up with Benoit. She and her partner who own the space together, which makes her quite vulnerable. And at the same time, there's also this space that is a communal in a lot of ways that is owned or even if not owned on paper, but certainly all of these lodgers have ownership and investment and so on in this space. I find it also a very interesting novel for how it plays out the complicated questions around ownership of property and ownership of land and homes for women and how precarious that ownership is. I think that's the part about Minty Alley that for me was always so interesting that even as a home owner, she is still in that vulnerable kind of position and all of the people that surround her, the person who have the mortgage, the husband who's part owner, the other partner who could take it from her. There are all of these things that are sort of beset Mrs Rouse that make Minty Alley quite a precarious place for her. In rereading it, especially that whole issue of property and so on, I was thinking about before certain laws came into place and you had people living together for years and years and years. And then the man might die or whatever. And then the woman just had no say, no right. That's right. Even in the character Mrs Rouse also talks about the fact that her mother left her houses, her mother left her property, which then ended up being dispensed with and so on. So I think again, we sort of spoke about that very early in the ways that Minty Alley really dramatizes all of these issues around socio-political issues that remain to some level, to some degree. Yes. Any other questions from our international all around the world audience? While we wait for any of those questions to come up, I am conscious that we haven't really given any time yet to mariners, renegades and castaways. And we know that this was some of us, we know that this work by CLR James was written during the time of his incarceration on Ellis Island. And oh, there are questions, I need to scroll down, there are lots more. And this was written during, oh gosh, yes, I have questions. Okay, can you tell us just very quickly a little bit about mariners, renegades and castaways and CLR James is in terms of him being incarcerated there and really what he was trying to say. I know I'm asking a big question and asking you to kind of answer it in a sort of capsule, but I'm aware now of seeing these other questions that have come up from our international audience. Mariners was written when he was on trial to be deported, he wasn't deported then and he got out, but the book was sent to me to read and to comment about in the draft that he did. On Ellis Island. Our relationship had not really fully happened when he was on Ellis Island. It really began when he got out. And he, then he grace Lee Grace Chinby and CLR and I work together the three of us to get the book completely redone on the basis of the comments that I've made because I didn't know I was being used as a guinea pig, which is, I don't mean any of friends, and he wasn't treating me badly. But I was to say, what kind of a book should be written for an audience like people like me who are just the high school diploma, and had never read literary criticism at all. And he wrote it, and I typed it with grace, doing some editing, and that's how the book got written. It was the case for him to stay in the United States. It has weaknesses, I think, because of that. But it was his reading of one of the most important books in American literature, which he felt Americans had not understood. And he, as someone from away, a West Indian, with the experience that he had abroad, that he had on. And because he was a committed socialist, he said this book is about a factory on a ship, destroying the environment. And I chose this book to make the analysis of the class relations between the monomaniac commander and the seaman who had hardly had names. They were the unknown man. And he said, I claim my right to stay in the United States on the basis of my reading of the literature that you call your own, that I think is world literature, and that I think is an important contribution to human society. Thank you. We have three minutes left. We have some questions. I'm going to just see, and gosh, the capsule answers that I'm now, as chair, going to demand of you. Georgio Riva is asking, in terms of organizing, can Selma say something about the school that CLR established for the grassroots? Selma, you're on a timer. You have seconds. Never what we've got. Well, and very briefly, we really do need more time for this discussion. Anyway, very briefly, those of us who were the grassroots were told to come to a school where the leadership would attend, and they would discuss with us and learn from us what we thought about various issues. It was called the school for the third layer, third layer meeting. The first layer is the top leadership. The second layer is the second in command, and then there's the rest of us, most of the world. And I was one of the people who was suggested be part of one of the school. There were two schools running at the same time with two separate parts of two leaders in each. That's all there's time to discuss. Okay, yeah. Yeah, we have one minute left. Somebody was asking about so Anthony Harding was asking what was CLR James's secret because he was obviously committed and successful both as a writer and an organizer, and what was his secret and I kind of want to feel Selma that you have in a way answered that before because you spoke about his great interest and his engagement and the fact that he was a listener. The fact that he was a great observer and that he took those things on board. He took what mattered to people on board and that leadership for him was about finding out where people wanted to go and getting them there. And so Anthony, I hope that in part kind of answers. Helping them to go there, not getting them there, but helping them working with them. I just don't want to go. If you don't want to go to the same place, get out of that organization. I like it. I like it. Ladies, wonderful woman. It is now 2045. I cannot believe the time has whizzed by. We must thank Margaret Busby for publishing this. It is a great contribution, which I will never stop thanking you for doing it. Thank you, Selma, but it was such a privilege to be able to do that and it's a privilege to be on this panel with you and with Ayanna and with you. I don't know how I got the gig. I can't believe it. Like life, does it get better? Does it get better in terms of literary gigs? We really needed the whole day to do this discussion. Definitely. Selma, James, Margaret Busby, Ayanna Lloyd-Banwell, I want to thank you all so much. I'm going to pass that to Molly. Molly, are you there? And will you wrap this up? Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Well, it's my turn to thank you so much, Nicole Rochelle, Margaret, Ayanna and Selma. If this evening's discussion has inspired you to read or rediscover CLR James as much as it has me, you can buy your copies of his books from the British Library Shop. Yes, beautifully demonstrated, Ayanna. Beautiful. Or if you go to the RSL's bookshop.org page, you can find books by our speakers, our wonderful brilliant speakers this evening as well as CLR James' books, while supporting independent bookshops as you shop. I'd like to thank our partners at the British Library for hosting this evening and the team at Unique Media for broadcasting this conversation to all of us across the world. Thanks too to the teams at Curtis Brown Heritage and NGC Boccas Litfest for all their work in bringing tonight's discussion together. And I know that there's another CLR James event coming up soon with Boccas, so please look that up and join us all for that. I think next week as well. You can also join the RSL, the Royal Society of Literature, again next Tuesday for a special event with Bernardine Everisto and Brick Bennett in the first of the RSL's partnered transatlantic conversations co-hosted with New York Public Library. All tickets for that event are free and online and you can book through the RSL website or find links through our social media. After that you can join us again in person or online with the British Library on the 17th of May to hear Armando, Ianucci and Marina Hyde in conversation about writing and translating the news. You can attend all RSL events for free with a free ticket by becoming an RSL member or digital events pass folder. Memberships and passes start at £25 a year and anyone can join today. So just go to RSLiterature.org to buy your membership now and get one of the last tickets to Armando, Ianucci and Marina Hyde particularly. I hope that we'll see you next week, but until then I'd like to lead off a final huge thanks to our speakers this evening for such a wonderful, deep and interesting conversation. Thank you all so much and good night to everyone watching at home.