By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
August 28, 2024

I wanted to finish my series on our valiant black women ancestors before I responded to the superficialities of people who assailed me on behalf of their leader (Express, August 6).

Although the press release of the PNM Women’s League purported to be the wisdom of its membership (close to 20,000 people, I guess), there is no way the League could have canvassed its members overnight to arrive at the claims that their leader offered “a powerful message”. Nor could they have constructed a collective response overnight. The missive of the PNM Women’s League was authored by one or two people.

Ten years ago I repudiated the repugnant sentiments of Camille Robinson-Regis, chairperson of the PNM’s Women’s League, when she serenaded the sexual prowess of her leader (“Confessions of a Soft Man”, Express, April 10, 2014).

I wrote: “According to the Trinidad Express, Ms Robinson-Regis assured the nation, at a meeting of PNM Women’s League, that although Anil Roberts likes to shout, at heart he is really ‘an empty vessel and a soft man’.”

The Express article reported “that after Ms Robinson-Regis declared Dr Rowley a man of steel, [Penguin’s] Soft Man was played. The audience sang along with it, and then shouted the names ‘Faris and Hinds’. Ms Robinson-Regis informed them that as far as she knew, they, too, were men of steel. As Penguin asserted, a soft man ‘could never get women’s respect / Everybody does call him stupidy’”.

Such misogyny is “unhealthy for our society”. I concluded: “Language matters. The messages we send to our youths can be very powerful especially when they are enmeshed in popular culture. The struggle for women’s dignity should remain paramount in our party and our society.

Something has to be terribly wrong when after 30 years we are still sanctifying sentiments that we thought we had abandoned long ago.”

Three weeks ago I argued that the leader’s request that we search out the “Africanism” in the biographies of our black compatriots was superficial at best. Several biographies and studies have been written on the people he identified.

William Cain and I edited CLR James: His Intellectual Legacies; Colin Palmer wrote a magnificent work, Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean, which I reviewed for the Journal of British Studies. Selwyn Ryan wrote a biography on Williams, and in Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins wrote an illuminating chapter on George Padmore.

Herbert M Hunter and Sameer Y Abraham edited Race, Class, and the World System: The Sociology of Oliver C Cox. They referred to him as “a founding father” of a branch of American sociology, although WEB Du Bois is considered “the founding father of American sociology”.

Marika Sherwood’s Origins of Pan Africanism is an important biography on Sylvester Williams, although Owen Mathurin’s biography on Sylvester Williams is more nationally oriented.

I wondered what “Africanisms” these newly-called-for biographies are supposed to contain; the anticipated costs of this research; and how the Government plans to pay for it. In other words, how serious is this off-the-cuff proposal?

The Women’s League missive suggests that “the prime minister’s emphasis on apprehending our challenges, failures and successes through the lens of these historical contributions is crucial”. The Leader of our Grief should have told us why they are so crucial to understanding our society.

The writers of this missive wish to “encourage Dr Cudjoe to normalise reading to understand, rather than reading to react”. What nonsense!

Reading, or the act of reading, involves much more than interpreting signs or symbols on a piece of paper or a Kindle. In A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey, a French literary theorist, reminds us that “the very act of reading is a form of production in its own right, generating interpretation and meanings which are beyond the control of the author”.

Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse is also important in this regard. He says to “delve deeply into the intricacies of narrative forms and functions, profoundly influences how scholars think about texts and their constructions”. Reading is a creative transaction between the reader and the written word, which suggests that meaning emerges only through active engagement.

Next Saturday, I will speak on James’ intellectual contributions at the African Studies Association Conference at Oxford University, UK. We will be reacting to what these writers wrote, the contexts in which they produced their art, and the philosophical imperatives that structured their work.

We will seek to discover the importance of their contributions by discussion and debate rather than bowing in reverence to the follies of a leader who needs to be more intellectually disciplined.

Serious leaders advance their positions by giving concrete details and offering possibilities rather than issuing decrees. That’s how it works in my field of study.