By Adrian Harewood
| Posted: February 07, 2006
In the fall of 1995 a few dozen of the top writers in Canada’s literary firmament gathered at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa to take part in the Black Writers Conference. Andre Alexis, George Elliott Clarke and Nalo Hopkinson were just some of the authors present. It was somewhat curious, given the august assembly, that the conference’s keynote speaker was neither a writer nor a literary critic of repute. He was not a renowned academic nor was he even a politician of middling significance. Doubtless, as he approached the stage, many in the audience must have wondered who the distinguished looking man with the finely coiffed salt and pepper goatee was.
By the end of his address in which he’d discussed the function of art, cited the example of Haiti’s liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture and referenced both Shakespeare and the Grenadian Revolution, audience members must have understood why he had been invited; for he had reminded them that artists had a critical role to play in the struggle to create a new world built on freedom, justice and equality.
The speaker’s name was Alfie Roberts. It was thanks in large part to the activities of Roberts and the group he’d helped found in Montreal in the mid 1960s, the Conference Committee on West Indian Affairs, that the seminal Congress of Black Writers had taken place there in 1968.
Roberts had been a much sought after advisor and confidant to political radicals across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the English-speaking Caribbean. His circle had included Grenada’s Maurice Bishop, Dominica’s Rosie Douglas, Guyana’s Walter Rodney, St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ Ralph Gonsalves, Jamaica’s Robert Hill, and members of New Left movements throughout the West Indies – three of these leaders, Bishop, Gonsalves and Douglas, would later become Prime Minister of their respective nations. Indeed, the ever-charismatic Bishop had pleaded with Roberts to contribute to Grenada's fledgling revolution by helping him establish a Pan-Caribbean political organization on the island. Much to the Grenadian leader's chagrin Roberts never came.
Books, it is said, help to fill in the silences. The newly released A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks on the Caribbean, Cricket, Montreal and C.L.R. James is an invaluable document that affirms that truth, as it advances the project of filling in the gaps in Canadian and Caribbean historiography. It is the serendipitous product of a conversation held in January 1995 between Alfie Roberts and his protégé, the Montreal write/broadcaster David Austin.
A View for Freedom is a slim volume, part memoir, part political tract that offers some fascinating insights into the incisive mind of one of the unsung figures in the history of both the Canadian and Caribbean left. In the text, Roberts offers an account of politics in St. Vincent and the Grenadines; comments on some of the leading figures in West Indian politics; recounts his life in cricket; describes meetings in Montreal with the Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James; and tells the story of the Congress of Black Writers and the thunderclap that was the Sir George Williams Affair, that is still, thirty six years later, the most significant student action in Canadian history.
Alfie Roberts was that most organic and public of intellectuals whose life was thoroughly contaminated by existence. Like his friend, the celebrated Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Roberts located his classroom wherever people gathered. One of his favorite sayings was “Each one teach one.” It was an aphorism that appealed to his democratic spirit and belief in the capacity of individuals to be agents of change. Roberts made it his project to engage people on the issues of the day. He regarded each encounter as a pedagogical and political moment full of possibilities for transformation.
“....It is only by interacting with a wider group of people that you get to understand humanity in a more comprehensive sense…So we consciously sought that type of extension of our activities outside the university as well.” (Alfie Roberts)
Roberts was an indefatigable community builder who helped create and develop a plethora of political and cultural organizations in the Black, West Indian and Greater Montreal community. He considered it paramount that he root himself in the environment in which he lived.
“....My way was to...try to tell them that they must always ground themselves in the local history of the country...you have to look around in terms of seeing what has happened under your nose and integrate it with a wider analysis as well.” (Alfie Roberts)
“Philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it.” (Karl Marx- Theses on Feuerbach, 1845)
Alfie Roberts adopted Marx’s dictum as his personal mantra. He had long concluded that it was inadequate to wax philosophical about the state of the world while the planet and its inhabitants burned, so he sought to connect the lived experiences of ordinary people with political thought. His lifelong commitment would be to the marriage of theory and action, what Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci called “praxis”.
Roberts was neither an academic nor a prolific writer, though he was in the purest sense a bibliophile and autodidact, who had made himself an authority on subjects as broad as Caribbean, African and Soviet history, Marxist theory and Jazz music.
When Roberts succumbed to a cancer that consumed his body at a furious pace during the summer of 1996, scores of community members young and old were left bereft. Many had relied on Roberts’ wise counsel and boundless spirit. To those who read of his exploits in tattered copies of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the bible of world cricket, he was a most intriguing figure; the unflappable Vincentian teenager who in the mid-1950s had the nerve to become the first “small islander” in history to play for the West Indies, and then the cheek to leave the game before reaching his prime.
“As a boy I used to wonder why nothing ever stayed the same. I found out that this is how life is, you always return to that which you think you have accomplished and no sooner that you are done you start all over again.” (Alfie Roberts)
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Part II of Adrian Harewood's review of A View for Freedom: Alfie Roberts Speaks on the Caribbean, Cricket, Montreal and C.L.R. James edited by David Austin will be continued in the next e-newsletter.
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