The Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture

 Kenneth Ramchand 

              The Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture 2021

ONE: After the Event

I am grateful to the Department of Literatures in English  for inviting me to deliver the Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture on the subject  ‘fifty years of the teaching of West Indian Literature at the Universty of the West Indies.’ These  years  run in close parallel with 50 years of my life. I’ve resigned three times and retired twice, but I have never left. This has been my life. If some jumbie had taken me up to the heights of Irish town, showed me what could be mine, and then  as lagniappe said unto me “Stop reading books and talking about books and we will make you Usain Bolt”,  I would have staggered a little and then said “Get thee behind me, Satan”. I cannot let go of the intimacy that exists between my life and the career of teaching  literature at the University. 

As we proceed, I will take notice of the falling undergraduate student numbers here as in other parts of the world . In passing I will try to see how we can account for this shift at our University, not forgetting that, unfortunately, we are not and never have been islands unto ourselves, free to get on with our buisness of becoming  without being genocided, enslaved, indentured, colonised  or merged  with the  lumpen proletariat of  the global village or infiltrated by  theory- infested talking heads of the Ph D factories.   In the closing part of my presentation I want  to come after the event as it were, and ask what it means to teach literature in general and what, more particulalrly, it is to teach West Indian Literature to West Indians.  

I had better say right now that as a teacher of literature and as a critic I have always seen it as my function to bring forward the names of books and writers; to make available from my research any information that would clear away the obstacles to reading;  and to  make the writings themselves available for readers to feel and see for themselves. There are lots of other things critics, scholars and teachers may usefully do but I have never lost sight of what I consider to be my profession’s simple primary function.

 

 

 TWO: Groundsing

I wish this lecture could have been live, and I could be on the Mona campus again where so many things and people helped to grow my consciousness and  make me clarify what I was about as a reader of literature and a teacher of literature.  

Jamaica was the first island in which I lived and worked upon returning from study and teaching abroad. A wire fence separated our house from that of George Beckford. My children went through the fence to play with his children and I slipped over to join in the Appleton and the noisy  radical discussions of University and society that went on in the crowded veranda. Beckford made me see how sublimated my politics was  in my criticism ( too sublimated perhaps). Beckford made me understand in scientific terms the profundity of the bonds, and the pity of the  ruptures, that had been socially engineered in the modern age   between literature, culture  and society. I don’t think he ever read Foucault but in his backyard he gave Caribbean flesh and blood to elements in the order of things that Foucault was to theorise later. One of his favourite chants was “Cumper must go”, a war cry against a non-West Indian Professor he considered irrelevant to our purposes.  I  believe George made me a better reader of society and books. He also caused me to be more combative. 

I was drawn to the village of Papine before it was re-discovered. I would park up AW 304 and walk to the rumshop, take in the secondary  ganja smell   and  watch mankind reggaeing by the jukebox, as I listened  for  the Jamaican tone of voice that would help me to hear the writers better. From Papine Village a neat well-dressed old man with an ancestral face  came every week with lettuces and tomatoes and with  many stories to tell; and there was Vel our home help, an upright young woman  who asked my permission to give the children ganja tea when they were getting the cold, Mel whose beauty and character still live with us in the lignum vitae carving of her head and bust that was given to me by her boyfriend. 

At long last I was meeting and living  among the ordinary people of the Jamaican books I had encountered in the Cold and the White. As some of you may know, I have never called these folks “the folk”. They were not a vanishing tribe of elusive Arawaks, they were the living stuff of the books I was reading and they had a life in real life. 

So now, back home, the University could not be an ivory tower as it tends to be when I work as a hired voice in other countries. But the College of the University of London, I had come to, was in many ways an alien growth, still under foreign tutelage. 

 

 

 THREE: Under the Banyan Tree

Early in January 1969, I was standing outside my office admiring the roots of a spreading banyan tree, preparing to go into my office, when the circumspect Edward Baugh came down the corridor past the office of Elsa Goveia,  looked at the sign on my office door and said, half -amused half- surprised,  “So you are inventing your own Department now?”  I  had not put it to myself like that but he was right . I had  taken off the sign that proclaimed me “Dr Kenneth Ramchand, English Literature” and replaced it with  “Kenneth Ramchand, Literatures in English”. 

Within two years the old  British Universty English curriculum was dismantled and we were in fact, if not in name, ‘Literatures in English’.  We lived so in common law for a few years, after which the name- change was solemnised . A few decades later an American University would make a big noise about how revolutionary they were because they were going to be the first University to adopt the name ‘Literatures in English’ . I am sure they knew better. We should have patented the name and raked in some hefty money to put in the Vice Chancellor’s reparation kitty. 

Thirty years ago (May 8, 1991) when I was invited to celebrate the twenty-first   anniversary of the teaching of West Indian Literature, I called the talk ‘West Indian Literature in the 90’s: Blowing up the Canon’ . Today’s generation of teachers and students might not realise what  a little colonial enclave we were, and why there had to be a revolution  in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. This is what I found in 1969:

 

(i)The curriculum in English was like the curriculum of a provincial British University. It ran from Old English to Middle English up to Modern English, stopping at safely dead writers like  T.S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. 

(ii)The teaching staff included West Indians, but on all three  campuses  the ‘English’ Departments were run by non-West Indians, and a non-West Indian was close to being appointed Professor and Head of the Department. 

(iii)There was no full Undergraduate course in West Indian Literature. 

(iv) There was  no course about,  and there were  no books from the Commonwealth (Indian, Australian, Canadian, Indian, New Zealand).  Maureen Warner was beginning African Literature written in English, and there was a course in American Literature 

(v)There were one or two students doing postgraduate work for the M.A. degree, but there was no drive to encourage Post Graduate Studies in West Indian Literature or in  any other area.

The 1991 lecture boasted that 

(i)an academic discipline called West Indian Literature had  been established and it was  the core element in the undergraduate programme; [I wonder if we have lost the idea of a core]

 

(ii)the teaching staff is mostly West Indian and the leadership qualities and qualifications of natives are now fully recognised; 

 

(iii)West Indian Literature is taught at every level in the Undergraduate program; 

 

(iv) other Literatures in English are an integral part of our offerings 

 

(v)West Indian Literature is  the main target of our Post-Graduate research;

 

(vi) there is  an  annual Conference  dedicated to West Indian Literary Studies; and

 

(vii) instrumentally for me, West Indian texts have made their way officially  into the secondary schools, and our graduates were the teachers. 

The lecture also referred to a number of stirrings in the literary scene happening at the very least in parallel with what the Department was trying to do.  Highlighted in the talk also were brief resumes of the emphatic re-entry of women’s writing, the  growth in critical writings, the comeback of the short story, and developments in the analysis of orality as literature. 

Ominous in these writings was the disillusionment with the glorious political kingdom that had set in  after the the new day and the brighter sun of an independence we slunk into separately while the corpse of the federation was still warm. Emphasis was placed on the work of Olive Senior -  for its exploration of what was called “the orphan condition” and the unanchoring of our societies and persons, its creation of irrepressible female heroines and its registering of violence, and disrespect, and the virtual  rape of  all the sanctities we knew. All of this informed the story ‘Country of the One-Eyed God’ in which one recognised the anger that was  settling in as the defining social characteristic of West Indian societies  in the post-independence period.

One of the themes of the presentation was that British Literature had been shifted from being at the centre of our work in the Department and was now one of the Literatures in English that we were reading and teaching.  

For me, this meant that at the undergraduate level we could invite our students to read and think about  outstanding books and authors from nations that wrote in one of the new   varieties  of “English” that had become national languages. We had sufficient knowledge of the history of these  former colonies of  their languages to feel their connections with us and with our society. These defining features of our literary scene are taken for granted today,  but it took some doing to bring us  to this point. 

Enough had been going on to suggest that the time had come, but in all Universities, academics find it hard to be born again. Some preferred a gradualist approach and some actually said that we needed a period of preparation for independence, or did these slaves  mean apprenticeship? When, at St Augustine,  we were introducing the innovative M.A. by Coursework and Short Dissertation that, incidentally, was quickly adopted by other Departments in the Faculty of Arts, one of our members expressed the view that it was premature. The University authorities probably thought it was a luxury or an indulgence  and they made it clear that we could do it but there would be no additional funding. 

  

FOUR: The Hectic Years

I  want to go back to those exciting years on the Mona campus when the student numbers for Literature were rising, when students occupied the Creative Arts Centre, when Wilson Harris agreed to come to Mona as a writer in residence , when reggae conquered the music kingdom, when at the Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Langauge Studies, hosted by us, one of my Ph D students frightened V.S. Naipaul by shouting out from the back of the room that he should be shot, a time when Nettleford danced and Morris, Goodison, Scott, Wayne Brown and Mc Neil sang, when Trevor Rhone and the Reckords were livening the theatre scene, when Alex Gradussov and Sylvia Wynter were running the  ‘Jamaica Journal’,  and Michael Manley was preparing to be Joshua.

I still remember literature fun times with  Carolyn Cooper, Gloria Lynn. Marjorie Firman, Dennis Scott (Jamaica), Rhonda Cobham, Kamla Persad, Patrick Quan Kep (Trinidad), Wyk Williams (Guyana), Carl Wade, (Barbados) and Rolstan Adams from Grenada. These were students from all the islands and what a rich mix we were. Some moments with Post Graduate students  have lived with me.

Wayne Browne (who sent me poems before I came to Jamaica) told me that if he had to prove the obvious fact  that a  certain writer was no writer at all, then he would have to think again about whether he wanted to do a thesis with me. And Timmy, Timothy Callender, explained to me that I deemed his first chapter rubbish because he was high high high when he wrote it and I could only understand it if I was high too. I took the proffered holy weed but it only made things worse. I contrived to protect him for two years from having his grant withdrawn, during which time he produced several short stories and began a novel. I think his works justified my having contrived  to grant him the first Post Graduate Scholarship in Creative Writing at the UWI! Another one of my PG’s held it against me that I was holding back on him because I wasn’t lending him the books I was reading to understand Wilson Harris, even after I told him that my secret source for gaining insight into the Guyanese author was to read each of the books again and again till I was drowning in it. Actually,I think this applies to all works of art.

In those days there was my close association with Kamau (who gave me a rare copy of N.E.Cameron’s two volume  The Evolution of the Negro), and there was our work together. We founded the journal Savacou for which, to correct the false record, I did a lot of legwork,  joint-edited the first six issues and took part in planning future issues, until my inputs were not needed any more. The great Elsa Goveia, our first Professor of West Indian history gave me encouragement and start-up money, and my Edinburgh friend who was running the Herald Printery at the time gave us reduced prices. 

For a long time after the still-birth of the West Indian Federation, and up to now, my only consciously held  ideology was being West Indian,   If there were un-discussed  ideological differences between myself and Kamau,  we were quite happy to work together for a free and unforced cultural poetics. Those who did not like what was beginning to happen whispered about a Ramchand-Brathwaite axis. There were other more malignant whispers. I knew than that we were living in a small  and insecure place. 

My life at Mona fixed me on a course that absorbed many tributaries but never changed its character.  It made me understand that in The West Indian Novel and its Background, I was  thinking about culture and society as if literature and the form of  literature really mattered.   The conviction I had that literature is nothing if it doesn’t reach ordinary people’s minds and feelings developed muscles in the years at Mona. 

I left for Trinidad in 1975, and my obsessions  got worse. For ten years, to no avail, Literature and the values of literature got introduced to the ordinary  readers of  the column ‘Matters Arising’  in the Trinidad Guardian. People in the public gallery who came to follow political debates in the Senate found themselves feeling the feelings that humanised the subjects  in whose names politicians were playing draughts to hold or gain power. That too came to nothing. But my soul went marching on.

To friends who  kindly reminded me that I should be writing scholarly works or  trying my hand at novels instead of wasting my time on outreach activities,  I could have said “Everything we do  under the sun is a waste of time”,  or refer them  to the philosopher poet of Ecclesiastes: “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” As the poet of Ecclesiastes himself finally declares, the greater wisdom lies in enjoying your work while you are doing it. But let’s leave the Universe for now, and look at the University. 

           FIVE: Where We Are Going Wrong

 

If I were asked  to  suggest particular reasons for the decline  in  the numbers of students  applying to do Literatures in English, I would begin by looking at the semester system which doubles the stress on students and teachers and which, by frequency, adds more importance than ever to examinations. Sometimes, with four weeks to go your teaching is paused because students are only thinking of the imminent exams. 

In the old days you had a bunch of students for a year, you could watch them develop over the year, you got to ‘know’ them and their handwriting, and most importantly you got them to immerse in the literary texts and discover the joy and the pain of immersion in texts that they had to live with for a whole year.  The semester, on the other hand, is one and done, and the student moves on, free to forget what has been got out of the way. At its worst, the system leads to a free for all and staff and students would be hard put  to discover connections between the semester courses that are laid out. To come to the point: with the introduction of the  semester system we have lost the fiction of there always being a core, a  core that allows us to knowingly embrace the illusion of a centre that can hold.

The second particular I would look at is the place of literature in the secondary schools. My work began in 1966,  before I came to the UWI, with the publication of an anthology  for  teachers and students in schools (and, in my mind, for adults who had left school) which was illustrated with photographs  supplied by the authors in most cases, a map of the islands showing where the authors came from, a glossary of words and phrases not likely to be found  in the usual dictionaries, and an appendix titled “Suggestions for Questions and Discussions” that disavowed any purpose related to examinations. It never crossed my mind that I should supply model answers. Once in Jamaica our campaign to give West Indian Literature an official place in the school syllabus took me and Cecil Gray out of Kingston to schools in rural Jamaica under the aegis pf Rex Nettleford’s Extra-Mural Department.

The narratives in the book exemplified the variety of narratives in our literature  and they together suggested a narrative of the West Indian experience. The photographs of and selections from non-West Indian witnesses and observers were intended to emphasise the dramatic appearance of West Indians telling their own story at last. Of the Introduction all I have time to say is that it was a declaration or manifesto that has always influenced my teaching and my outreach activities. The book was honoured with a Preface which, as an unknown in another country, I asked  the then Vice-Chancellor  Sir Philip Sherlock to write. 

Incidentally, it was the same Sir Philip who I threatened like a good Fidelista,  that history would not absolve him  if he did not agree to purchase at a ridiculously low price a manuscript that the author Wilson Harris  would willingly sell to the UWI. Thus by impertinence began the necessary project of gathering authors’ manuscipts at the UWI which I had been told the University does not do. Before I got here we obtained the papers of Roger Mais and a manuscript from Michael Anthony. 

The third issue I would list is the effect of economism in the world. What I mean is clearly stated in Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful which entered my bloodstream decades ago: 

If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to peace or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’, you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow or prosper. 

That is the challenge that has ever faced the Arts and the Humanities and that has become more urgent now as the third world war rages and civilisations are collapsing all round the globe. [Do you all know that instead of cleaning up their mess, the political and capitalist architects of doom are looking to evacuate earth, and head for the moon to continue kiling  lunatics, lovers and poets? ]

The fourth issue may sound contentious but it is a fact that as teachers of literature we have not sufficiently encouraged our students to pay serious attention to what John Stuart Mill referred to as “the culture of the feelings”. One day Mill realised that a heavy regime of “book-learning” was dehumanising him. As teachers of literature we have to  check up on our own perspectives and our own relationship to the writings we teach. Only then can we begin to search for ways of teaching that might help our students to discover the culture of the feelings, to realise empathy  and to see the need for  the principle of  equity to be operative at every level of society. These are the pillars of humane living that have been turned into rubble by economism. 

 

 

          SIX: Finding the Lost Literature

A teacher learns as he goes along  and he encourages his students to do the same. In a recent book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), George Saunders describes a master class he conducts through the Russian short story with a class of six students selected from between six and seven hundred applicants, the chosen six being “some of  the best young writers” in America. It is one of the most engaging books about reading and writing that I have seen. The seven short stories chosen as texts are reproduced in the book along with the conversations with his students and an appropriate amount of teeing- up by the Professor. It is a book we all have a lot to learn from about teaching, reading, writing, society and life. It is exactly the kind of proceeding I would like to see being carried out in relation to our literature.

In an essay called ‘The Lost Literature of the West Indies’, I began with the physically lost literature that our researchers need to retrieve. This was  only   the  prelude to a more compelling theme: most of our literature is lost literature because it is not being read properly or taught properly or being fed into our society as a shaping force that can transform our lives and our society and our world. Finding lost literature is not the same as writing essays on books that are known about but perhaps deservedly not widely read.

I drifted in my teaching towards using extracts from novels as in West Indian Narrative  or selected short stories. This started to happen  after I realised that The West Indian Novel and its Background  only prepared the way for another book about the evolution of  West Indian prose. I  tried to raise interest in a history of our short fiction  by publishing an article claiming that most of the West Indian novels up to the 1960’s, and even as late as Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) are collections of short stories in disguise.  [I wasn’t making joke]  I shall have more to say about thIs and about how much the native short story has shaped the novel, the  less indigenous inherited form. 

For now I draw attention to one of  the short stories in a projected work to be called The Book of the West Indian Short Story. This  short short story  is called ‘The Bridge’ and was written  by Janice Shinebourne. It is not flash fiction though it has more life and poetry in it than flash fiction. With small groups of students, I have several times used it to do  with more economy and concentration on language  the things that  George Saunders does so inspiringly  in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The efficacy of the method is proved by the fact that I have worked it not with the best young writers in Trinidad but with  undergraduates who come to us from our secondary schools where literature has not been doing too well.  From this story the students inched up from just noticing or being struck by items in the text to making tentative propositions about history, culture, landscape, nature, love, life, loss, regret, death and slow dying. They also came up with appreciations of how writing has the power to stir feelings and arouse thought. 

The best teaching is not  telling people what to feel or think. Carrying exercises like these into extended fictions like whole novels or long short stories as bravely used by Saunders may call for  some discreet plotting by the lecturer but I have no doubt the method  produces an encounter that is as much a learning experience for the lecturer as for the class.

 

 SEVEN: Punching Above our Weight

I beg to close by referring to a Brtish Academy Report of September 2008 entitled, ‘Punching our weight: the humanities and social sciences in public poicy’. This is constructive reading for all of us. The Report notices firstly  that government policy-making has not benefited from the cross-departmental ways of seeing and thinking to be found in literature, the arts  and the humanities. Secondly, it notices that we do not take ourselves seriously as a professional and technical body with unique insights into human nature and  human interactions and as visionaries  with more capacity to imagine the shape of things to come than experts in  any of the more mechanical disciplines. 

I think that the time has come for us to rise to the challenge and actively promote  our work as having a major part to play in policy planning for the making of a better world. This requires finding a way to retain our free sensibility while negotiating  its application to the problems of a troubled world. Einstein did not make the bomb but neither did he try to stop it. We cannot afford such neutrality. I think we have a duty to find out what  we really are or can be  and take definite steps to make saving interventions.

I close with announcing that the proposed theme of the  third international conference of Friends of Mr Biswas is ‘Punching Above Our Weight’.   I do not see why this journey of finding the true self  cannot be undertaken in collaboration with the UWI, the UTT and other tertiary institutions in the region. 

WednesdayJune 2, 2021

(4449 words)