John La-Rose

John was well-known as a poet, essayist, publisher, and film maker. He was editor-in-chief of New Beacon Books from its inception. He was also chair of the George Padmore Institute, an educational library and research centre housing materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and Asian descent, in Britain and continental Europe.

'As a writer, publisher and cultural activist,' says the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 'John La Rose has helped in the growth of many writers in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and America. Rarely has anybody come into contact with him without being affected by his generous, searching, modern renaissance spirit.'

Life experience with Britain
by John La Rose

At the heart of my own experience is the struggle for cultural and social change in Britain, across Europe and in the Caribbean, Africa and the Third World.

Of course, my life did not begin here. I came from Trinidad, where I had already been engaged in youth politics and trade unionism, and arrived in Britain in 1961 to make my home in London.

In 1966 I founded New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publisher, bookseller and international book service. In December of that year, I was the co-founder with Edward Kamau Braithwaite and Andrew Salkey, of the influential Caribbean Arts Movement, which later gave birth to the influential journal, Saracou.

Later I became the chairman of the Institute of Race Relations in 1972/73, during the period when the IRR was establishing its independence. I was also chairman of Toward Racial Justice, the vehicle for publishing the campaigning journal Race Today.

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I took my place with others in the Black Education Movement and was part of the significant social and educational struggles of the 1960s and 1970s:

• The fight against 'banding', or the wrongful placing of West Indian children in schools for children with learning difficulties.
• The founding of the George Padmore Supplementary School, the first of its kind, and subsequently the national association of supplementary schools.
• The creation of the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association, which published How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System.

Out of these events and circumstances came the Black Parents Movement, and I was involved with the Black Youth Movement and the Race Today Collective, in a formidable cultural and political movement fighting against arbitrary police actions and for better state education. All this culminated in the largest and most effective demonstration of black political power in Britain over the last 40 years - the New Cross Massacre Black Peoples Day of Action on March 2, 1981.

I can remember the magnificence of that day when 15-20,000 black people and their supporters, under the banner of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, demonstrated through the streets of London. They were mobilised to protest the mishandling by police officers of investigations into the fire which claimed the lives of 13 young blacks at a birthday party in January 1981 at the home of a West Indian family in New Cross Road, South London.
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But my experiences are not necessarily unique. There are many others who have been involved in the struggle for cultural and social change.

I have tried to highlight these various experiences through a series of talks and conversations, held at the George Padmore Institute, in which prominent figures spoke of their experiences of life with Britain.

• Pearl Connor-Mogotsi on her pioneering cultural work in theatre and film.
• Garth Crooks on being prominent in football and sport.
• Courtenay Griffiths on the interaction and dynamic between the experiences of his youth and his development into a young professional barrister.
• Linton Kwesi Johnson on his early experience in Britain and his first moves into poetry, public performance and music.
• Michael La Rose on the rise of the sound system in popular culture and social life.
• Alex Pascall on the historic BBC radio programme 'Black Londoners'.
• Colin Prescod on becoming an academic sociologist and social analyst.

What is important about all these experiences and contributors, is that they, like myself, have a long track record of personal involvement in the struggle against racism and to overcome racial disadvantage. Confident in resisting, transforming and transcending these difficulties, we are contributing to the humanisation of our society.

Social exclusion and cultural creativity
by John La Rose

For tens of millions of the world's people, especially during the period of colonial- ism in their histories, "social exclusion" from regular work and income has been a long term and dire experience. Yet social exclusion was not social death; social exclusion, with its enforced leisure, produced forms of cultural creativity which engendered marvels of reality, "le realisme merveilleux," in Jacques Stephan Alexis's phrase or in the words of Alejo Carpentier: "lo real maravilloso."

Looking back at the Agora in ancient Greece, we see the outlines of this process. The Greek skole or leisure, from which words like scholar and scholarship originate, allowed for time, for discussion, for debate and interaction, which underlined the development of philosophy, drama and democracy. It was the rigor of slave labor which made all this leisure possible.

In the Caribbean the unemployed, in their enforced leisure, created Calypso, the famous mass popular Carnival and Steel-band. It was the unemployed from Behind the Bridge in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who created the language, the music, the dance, the instruments, the organizations, which gave birth and originality to these institutions. They were like any other artists - with time for withdrawal into intense moments of creativity, working for hours and hours at their art form and producing brilliant episodes of invention.

Each of these marvels of creativity also engenders extensive forms of productive activity: carnival bands, calypso tents, carnival tourists, more hotels, the invention and production of unique instruments for a wholly new type of orchestra, work for tuners who tune them, compositions, studios, agents, concerts, exports, travels for orchestras, tours internally and abroad, arrangers, cassettes and CDs, programs for the radio, TV, books, journals, the press.

The same is true for the genius of the unemployed in Kingston, Jamaica, who, in their leisure created Rude Bwoy and Reggae, of whom the most famous exponent was Bob Marley. No one, in the original moment of creativity, would have dreamt of such marvelous creations, especially coming from such excluded sections of society, from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.

We have only to think of the massive popular creativity of African Americans in their world of social exclusion and segregation: their Negro spirituals, the black church with its sustaining spirituality, its inspired and influential musical forms, its foundations for oral expressiveness and invention, its inspiration for, literature; and then the blues, jazz and now rap, and the constant inventiveness in language, dance, music, art, style and fashion.

This creativity, provides a praxis of transculturation, profound in its world impact and interaction among the peoples of our planet. (It) provides a different apprehension of social exclusion beyond the negative function of social death.

Excerpts from "Unemployment, Leisure and the Birth of Creativity," The Black Scholar, Volume 26, No.2. Copyright John La Rose.

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