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.
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.
image
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.
© Copyright 1997-2005 Chronicle
World
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