The Point Is to Change the World

Selected Writings of Andaiye

Andaiye, Alissa Trotz

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771135085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Radical activist, thinker, and comrade of Walter Rodney, Andaiye was one of the Caribbean's most important political voices. For the first time, her writings are published in one collection. Through essays, letters, and journal entries, Andaiye's thinking on the intersections of gender, race, class, and power are powerfully articulated, Caribbean histories emerge, and stories from a life lived at the barricades are revealed. We learn about the early years of the Working Peopl's Alliance, the meaning asnd impact of the murder of Walter Rodney and the fall of the Grenada Revolution. Throughout, we bear witness to Andaiye's acute understanding of politics rooted in communities and the daily lives of so-called ordinary people. Featuring forewords by Clem Seecharan and Robin DG Kelley, these texts will become vital tools in our own struggles to "overcome the power relations that are embedded in every unequal facet of our lives."

PART ONE
LEARNING LESSONS FROM PAST ORGANIZING

SECTION I
THE GOOD AND BAD OF SOME EARLIER FEMINIST AND LEFT ORGANIZING IN THE REGION

ESSAY 1
The Angle You Look from Determines What You See: Towards a Critique of Feminist Politics and Organizing in the Caribbean [2002]

A PERSONAL THANK YOU TO LUCILLE MATHURIN MAIR

There is nothing I can add to the wealth of tributes that Joycelin Massiah and Peggy Antrobus paid to Lucille Mathurin Mair in their commemorative lectures of 1998 and 2000. All I can do is to offer a small personal thank you.

Lucille Mathurin was my warden at Mary Seacole Hall. That is to say, she was my warden until she refused to allow me to stay in the hall in my third year as an undergraduate. The precursor to this was that she had called me in—twice, I think—to remonstrate with me about the behavior of a gang of women I used to hang out with. She said that apart from having received complaints from others, serious students, about our raucous talk and laughter late into the night, she herself could hear us from her house nearby. She had also observed that we were cutting classes, and altogether acting as though we had not come to the university to study. I asked her why she was speaking only to me: was it because we often hung out in my room? “No,” she answered. It was because I was—not the leader of the pack; that would be claiming too much—but in some way its facilitator.

Years later, when she was, I think, Jamaica’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and I the International Secretary of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, we met at a Socialist International Conference in Venezuela. Now, our positions were clearly very different, and I have no reason to believe that she approved of the political activities of the WPA. But her face lit up when she saw me and we hugged. “You’re glad to see I got more serious, aren’t you?” I asked. “So it worked,” she laughed. I met her several times after that, especially after I joined the organized women’s movement in the region.

I still think she should have let me stay in the hall, but I thank her for refusing to act as an enabler in my determination to party my life away because, deep down, I found life confusing.

So, my old warden. This is for you, with respect and love.

WHY A CRITIQUE OF FEMINIST POLITICS IN THE REGION?

This presentation will continue the tradition begun by the first two presenters of the Lucille Mathurin Mair lecture, of using direct experience in the regional women’s movement—most directly in the movement in the English-speaking Caribbean—to raise issues about its future. While it offers a critique of feminist politics in the region, it does so from a different angle than Peggy Antrobus (2000: 25), who argued that it was the loss of energy of feminist politics from the work of feminists in the region as administrators, researchers, practitioners and organizers that was leading to the de-politicization of the work. I want to talk about the flaw within feminist politics and feminist organizing itself.

First, let me say what the critique is not. I understood from the moment I wrote the title and sub-title that they might mislead some into believing that I was going to critique feminist politics in the Caribbean from the angle of the proponents of the “male marginalization” thesis. There is no chance of that. I believe, with many other Caribbean women, that it is in all our interests to recognize and address what is happening to some sectors of men in the region, including early school-drop-out and a precipitous fall in the proportion of males in the formal education system at all levels.

But to recognize this is different from accepting a thesis that at least implies that while men are moving to the margins of the economy, the education system, and other institutions of Caribbean society, women are moving to the center. We can only believe that if we ignore how power works; for, at no time in our history have the majority of men or women been at the center of economic, political or social power. And interacting with how the hierarchies of nation, class, and race operate, there is a power hierarchy between men and women—and every Caribbean woman, of any race or age and even class, lives a reality of female subordination.

There are many personal testimonies from young women about the persistence of discrimination. Hear, for example, Gabrielle Hosein (2001: 1): “We grew up seeing how much has changed for women, while also seeing where we were still being left out.”¹

If I believe all this, why am I making this critique? In what spirit? Colleagues of mine who have worked with me as gender experts/consultants/resource persons over the last six years know how frequently I have derailed sessions by trying to explain, not too clearly, what I thought was wrong with what we were doing. What I am trying to say today, more clearly, is what I think is wrong in feminist politics, dealing with it only in relation to the region—in particular the English-speaking Caribbean—which is where I have been part of a certain experience. Thus, the critique is in the first place a self-criticism, though I hope, more useful than only that.

I think the place to start is with how we learn about power and what we learn about power from real life, as distinct from any “ism” at all. As Patricia Mohamed (1998: 7) says, we relate to the world through the way we experience it, and I would add, the way we experience the world should teach us something about how to build a movement, if that is what we want to do.

HOW AND WHAT WE FIRST LEARN ABOUT POWER

To illustrate aspects of how girls and women in the region learned about power decades ago, and perhaps still learn today, I want to begin with a page-anda-half adapted from something I began writing 25 years or so ago and never finished. The page-and-a-half began like this:

If I close my eyes against the bright, yellow sun; and the shivering trees; and the cold, empty rooftops; if I close my eyes I can see my grandmother where she used to be, rocking in her chair and singing herself a cradlesong to still the rage that grew as she grew older.

“He that is down/need fear no fall,” she would begin. “He that is down/need fear no fall/He that is low, no pride …” And her voice would falter as she came to the last line because, as she would say, each day, defiantly, “Pride yuh mus’ have. Pride yuh gotta have.”

Now I whisper to her across time, “Hey, Granny, I en crazy. Jus’ down. Not crazy.”

Then I run to the corner where my mother hides. “Look!” I plead. “She crazy. Little Jackie Horner/Hiding in her corner,” I giggle, chanting, singsong, like a child. “Little Jackie Horner/Hiding in her corner …”

Then “Ma?” I call softly, to say sorry. And the walls begin to shake, and the floor rise, and my grandmother sighs to the rhythm of our fears.

I’m not completely sure what this is about (some of what you write you don’t know is there), but I know it is about three generations of women: the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother—the grandmother, singing herself a cradlesong to still the rage that grew as she grew older; her daughter, the mother, described by the grand-daughter/narrator as crazy; and the grand-daughter/narrator herself having to defend herself against the charge (which may be her own) that she is crazy. And since I know where the story was going and where it came from, I know that it was to be about the work that each had to do in order to try not to go under. For the grandmother, it was, in part, about the work of coping with the strange death of a young husband, with what she perceived of as desertion by him and shunning by his friends, and with raising eight children without a partner when she had only low-waged “women’s skills.” For the mother, it was, again in part, about the work of trying to make herself into a normal middle-class wife after a childhood of poverty, of leaving school early, of illness, of abuse from a male relative, of what she perceived of as a lack of support—amounting to desertion—by her mother. For the grand-daughter/narrator, it was in part the work of surviving into womanhood through a maze of contradictory demands and signals from these two women. No men were involved in the physical or emotional housework of raising any of these women.

But of course, the story is also about how the lives of girls and women are affected by race and color, class and other power hierarchies. I learned the limitations placed on me by race before I learned the limitations of gender: I knew, very early, the use of the word “black” as disparagement (“Stay out de sun, Yuh want tuh turn more black?” said especially to little black girls). I didn’t understand yet what the injunction had to do with gender, but it did; blackness lowered your market value.²

I also learned early about the inequalities among nations, particularly as these determined the education of colonials. The story that was never finished continued:

In school the teacher asked, “What color is the sea?”

“Brown, teacher, brown,” we chorused.

“Brown?” she shouted. “Brown? Is how yuh mean brown? Open yuh book at page 3. Repeat after me: The sea is blue. The sea is blue. The sea is?”

“Blue, teacher, blue.”

But we knew the sea. It was where daily, boys swam, behind the wall where at Easter we all flew kites, and where, on Sunday afternoons, teenage boys would sit to catch the eyes of teenage girls riding by.

We had seen what we knew as the sea, and it was brown; brown with the mud and silt washed down by the Amazon. So we ran after school to look again, to stare at the dark, muddy water, and repeat in reluctant acquiescence, “Blue, teacher, blue. The sea is blue.”

In my own life as in the life of the grand-daughter/narrator who is only partly me, rage was, though not coherently, about all the ways that power worked against me: I was born in a colony, educated from books which not only ignored me but negated me. I was born black, of parents who were at that time both very low-waged nurses. My parents went away, my mother to continue to work as a nurse so my father could study to be a doctor and I went to primary school where I learned some of the connections between class and race or color: in primary school where no one was well-off or light-skinned, black people (called Negroes then) were superior to Indians, because closer to English ways. I left primary for secondary school where I learned the connections between class, race or color, and gender. Here, where parents of all races were professionals, civil servants and the like, and almost everyone’s ways were suitably anglicized, skin color and hair determined where we were on the ladder. Here, an Indian was not inferior to a “Negro,” neither, of course, was anyone else with a lighter skin. All this was crucial in the competition for boys: as one lighter-skinned friend told me, “I will get more than you.” I understood the earlier admonitions to stay out of the sun. The last, long quote from the story goes as follows:

At home I asked my grandmother, “Why the teacher say the sea blue?”

“You does ask too many question,” she answered, banging the pot hard against the sink. “You does ask altogether too many question.”

I looked at her, saw reflected in her face the faces of all the women at whose seeming sureness I tried to clutch: teachers in school saying “Girl, behave well, study hard, sit properly”; and pretty friends admonishing “Girl close dem book, press yuh hair nice, smile sexy”—and I smiled as I rode my bicycle past my domestic worker great-aunt standing on the corner threatening my disguise, smiled as I listened to my mother and her friends instruct me to be a good girl get a husband even while they complained about theirs. “Lord,” I prayed when I was fourteen and sixteen, “Let me be—whatever. Dumber. Prettier. Fairer. Surer.” And I embraced whatever seemed like solid ground, marveling that I could hold none.

Now I close my eyes against the bright yellow sun and “Oh!” I whisper to the grandmother rocking in the light and shadow behind my lids, “How much further down?”

Race/ethnicity/color; class; nation; gender; age: from childhood I could feel—if not understand—their interaction in my life. And this is how I came to politics. As I wrote in “The Red Thread Story,” which I had actually named “A Red Thread Story”:

Each stage of my political life started with a sense of being discriminated against in a particular place—as a citizen of a colony, for instance, or as a person of African descent; and my politics were informed first by a kind of Guyanese/West Indian nationalism, later by ideas of the Black Power movement, then by Marxism. What was consistent throughout this journey was a search for explanations of how power worked and, increasingly, of how each power relation worked in interaction with others. I always knew that I was avoiding confrontation with the power relations between men and women, but it was only in the mid-1980s that I actively began to seek out the women’s movement in the region and internationally. (Andaiye 2000: 54)

Why did I finally seek out the women’s movement in the mid-1980s?

WHAT PROPELLED ME TOWARDS THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Unlike Joycelin Massiah and Peggy Antrobus, I am not a pioneer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Forewords
• Editor’s Note: On the Politics of Precision
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part One Learning Lessons from Past Organizing
• Part Two A Different Perspective: Starting with the Unwaged Caring Work of Mainly Women We Reach all Sectors
• Part Three The Political in the Personal
• Part Four Towards Strengthening the Movement
• Afterword: Andaiye and the Caribbean Radical Organizing Tradition: Anthony Bogues
• Index