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Reading Time 9 mins
June 16, 2021
BDN is pleased to share Dr. Laurie Lambert’s talk, “Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution,” which she presented at the 2021 virtual African Liberation Day Celebrations hosted by the Grenada African Liberation Day Organizing Committee (GALDOC), May 25, 2021. The presentation was primarily excerpted from her acclaimed book of the same name.
Read the post and join the conversation.
BDN Editors
Thank you to the organizers for the invitation to present. I am going to read a section from my book, Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution. It’s a book of literary criticism, analyzing the literature of the revolution through the lens of gender and specifically the work of Caribbean women writers. The passage I’m reading is from my chapter on the work of Merle Collins. This excerpt discusses her novel Angel, a coming of age story that also outlines Grenada’s radical history.
This section is about the end of the revolution in 1983. 
In the final third of the novel, Collins begins to explore tensions between Angel’s generation and that of her parents. The setting is Grenada in the 1970s. Leader (pseudonym for Gairy) has now been in power for two decades. The tensions in this period come about as a result of the antagonism between Leader and the burgeoning revolutionary movement led by Chief and Horizon (pseudonyms for Bishop and the NJM).
Angel’s transition to womanhood occurs just as she discovers her ability to grasp issues surrounding race, politics, and power and how these issues matter in Grenada, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. She attends the UWI in Mona, Jamaica, and begins to explore Black Power politics with her colleagues from other islands. Upon her return to Grenada, she takes up a teaching post and tries out her newfound political identity in different ways.
In a scene involving Angel and her father, Allan, we learn that Allan has kept a framed picture of Leader on the living room wall in the family home.[1] He returns home one evening to find that the picture is missing. Allan questions Angel as to the picture’s whereabouts, and she says that the picture is broken and that she has placed it under Allan’s bed.
The gesture is highly symbolic, simultaneously displacing Leader as a father figure in Grenadian politics and challenging Allan’s authority as the head of the household. As they argue, Angel reveals that the picture of Leader is a source of embarrassment and anxiety for her. The friction between father and daughter is illustrative of the generational and ideological gap between the majority of the older people, who support Leader, and the younger set, who support Chief and Horizon. Angel is too young to fully grasp the good that Leader achieved in the 1950s, nor does she interpret his leadership as a symbol of black power.
For Angel’s generation, Leader’s blackness is not enough to legitimize his authority or prove his commitment to the nation. Allan’s response to Angel is similar to the response Gairy cheekily offered to young Black Power radicals in Grenada during the early 1970s: If you believe in black power, then why not support a black man representing a majority-black population? Allan chastises his daughter’s seeming hypocrisy. Allan’s perspective suggests that the gains Leader brought to the peasant class during the colonial period still held sway in the minds of some Grenadians of Allan’s generation, even in the face of Leader’s later corruption. For these older folks, Leader was the first black politician to stand up to the large landowners and bourgeoisie, who were mainly white or mixed race.
Leader’s ability to claim power represented a resounding defeat of the nation’s high brown elite, which never recovered political power. Leader’s dark-skin complexion is referenced as proof of his fidelity to the people. Allan’s mention of “high brown people,” on the other hand, can be read as an allusion to an elite class of Grenadians and to several leftist Caribbean political leaders from this time who happened to be “brown” or mixed race, including Bishop and Unison Whiteman in Grenada and Michael Manley in Jamaica.[2]
Manley’s leftist politics are part of what Allan criticizes when he tells Angel she has learned “so much stupidness in Jamaica.” Indeed, when Angel tries to argue that distinguishing between “high brown” and “black” is pointless since they are all black and fighting for a better quality of life for the poor, Allan retorts, “That is what you think, that is the communist nonsense they telling you.” Allan thinks of communism as an objectionable ideology causing the younger generation to forget their roots, leading them to be unnecessarily drawn into international political conflicts. He prefers Leader’s more locally grounded vision.
This moment provides an opportunity to understand how many Grenadians wanted to opt-out of the Cold War and chose not to understand Grenada’s decolonization process as part of a global, diasporic project of liberation. During the 1960s and 1970s, many leftist political movements in the Caribbean, particularly those associated with the Non-Aligned Movement (as Grenada was), were labeled “communist” by the more right-leaning leaders, even if they did not identify as such. This was an attempt to discredit the Left by burdening the term communism with negative connotations.[3]
In the novel, the political party Horizon envisions itself as a part of a cadre of third world revolutions, and as such, it is dismissed as a mere communist organization by Allan, who, in his resistance to Marxism-Leninism, is representative of many in his generation. But these young, leftist leaders were not deterred by their detractors. They sought a united Caribbean region, like the one that was sought but then dismantled in the short-lived federation project of the 1950s. For them, too much emphasis on nationalism was part of what led their elders to the failure of the Federation. Angel’s generation sees communism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and African socialism as real alternatives to capitalism, which they recognize as the centerpiece of the colonial apparatus. They were actively engaged in interpreting these ideologies for Caribbean contexts.
Angel rejects Allan’
s view of nationalism and his critique of communism. Instead, she takes a stand for regional solidarity across linguistic borders by evoking Fidel Castro and Cuba. The capitalism/communism binary animates their discussion, but Allan does not have a robust response for his daughter. Angel exposes the way American and English news sources have shaped her father’s viewpoint. Since Allan has no concrete critique of communism or how it might work in the Caribbean, Angel is not ready to acknowledge the validity of some of his concerns. The good that Leader achieved in the 1950s is of no interest to her, just as the possibilities presented by communism are of no interest to Allan. In some ways, they were each influenced by the leaders they most identified with, each carrying different messages about Caribbean identity and freedom.
Searching for a Third Way
While Allan and Angel represent generational and ideological divisions, Collins uses Doodsie to mediate between the two and to present more complex views of leadership. Through Doodsie, she explores the idea of a revolutionary consciousness untethered to either communist or capitalist ideology. Doodise is in favor of Chief, Horizon, and the revolution. She is not interested in aligning herself with a particular ideology; instead, she favors a commonsense approach where things will “go good.” For her, it means supporting political practices that are not necessarily linked to theory or book learning. Her education is mainly informal; therefore, she evaluates these practices through observation and in light of her own experiences. Doodsie has always been suspicious of Leader, and as local support for him dwindles, and Chief becomes more popular, she listens carefully to what Chief and Horizon are proposing for Grenada.
Her support for them is never presented as a shift toward communism. Instead, she focuses on what she understands to be the value of Horizon’s proposals for the community versus the abuse of power she sees in Leader’s behavior. I read Doodsie’s support for Horizon coupled with her rejection of a named ideology as a desire to approach revolution cautiously. Doodsie behaves as if this caution might somehow save her from the potential violence and trauma she already knows the political process entails. Her circumspection is not simply support for Horizon that does not want to be named but also support for particular principles of revolution that may fall outside the version sanctioned by the political party itself.
Doodsie represents an attempt to redefine the revolutionary process from below. She is a bridge between her own generation and that of Angel. This is not only about finding a middle ground but also about Doodsie’s freedom to shape revolutionary possibility according to her own vision. Melda, one of Angel’s neighbors, is another character of Doodsie’s generation through whom we see resistance to established ideologies of revolution. Late in the novel, after Horizon has been in power for several years, Angel’s community grapples with rumors that an internal power struggle has taken over Horizon and that the party has put Chief under house arrest—a fictionalization of the final days of the NJM in October 1983. Melda insists that the party is wrong, regardless of party rules, to put Chief under house arrest since the will of the people trumps the will of the party. The people support Chief, she rightly points out.
As Doodsie tries to explain the situation to Melda, Melda interrupts her in frustration. Through Melda and Doodsie, Collins disarticulates the vision of revolution promoted by Horizon. These women characters exemplify how the masses took ownership of the revolution and, near the end, came to resent the party politics that interrupted a process to which they felt closely connected. In this way, the end of the revolution is a struggle within the party, but also between the party and the people. The gulf between the aspirations of the people and the aims of the party is similar to the divergence that crops up between Leader and members of his political base after he was in office too long—another instance of repetition in Collins’s reconstruction of events between these two periods of political change. Collins is again underlining the way politicians’ mishandling of power causes the politics of the nation to shift in directions that hurt many Grenadians. In such instances, revolution becomes a source of violence and trauma because in this fatal shift during the revolution’s final weeks, members of the People’s Revolutionary Army assassinate Chief and his comrades.
The assassination of Chief is not represented in the novel. However, the time immediately after his death is described as a time of nationwide fear and confusion. Collins keeps the focus on Angel’s and her family’s experience of these events. Angel and one of her brothers, Rupert, argue over whether it is more important to resist American imperialism or to resist the council. Through this conversation, Collins exposes readers to the difficult position Grenadians were put in as a result of conflict between Bishop and the party. Rupert thinks that Horizon is at fault for the violence and refuses to support the party and the council any further. He was at the fort and witnessed the confusion there just before the army killed Chief. [4]
Angel, like her mother, tries to maintain a balanced view, not siding with the party or with Chief. Rupert excoriates her for vacillating, and she decides to join the council in resisting the U.S. invasion. It is not an easy decision for Angel, given her devastation at Chief’s death and Rupert’s stance, but she finds it more important to take a stand against imperialism. In conversation with her family, Angel compares this critical moment of anti-imperialist struggle to the 1951 anticolonial struggle. It takes a tragedy for her to finally see a connection between the two periods. Angry at the collapse of a revolution in which she had invested so much, she searches for hope in a moment of hopelessness. Doodsie and Allan sympathize with Angel but do not buy her argument. Angel’s speech is typical of the compulsion to narrate revolution and radicalism in victorious terms. This, I propose, is how radical movements in the Caribbean secure support and legitimacy for their agendas during times of contested political transition—by claiming connection to a triumphant legacy.
Angel’s inability to convince her parents of the legitimacy of the Interim Army Council and the illegitimacy of the U.S. invasion, however, represents a break in this cycle of narrating revolution as vanquishing imperialism. The reality is more complex, with anti-colonial revolution absorbing some colonial relations. The fratricidal assassinations that mark the end of the Grenada Revolution brought a mixture of shame, fear, confusion, guilt, and trauma to the Grenadian public and to the narrative of revolution. In Collins’s writing, therefore, we find a questioning of revolution as a response to colonial empire via a working through of the complicated history of radicalism in the nation.
[1] The scene is presented on pp. 202–217 of Collins, Angel.
[2] Manley, the prime minister of Jamaica from March 1972 to November 1980, came from an upper-class mixed-race Jamaican family, supported democratic socialism, and maintained close ties with Fidel Castro.
[3] Jamaica Kincaid describes this phenomenon in A Small Place, published in 1987. Dionne Brand hints at it as well in her own work. In her 1994 Bread out of Stone, Brand goes so far as to suggest that anyone who seemed vaguely intimidating could be labeled a communist.
[4] This and the following quotations are from Collins, Angel, 290–348, passim.
Acknowledgments:
- BDN extends thanks to the University of Virginia Press for permission to republish the chapter and profound thanks to Dr. Laurie R. Lambert for facilitating the process.
Laurie R. Lambert, Secretary of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her research and teaching interests include Black Feminism, Caribbean Literature and History, Literatures and Cultures of American Imperialism, Black Radicalism, and African Diasporic Literature and History.