Remembering Walter
Woman's-eye View
Walter Rodney and I grew up at the same time, more or less in the same place, in Georgetown. When our generation ? his and mine - was growing up, the city was small, bordered by Lamaha Street in the North, Bent Street in the South, Water Street in the West, and Vlissengen Road in the East. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that all else that people know today as Georgetown either did not exist or was country; Kitty was country. Georgetown then had only a handful of secondary schools and the rest of the country even fewer. Of these schools, the big five were Queen's College, Bishop's High School, St Stanislaus College, St Joseph's High School, and St Rose's High School. Each was all-female or all-male. Each taught its students invaluable skills; each taught us useful values; each taught us sad snobberies: one of my earliest poems was about riding down the road, dressed in my school uniform, pretending not to see a great aunt whose greeting as my relative would have revealed the uncertainties of my background. If the physical boundaries of Georgetown were small, the social world these schools enclosed was smaller. Some of the students came from the country, some were poor, some were both ? which usually meant you were on scholarship - but we had all come to these schools to be cut to size: if the world of home did not fit the world of school because it was country or poor or both, then the world of home had to be left at home. Since Rodney went to Queen's College and I, to Bishop's at the same time, our paths crossed at fetes, school sports, debating rooms. But we weren't friends, I think because he was far less confined than I was by the narrowness of the world of those schools. One of Walter's frequent quips, later on, was that when we were growing up Georgetown was divided into North and South, as the world was divided, the North rich, the South poor. When I first met him, he lived in Bent Street, I in Newmarket. In the geography of Georgetown, he was of the South, and I, of the North. The lives of those of us lucky enough, or bright and hardworking enough, or privileged enough to be getting a secondary education in the British Guiana of the 1950s were at one level, innocent. We had gangs with names like 'Oceans 11' and 'Magnificent 7', which did nothing ganglike at all. At the same time, many of us knew that there was something else going on in the country: people were struggling for change in the old inequities of race and class and colonial status, and their struggle was being resisted by the colonial power, Britain. A movement which included Guyanese across race and across class shattered, and the country began to consolidate the racial camps which later went to war against each other. For us, in our early teens, there was an odd disjuncture between our two realities ? one was about upturning the old order of things, the other was about preserving the old order of things. Rupert Roopnaraine captured this contradictory aspect of our lives in a film he did on the events in British Guiana in and around 1953 which he called, (after a line in Martin Carter), The Terror and the Time; against a backdrop of images of political turmoil the radio plays a popular song from that era, 'How much is that doggie in the window?' Many years later Walter Rodney, Rupert Roopnaraine and I talked briefly one day about how much, like others of our generation, the trajectory of our lives had been pointed in a certain direction by the fact of having grown up in that time; it was then that we first learned that there were people, Guyanese people, who were willing to challenge forces others saw as unmovable; history lessons at school did not dwell on slave and other rebellions. Some of our families were active in the politics of national change, even though they were quite fixed on other issues of race and class and gender and people staying in their appointed places. Some of us, as we were growing up, went ourselves to the political meetings where the Jagans (Cheddi and Janet), the Burnhams (Forbes and Jessie), the Carters (Martin and Keith), Rory Westmaas, Sydney King (now Eusi Kwayana) and others defied authorities they opposed as oppressive. My path crossed Walter Rodney's next at the University of the West Indies, itself then a small world. We still weren't friends. In fact, once when he was running for some University student position I backed his opponent because she was a woman. That reason is a little embarrassing, but no more so than the reason so many of my friends supported Walter, i.e., because he was a fellow Guyanese. And maybe, to be truthful, what I knew of him frightened me. Today there are dreadlocks everywhere, sometimes on my own head. In the early 1960s in the Caribbean, every self-respecting black woman had her hair straightened, every self-respecting black male had his cropped short. These were pre-Afro days, and the only dreadlocks in sight were on the heads of fierce black men who came from the very poorest areas of Kingston, Jamaica ? and they were in our sight only because Walter Rodney started to go down from the campus to where they were, and they, with him, started to come up to where we were. You have to put yourself back into the world of our schools to see how much he had already refused to be confined in the role for which his education had been preparing him, the role of gatekeeper, barring entry to poor people. I left UWI, and while I heard about Rodney from time to time ? he received a PhD at twenty-four, he was denied entry into Jamaica a few years later in an action which precipitated wide protest and unrest, he wrote book after book, he was refused a job at the University of Guyana - I never saw him again until the mid 1970s, after he had come back home and joined with others who were forming the pre-party WPA. What he did here between 1974 and 1980 has been well-documented, even if in documents few Guyanese under forty have read. What he did was to defy authorities he opposed because they were oppressive. In that sense, he was a child of the best of what the early 1950s was about. It might take another column to write of what else he did in the six years between his return to Guyana and his death, because it was in the same period that he completed a number of books, including A History of the Guyanese Working People, two small children's books, Kofi Baadu: Out of Africa and Lakshmi: Out of India, a small political treatise, People's Power, No Dictator. He wrote everywhere ? in the car if he wasn't driving, standing on the street corner, on the stelling waiting to board the Berbice ferry, waiting for public meetings to begin in Linden, on the Corentyne, in Leonora, in Buxton, often surrounded by police ? he wrote everywhere because, he said, people who were trained as intellectuals had a duty to write and to publish as part of an ongoing debate of ideas. A thought that you didn't communicate was a wasted thought. To stay silent for fear of being wrong was to cheat yourself and others. One day I discovered how serious he was about all this: a younger WPA member was proving a case he was making by quoting Walter's Groundings With My Brothers like a holy book when Walter stunned him by saying, "I changed my mind since I wrote that." What he had changed his mind about had to do with race, one of the two abiding preoccupations of his life and his life's work; the other abiding preoccupation, about which he never changed any part of his mind, was the right of people, and particularly poor people, to be free of oppression. Early on the morning of June 14, 1980, the morning after they finally killed him, a number of WPA members were sitting in an office when someone pointed out to me, as the then editor for the WPA, that I had to draft a press release. Numb, I wrote, "Walter Rodney died last night... Walter Rodney died last night... Walter Rodney died..." until Eusi Kwayana, looking over my shoulder, took the paper from my hand and wrote the first words of what became our statement: "Our talented, committed, and much-loved brother..." He was all of that. I do not mean to make him sound perfect; with all that he could change his mind, he was often stubborn and headstrong. But he was also always brave, and he was brave on behalf of something larger than himself.
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