Abstract
There can be no doubt that the legacy of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) and its disastrous implosion, which opened the door to US invasion, has affected an entire generation of cross-Caribbean peoples seeking change, betterment and freedom from the cultural remains of British imperialism and the continuing stranglehold of US economic and cultural power. When Shalini Puri writes in her book that ‘the Revolution brought into focus both the promise of leftist politics and the squandering of that promise’, she implies that it is not so much the future in the present – which is how the hopes and strengths of many thousands of Caribbean peoples saw the ‘Revo’ – but the present in the past. ‘It is my contention,’ she argues, ‘that the Grenada Revolution is in many ways a current event, a chapter with still unfolding consequences for Caribbean history.’
But unusually for the work of an academic, her book has another purpose beyond historical and cultural analysis and the charting of the considerable impact across the Caribbean of the ‘Revo’, with the regional wake of its progress and its wreckage. Her book also explicitly carries a message of healing and renewal as much as it is an accounting of epochal failure, and this is what makes it so extraordinary. In the thirty plus years since the violent divisions and atrocious events of October 1983, I have not read another narrative like it.
I call it a narrative for it is many people’s stories along with many people’s silences of the dead and living: revolutionaries who were incarcerated for three decades; those who struck out with angry accusation; those who walked like ghosts over the memories of human beings they loved and admired in small islands changing their worlds and in doing so changing themselves, but who could in no way understand how such benign human progress could so rapidly and violently career into its reverse. And there were also many at the very heart of the process who could say, or chose to say, nothing, mainly out of the intense pain of bewilderment that they felt. Teachers, agronomists, economists, doctors, dentists, cultural and media workers, lawyers and construction engineers and workers from right across the Caribbean and beyond; from Guyana, Trinidad, St Lucia, Jamaica and Cuba and far points of the diaspora they came to Grenada to work for the progress of the ‘Revo’ as a beacon of Caribbean struggle and advancement. When Maurice Bishop so often declared, ‘One Caribbean’, they knew exactly what he meant. Their testimonies and constantly burning perplexities are vital components of Puri’s book in their telling about four years of transformation, of which the ‘Revo’s’ leaders, like Bishop himself, would privately say: ‘It ent easy man; it ent easy!’
Her book begins (and the whole book can be no more than a beginning, for the accounts of the Revolution’s surviving protagonists, many of whom, free of their physical cell walls, are now able to tell and write their records of the ‘Revo’s’ bloody self-destruction) by setting out its considerable intentions: ‘This book is simultaneously a critique, a tribute and a memorial. Its effort is to mobilize memory for egalitarian politics in the present.’ This embraces a vital task – to ‘mobilize memory’ before those who hold it within themselves in relation to the ‘Revo’ disappear from the Earth and take their memory with them. Sivanandan has shown us the imperative of this in his epochal novel of the Sri Lankan struggle, When Memory Dies, and Shalini knows, too, how cultural artefacts of poetry, song, prose, painting, calypso, dance, drama and sculpture can help to keep memory alive for the sake of Caribbean progress and struggle.
But the other question she begins to attend to is the most vital of all and is quoted from the ‘Revo’s’ finest and most popular poet Merle Collins, who would read her inspiring and insightful works like ‘Callalloo’, ‘Butterfly Born’ and ‘The Lesson’ to thousands of her empathetic compatriots at huge open air rallies. But her question, too, as much as her poetry, inhabits and still tantalises the minds of her people: ‘What I don’t understand is how did people who had a dream – and what a magnificent dream it was – end up doing what they did to each other?’ The only people who know collectively the answer to her question are those who took part in the ‘Revo’s’ final hours and tragic denouement. Puri’s book is a vital preface to their as yet unforthcoming testimony, but it is their witness that we need to know and fathom for the sake of the entire Caribbean and its people. For unless minds remember, mouths speak and hands write, memory will die and the truth of history, including that of the ‘Revo’s’ catastrophic finality, will remain unknown, unlearned from and never understood.