Cecil GutzmoreGRIOTS JOE Higgs calls Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) "A giant from the little island of Jamaica." Just right. Garvey is the only Jamaican that the title "First National Hero" tended to belittle. Correspondingly any attempt to present him in terms of "American [US] experience" is also dangerously partial. He was the greatest global African philosopher-activist of the twentieth century, of all time really.
The film "Marcus Garvey: Look for me in the Whirlwind" is a document extraordinarily unworthy of its subject. At its best it is a glorious mobilisation of sometimes fine testimony from some of the black survivors who as children encountered Mr Garvey. One of these, Jamaican domiciled Sister Samad, tells us at the end of the film: "He left us a legacy of 'I AM'" I was tempted to think that one of these witnesses was retailing a story I once heard Queen Mother Moore tell of a black Southern crowd getting to its feet and against the intimidation of a racist sheriff and insisting: "Speak, Garvey. Speak." Then the material confirmed that this other witness was herself from New Orleans precisely the city I recall Queen Mother Moore mentioning in the thrilling tale she told us to the Los Angeles State of the Race Conference in 1977/78.
What makes the film so terrible is the way in which great resources are either just stupidly wasted or deliberately used to the purpose of besmirching Garvey's reputation. One does not need him to be presented as the perfect embodiment of black humanity. But deliberate distortion can have no place in a document that did not declare itself fictional. Those resources included money from US institutions facilitating the acquisition of good archival footage and travel both to locations as well affording access not only to both Garvey's sons but also to the best people currently working on Marcus Garvey including Professors Tony Martin, Robert Hill and Winston James as well as our own Professor Rupert Lewis and Beverley Hamilton, with one white female scholar and the miss-informer Clarence Walker tossed in for the multi-racial funders/audience. How in these circumstances was so misleading a film produced?
Part of the problem, I suspect, was that the film writer, a woman who is no Garvey scholar, settled on a dramatic story-line too early. The film-maker stuck too doggedly to the notion that the story to be told was that of the "American Experience" Garvey. Now this need not be harmful: but it will certainly be disastrous if, as in this instance, America is taken as the world. I once heard a GI in the UK say only minimally in jest "I am going back to the world."
The filmmaker's head is of that ilk. More important, though, is the role of Professor Hill. He is an indefatigable scholar and a bright man of broadly Jamesian-Marxist persuasion. He has ended up with Marcus Garvey as his lifework but does not in fact like Garvey's politics or personality. I concluded as much years ago on reading Professor Hill's introductory essay to his published collection of Garvey's late 1930's journal The Blackman. Hill does not appear to mind how any facet of Garvey's life is presented. His proviso might be that the claim should not contradict or be unsupportable by a document he knows of. But even that proviso may not hold completely.
We are in an age when alleged biography can embrace fiction and certainly faction. My worry here is that this partial film biography intends the putrefaction of Garvey's reputation using the neat visual image and claims made by apparently authoritative talking heads and in the commentary, despite internal contradictions. A small thing: Garvey's artisan father built tombs in St Ann's Bay and, to teach his son self-reliance, once left him stranded in. The commentary says this happened "one day" but the visuals place it "one night" by filming the scene with a lighted storm lantern. The filmmakers are determined to paint a picture of Garvey as fundamentally a crooked, managerially incompetent, megalomaniac.
The fact that he needed a massive superego in order to achieve what he did is greatly underplayed. Only Winston James is allowed to connect Garvey's personality to his relationship with his adoring mother. Would they dream of treating Winston Churchill in that way? There is, of course, no evidence of crookedness in the Garvey record. It is accordingly invented. Viewers are told that, having founded the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914, Garvey "used school funds on his own living" and then ran away to the United States in 1916 leaving Amy Ashwood to face the music. Only much later are viewers told that Garvey's mission in the US in 1917 was to raise money for a vocational school in Jamaica and that this was not abandoned until much later for the greater mission originally envisaged in the 1914 founding of the UNIA. Viewers are also told that Garvey never owned more than a few shares in the Black Star Line. Some crook, you might think. But the damage is already done.
Crucial achievements
The crucial achievements of Garvey's life are his spectacular organisational and inspirational work for African people at home and abroad in the USA between 1917 and 1923, perhaps, 1925. This was also the moment when he was systematically undermined, destroyed by enemies. The most powerful of these was the Government of the United States of America with the British and French colonial authorities not far behind. This is not the story of the film. It tells viewers throughout that Garvey was his own worst enemy. The fact is that in 1919 Edgar Hoover was writing:
"Garvey is a West Indian Negro... Unfortunately, however, he has not yet violated any federal law whereby he could be proceeded against on the grounds of being an undesirable alien, from the point of view of deportation. It occurs to me, however, from the attached clipping that there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda."
That is what the US authorities conspired to get Garvey for and there would have been nothing that he could have done to prevent it. The film-makers have a lot to say about Garvey's failure to take advice. But with the Black Star Line Garvey did take advice from black and white experts who proceeded to engineer a massive disaster. The film is also horribly inadequate on Garvey's early activism, his second wife, Amy Jacques, his late 1920s, early 1930s Jamaican years and his final period in the UK.
Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. E-mail:
Gutzmorecr@hotmail.com
