A Review by Allan Weekes
What is greatness? What is the characteristic or amalgam of characteristics that compels our attention, stirs our imagination, and may even move us into imitative action? Whether we are truly able to define greatness as an abstract quality may not be as important as the fact that in every human community there have always been persons who through their words and actions stand out among the rest of us in their capacity to influence their fellow men to love and adulation for them, and through these emotions and insights they reveal give new direction to their communities.
Anderson Reynolds’ latest publication, They Called Him Brother George: Portrait of a Caribbean Politician, deals with one such an individual. This work does not engage us in any philosophical historical analysis of the nature of greatness. Nor does the writer seek to persuade the reader to share any predetermined opinion. The work, rather a labour of love, emerging from the community like George Odlum himself, is a response to the collective distress voiced by young reporters of George Odlum’s time, like Eliza Francis and Nicole McDonald, who bemoaned the lack of documentation on the contribution of George Odlum among that of some other St. Lucians. In short, it was their conviction that access to the future generations of knowledge of the lives and times of those persons is vital if we are to develop as a people. In short, they are our heroes. In this his latest work Anderson Reynolds attempts to provide this link between the past, the present, and posterity.
In They Called Him Brother George: Portrait of a Caribbean Politician, the author achieves this aim through a volume which is a combination of narration and original analysis. He begins by evoking for us the local as well as the regional and international political and economic milieu of the time, where, as a dedicated educator, revolutionary political activist, journalist, and formidable orator, George Odlum would throw in his talent and energies and live out his remarkable life.
A lighting rod, he would so agitate the status quo that St. Lucia would see new laws hurriedly enacted affecting the mode of dress and conditions of assembly of its citizens, stirring up fear and hostilities, and resulting in political meetings becoming battle zones where deterrents employed could run the gamut from tear gas by the police to homemade bombs limited to explosions of the stench and substance of human excrement, by opposing factions.
However, this is less a historical account of what is perhaps one of the most turbulent period in the political history of St. Lucia, but more of a sampled documentation of what people of his time thought of one of the most significant figures of the era.
Through wide-ranging research, the author has garnered and presented under one cover an anthology of literature; a reading feast drawn from the memories of the acquaintances of George Odlum, often from the simple folk whom he loved and fought for as well as individuals more widely known in the society, including journalists, diplomats, novelist, and former government ministers, as well as some memorable pieces from George Odlum himself as newspaper columnist, special commentator and orator.
Those who subscribe to the perspective that the childhood of high achievers holds the key to what they later manifest in maturity will find in They Called Him Brother George much they could use to validate their perspective.
Cornell Charles, a novelist and lifelong friend of George Odlum, recounts in Reflections of Brother George, one of the selections of this anthology, how George Odlum’s father’s barbershop was always a scene of lively debate on local and international affairs and how George’s father, a devout Adventist, instilled in George a love of the Bible. So much so, that George later avowed that he read the good book from cover to cover yearly. This combination of debate and heightened language would have helped orient Odlum towards arts and politics.
An early manifestation of this appears in another selection, Eulogy by William and Victor, in which Victor Marquis, a novelist, newspaper editor, and columnist, mourning the passing of George, recalls how on the night of the party of his graduation celebration on Rat Island, an occasional holiday resort, he and George Odlum, then a young literature teacher, forsook the mundane merriment of the party to be outside alone in the open recounting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in its entirety to themselves and the starlit sky.
Instances like these demonstrate that though the focus is almost always on George’s actions on the broad stage of local and international politics, Reynolds’ work shows us that George Odlum exhibited a capacity for love and caring in his personal relationships.
For example, in He Would Be King, Julian Hunte himself an over-achiever with an outstanding career in management, politics, and diplomacy spanning many decades, pays tribute to George Odlum’s largesse of spirit, his capacity to maintain friendships and amiability even with those whose personal agendas were at variance with his, however passionately he strove to manifest his own vision of the world. Hunte records for posterity how George Odlum maintained a lifelong friendship with him which later came to include his family, and even reached out to him, granting him, despite their differences, an opportunity to step on a new rung of the ladder that placed him on the new level that led to the regional and international phases of his illustrious career.
Similarly Jeanine Toussaint in her commentary, Odlum Calls It George, an account of the open-air ceremony held as a tribute to George in the days when his demise seemed imminent, recounts how Lydia Willie, one among many of the disadvantaged that George befriended in the course of his batling for better working conditions for estate workers, recounts how George sustained her after the death of her husband. Tearfully, she says to the audience “He did everything for us.” Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent, and a fellow warrior of George, confirms this quality of George’s in a more general way, in signaling George’s humanity as his most dominant trait.
But this largesse of spirit, this trait Ralph Gonsalves speaks about in Reynold’s new book in its anthology section presents eye-witness accounts of what happened in the flesh when George Odlum, now fully identifying with the poor and disadvantaged of his country, would enter the struggle to right the wrongs of economic and political injustice. The guardians at the gate of the status quo would strike back. Oswald “Aussie Boy,” one of Odlum’s faithful followers, reports how George Odlum of all politicians he had ever known was the one that suffered the most at the hands of the police. “In his quest to liberate the workers of St. Lucia, Odlum experienced police teargas flying in his face, gun butts jamming mercilessly in his torso while he danced like a Tap Dancer to avoid bullets fired around his feet.” Mary Bruce too remembers an incident. “I heard when an officer cranked that gun and pointed it straight at Brother George.” What followed after this reads like a tragic-comedy in the reversal of fortune genre and George Odlum’s party would eventually win at the polls and George would gain an opportunity to help uplift the standard of living of his people. All he did in this regard is recorded in Anderson Reynolds publication.
Yet in spite of all what George Odlum did, educating his people in what he considered just governance and the qualities needed in the people who could administer it, in spite of his contribution to the material well-being of his people and though on a personal level he served as a member of a cabinet of ministers, there is in They Called Him Brother George many intimations that George Odlum died a political failure. The stress on death of course may be misleading. The truth as some, no doubt well see it, is that long before his mortal end all possibility of achieving his initial vision had been irretrievably lost.
Dr. David Hinds in Tribute To George Odlum provides for readers an excellent analysis through a historical perspective of why this may have come about, while Dr. Edsel Edmunds who would have known George Odlum from his school days ruminates interestingly on the psychological factors that may have shaped George Odlum’s destiny.
Those who have reflected on the life and times of George Odlum have often wondered what would have happened if George had become Prime Minister at the time when he most desired it and had virtually earned the position. Two of these persons— Modeste Downes, poet and trade Unionist; and Peter Lansiquot, economist and diplomat—voice their speculations on the event that never was in Reynolds’ new publication under the title If George Had Been Prime Minister. Peter Lansiquot’s contribution is valuable in that it give the reader a great deal of information on George Odlum’s competence as an executive but even more significantly the great strides he made securing scholarship opportunities for young St. Lucians in a wide range of disciplines, particularly medicine. But his speculations on what Odlum could have achieved in regard to St. Lucia’s political status internationally are on shakier ground.
Modeste Downes however may have avoided the futility of such speculation by his approach to the subject. He maintains relevance by drawing attention to areas of the economy which were of concern to Odlum but remain problematic to this day. Among these are the foreign ownership and exploitation of St. Lucian land which has probably seen worst debacles since Odlum’s time; the need for constitutional reform; the inadequacy of our educational system; the poor self esteem and low productivity of our work force; the general official malaise to Art which is glaringly symbolized by the absence in the country of a proper venue for the performing Arts; and worst of all that so many of our leaders are hounded by the shadow of corruption. Modeste Downes in his If George had Been Prime Minister reiterates the agreement that made Allan Louisy Prime Minister with the understanding that George Odlum would replace him in the office after six months. The justification given by Modeste Downes for this was the acknowledgement that it is the duo of George Odlum and Peter Josie with George of course as the senior partner that was responsible for Labour’s resounding victory.
Odlum was not just a politician but a fascinating individual; and interest in him persisted up to the final moments of his life. There are those who, like the writer Jeff Fedee of In The End For George It Was God, and even his daughter Yasmin, suggested that as death approached Odlum experienced a spiritual or religious conversion in conformity with their Christian faith.
And yet among George Odlum’s writings, there is nothing as compelling as his tribute to his dead friend and fellow warrior Tim Hector.
In this tribute, George Odlum in the full splendor of his cultural diversity, uses the rubric of a Christian hymn imbued with the passion of Christ to evince the wrongs that had been done to his befallen comrade and by extension to himself, yet in the end does not set an after-life rendezvous with his friend, Tim Hector, by the still waters nor in Elysian fields nor among the Angelic Hosts, but in Valhalla, a place, rock or hall, decorated with spears and shields where fallen Viking warriors feast unendingly on wine and the flesh of a self-regenerating boar in the company of Odin, a Norse god. Readers may grapple with this enigma.
Maybe the examination of nexus between George Odlum psychological make up and the historical factors that offered him the trajectory for his self expression and how this applies to our own lives is where the value of this book lies. We cannot control the way others interpret our lives or the final meaning they place upon it. George Odlum no doubt will understand.
Allan Weekes is a retired English and literature lecturer. He has also taught French and second language methodology. He was a member of the famous St. Lucia Arts Guild, and is a literary critic, a creative writing coach, and a theatre director. He founded the Creole Theatre Workshop, which under his direction presented his Kwéyòl translations of the early Derek Walcott plays. He has published An Introduction to Kwéyòl (with D. Jamala), and a play, Talk of the Devil.