10. Finding the Anancyesque in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the decolonisation project in Jamaica from 1938 to the present

Ruth Minott Egglestone

Decolonisation is a long, slow, multilayered, nuanced and selective process which should privilege agency, self-knowledge and respect. It is a rich palette from which our experience and imagination can choose and combine fresh colour combinations alongside the tried and tested ones. This chapter explores an allegorical connection between The Tragedy of Julius Caesar and the transition towards decolonisation from the Jamaica of 1938 to the present. The central argument has three strands: the idea of Cassius as a heroic figure; the role of Sir Alexander Bustamante as catalyst in the Jamaican movement for independence; and the model of a redeemed Anancy as a positive expression of the Jamaican self for the future.

An important component of the enduring popularity of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – from schools and universities in the Asian subcontinent to global symbolism on stage in Central Park under the presidency of Donald Trump – is that this play has built-in resonance (Marks, 2017). For generations the values of honour, dignity, equality and civic duty have been rekindled through its rhetoric within an imperial educational mould, recognisable across the Commonwealth. Moreover, Julius Caesar still describes the dynamic of contemporary history. The dilemma of the Roman conspirators becomes a trope which allows for consideration of some of the tensions that underlie the closing phase of Tudor rule. Beyond that, we ask ourselves whether the debate that led to Caesar’s demise and its consequences is also germane to the politics of the end of empire, still at play time and time again in Britain and abroad.

My career as a secondary-school teacher of English language and literature began in January 1982 at Manchester School in rural Jamaica. I was going to learn to be a good teacher on the job. The first Shakespeare play I taught was Macbeth but I was always only a few scenes ahead of the class. I had hoped to do better the second time around, but that would be in Kingston at Campion College and with another unfamiliar Shakespeare play: Julius Caesar. I was 23 years old and burdened with the thought of preparing the play over Christmas to be ready for a spirited, co-education class of very bright 13-year-olds at the beginning of the new term. Again, I taught that tragedy only once and yet the play’s dogged pursuit of the freedom to be has encouraged me ever since on those occasions when I have found it necessary to swim against the current and then hold my ground on a point of principle. I have always felt that a life based on mutual respect is an essential framework for relating to ourselves and others.

I knew that Brutus was the hero of the play for my West Indian father’s generation, with the fault line being the betrayal of friendship in favour of patriotism. But when I first read Julius Caesar my attention was riveted by the voice of Cassius – that ‘hungry’ thinker¹ – with its emphasis on self-respect and a notion of dignity that values each person equally. Contrary to the view that presents him as a spin doctor solely intent on the manipulation of truth for his own ends, I found to my surprise that I identified with this overt dissenter because he is so earnest. I believed his statement that:

To start with, I agreed with the reasonableness of his assertion in lines 95–6, with its affirmation of sovereignty. I easily identified with the concept of agency inherent in statements such as: ‘Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius’ (I. 3. 90). Cassius is prepared to resist the oppression that he sees Caesar – who ‘doth bestride the narrow world | Like a Colossus’ (I. 2. 135–6) – threatening; and he feels justified in doing so because the point of a republic is that the leader is one among equals. So strongly does Cassius feel about all of them being bullied by Caesar, and so great a threat to the Roman way of life does this possibility seem to him, that he feels compelled to do something about the dilemma.

I was 12 years old when Michael Manley, the trade unionist with a ‘passionate commitment to equality and justice’, became Jamaica’s fourth prime minister after winning the elections for the People’s National Party (PNP) on 29 February 1972 (Franklyn, 2014). So, my adolescence was shaped by the process of becoming a very happy product of the – not only turbulent but also very inspiring – experiment in democratic socialism of the 1970s. This happened in tandem with a heightened public awareness of Jamaica’s global voice in Third World affairs and the ascendancy of reggae music as a cultural force. I was as much of an idealist as Cassius and during my teenage years democracy in action had been a defining principle for me at home, at school and in the wider society. Furthermore, my West Indian education had pivoted on the value of original thinking. How, then, could Cassius be condemned at the outset because he thought too deeply about the dynamics of his society?

Thematically, the play’s flirtation with the dynamic of one-upmanship provides much scope for application to the importance of dignity as embodied by the Jamaican folk hero Anancy. This unapologetic go-getter finds a sense of worth in managing to make the most of his disadvantages, and especially the hardship he has experienced, but usually at a great cost to others. Louise Bennett, storyteller par excellence, sums up Jamaica’s most powerful metaphorical figure in these terms: ‘Anancy, the trickify little spider man who speaks with a lisp and lives by his wits, is both comic and sinister, both hero and villain of Jamaican folk stories’ (1979, p. xi). He has great respect for the power that words have to give shape to reality, not only in their capacity for presenting the element of risk incumbent in the choice to be made in the crossroads experiences in life, but also as a tool for the pursuit of an aim which finds expression in the alluring and masking potential of rhetoric.

Anancy, whose reputation has been created by the folktales that bear his name, is the ultimate opportunist, who does his best to take advantage of the gullibility of others. The Anancy story is, however, a morality tale centred on the ironic truth that what goes around comes around and, therefore, in the cycle of life Anancy will inevitably become a victim of his own scheming. Julius Caesar, like the folk stories that belong to the trickster Anancy, illustrates the negative aspects of both naivety and one-upmanship. The action centres on an obsession with power which usurps any sense of fulfilment found in publicspiritedness. Caesar, the great republican conqueror of the enemies of Rome, is unable to keep his own ego in check, acquiring pre-eminence, at first as a reluctant wolf among sheep and then, in the words of Cassius:

The citizenry naively behave like deer as they exultantly seek to crown Caesar for his victory over Rome’s erstwhile hero Pompey; by so doing, they create a lion in their midst.

Showing unselfish interest in public welfare, motivated by genuine devotion to the general good, does not come naturally to Anancy, who, like Caesar, has few friends. According to Montesquieu (read through the eyes of Isaiah Berlin), the principle which causes a republic to flourish is virtue – as expressed in a disposition to act with energy for the public interest or advantage and a willingness to sacrifice private interest for the public good.² In my reading of the play, these traits apply to Cassius and Brutus as they individually explain their rationale for joining the conspiracy against Caesar. However, they jostle each other in their devotion to a cause which admits gamesmanship as they exploit each other’s foibles in the interests of progress. This deficit in trust ultimately surfaces as ‘some grudge’ (IV. 1. 125) that seriously tests the bond between them. As much as it discusses the excesses of power, this Shakespearean play is a study of the course of friendship in difficult times. It is, therefore, in the danger to the continuing relationship between Cassius and Brutus that the tragedy lies, rather than in the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Looking through the lens of enlightened self-interest, Cassius has little to gain by standing in opposition to Caesar (except, perhaps, self-respect) and much to lose. The man Julius Caesar was a consummate politician, an exceptionally good leader and an effective writer. His Conquest of Gaul was taught for centuries as a Latin reader in schools and his demise at the hands of his compatriots resounds as a warning to all political leaders, who must inevitably spar with hubris as they try to rise above the temptations of power. ‘Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!’, cries Cinna, the conspirator, as Caesar falls (III. 1. 78). In his tragedy about this Roman hero’s untimely death, William Shakespeare plays sport with ambiguity, using stress and elasticity, smoothness and resilience to create a nuanced dramatic structure that has the tensile strength, but gossamer quality and complexity of a spider’s web.

As a young teacher in the early 1980s, I felt that Cassius’s point of view was more relevant to my world than that of Brutus because it accommodates status anxiety as a driver of ambition, in tandem with noble respectability, and therefore presents a much more nuanced analysis of an emergent West Indian discourse on national sovereignty. Packaged in a dialectic which he calls ‘crab antics’, the anthropologist Peter Wilson’s analysis of the role of the hero within the West Indian value system pivots on a code of honour centred on ambition fuelled by the principle of either ‘respectability’ or conversely ‘reputation’ (1969).³

My own research, based on cultural patterns within the Little Theatre Movement’s National Pantomime tradition in Jamaica, makes the case that the ‘crab antics’ model is a good match for masculinity within the Jamaican context.⁴ For this male-dominated play, however, Jean Besson’s summary of Wilson’s framework is most helpful. The idea of respectability, she says, ‘is based on class, colour, wealth and Eurocentric culture, life style and education’. Then she points out that ‘[r]eputation, by contrast, is an indigenous counterculture based on the ethos of equality and rooted in personal, as opposed to social worth’ (1993, p. 16). In these terms, the question of integrity in Julius Caesar is a tussle between the reputation-based approach of Cassius, Caesar’s childhood competitor, and the respectability of Brutus, Caesar’s protégé, whose ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus founded the Roman republic.

Julius Caesar is the embodiment of honour in every sense of the word except that of nobility of spirit, for, like Macbeth, he is possessed of an ‘o’er vaulting ambition’.⁵ He is a patrician of the Julian clan, but also very much a self-made man and his fame lies not in his inherited ‘respectability’ but rather in his military prowess and therefore his ‘reputation’. His flaw is that he is not satisfied, despite seeming to have as much as it is reasonable for any highly successful man to have. His ambition is beyond measure and he is prepared to overstep any boundary to fulfil it. Excess is the undoing of equality and the state of social equilibrium. Excess is also the opposite of unity. Caesar has to be contained because he cannot contain himself.

Jean Besson adds: ‘Reputation is also based on verbal skills and anti-establishment activities’ (1993, p. 16). In this context Cassius, the great persuader and initiator of the counter-insurgency, emerges as the first Anancytype figure. Cassius is the most complex character in the play because he is an earnest and effective subversive whose purpose is not hidden. Caesar knows and articulates the threat that this kind of senator poses. Cassius is perceptive, well-educated, principled and ‘he thinks too much; such men are dangerous’ (I. 2. 195). It is also true, as Caesar puts it, that Cassius is one of those men who can never be ‘at heart’s ease | Whiles they behold a greater than themselves’ (I. 2. 208–9), for he believes firmly in the republican principle that all citizens should be equal, claiming, ‘I was born free as Caesar’ (I. 2. 106).

Then, somewhat unexpectedly, as a fully fledged exemplar of a carefully cultivated, organic and potent spirit of Jamaicanness, I migrated to the United Kingdom in 1986 to continue teaching and then go on to postgraduate studies. What were to be six years have now become more than thirty, but during this time Cassius’s statement, ‘I’d lief not be as live to be in awe of such a thing as I myself’ (I. 2. 95–6), has become an oft-repeated assertion in both my professional and personal life. I learnt from Cassius that when we have to accommodate the menace of wolves or lions in our midst, it is the sheepish behaviour of the collective in the past that has brought this threat into being.

For this reason there is always the danger of inscribing Caesar within the action. Cassius’s commitment to the cause of freedom is total. Casca recognises this in his acknowledgement that ‘every bondman in his own hand bears | The power to cancel his captivity’ (I. 3. 101–2) if he is willing to die for freedom, for there is merit in considering the angle that Caesar ‘would not be a wolf, | But that he sees the Romans are but sheep: | He were no lion, were not Romans hinds’ (I. 3. 104–6). The question is, how serious are we about guarding our freedom? In an essay on the fall of the Roman Republic for the BBC History website, Cambridge professor of classics Mary Beard speaks of ‘the carefully regulated system of “power sharing” that characterised traditional Republican politics’ (2011). We need to ask ourselves why within our democracies we behave like sheep. It seems like the easy option at first; only that we then feel, too late, the iron fist within the velvet glove as the wolves we have created terrorise the collective. In turn the following question could be asked: ‘Why can’t the Jamaican people see through their politicians?’ The answer would probably be: ‘Because the successful ones are so reminiscent of Anancy’.

For me, Cassius emerged as a tragic hero but I realise now, as I reflect on my ensuing journey through life with Shakespeare’s Roman play, that teaching Julius Caesar in this way in 1983 was an exercise in what Sylvia Wynter would have called decolonial ‘intellectual disobedience’.⁶ My reading would make Brutus a foil to Cassius, for, by allowing the tone in which his lines are spoken to be honest rather than conniving, the voice of Cassius as freedom-fighter emerges from Shakespeare’s text. Such an attitude is one that a Jamaican theatre-going public would respect, for as the esteemed sociolinguist Mervyn Alleyne says at the end of a long career of cultural engagement: ‘Jamaicans won’t put up with foolishness: they rebel at anything that looks like discrimination’.⁷

My thinking here also rests on the fact that in 2013 Liam Martin published De Tragedy au Julias Ceazaa/Julius Caesar in Jamaican English, a translation of Shakespeare’s play into two versions of Jamaican ‘nation language’ – A Patwa Vosian (a Jamaica Creole version) and A Rastafarian Vosian (a Dread Talk version) (2013).⁸ The translation of Julius Caesar into Jamaican nation language gives Shakespeare’s play the intimacy of an Anancy story, while the confluence of the Great and the Little Traditions is an echo in itself of the dialectic of respectability and reputation that sits at the heart of a male value system that privileges the idea of honour over virtue, for indeed both Cassius and Brutus are honourable men.

Something of the distinction that can be made between the linguistic register of the two vosians[versions] is given in the helpful summary of their relationship alongside Standard Jamaican English (the language of this chapter) by the linguist and educator Velma Pollard in her book Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari:

As a result of the 1970s, contemporary Jamaica prides itself on being a socially mobile society. Nonetheless, Jamaican Standard English is the language of the establishment and patwa carries the indigenous countercultural stamp. Liam Martin’s double translation in De Tragedy au Julias Ceazaa presents a synchronicity between his two versions but this is not surprising because during the second half of the 20th century, and especially in the late 1970s, Dread Talk became part of that code shifting, linguistic continuum of everyday language in Jamaica, which also includes reference to frequent (mis)quotations in 16th-century English from the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Rastafarian/Dread Talk is also the language of reggae music and, as Velma Pollard points out, despite the continued disapproval of classroom teachers, ‘the youth who in earlier years spoke Patwa (JC) for peer group acceptance with or without their parents’ assent, speaks today the same language but deeply laced with DT (Dread Talk) phrases and lexical items, and this in a most effortless fashion’ (1994, p. 10).⁹

It is only in sharing his plans with Brutus in Act 1 that Cassius becomes vulnerable, for his safety rests entirely on their bond of friendship. In response Brutus affirms that he is talking to a kindred spirit for theirs is a relationship of mutual trust: ‘That you do love me, I am nothing jealous’ (I. 2. 162). It is interesting to see how the Rasta translation of these words conveys the sincerity of Brutus’s confidence in this friendship with Cassius. It reads: ‘Dhat de-I lov I, I-man no dae suspicious at all’ (Martin, 2013, p. 122) and means: ‘I know without the shadow of a doubt that you love me’. Uttered by a Ras Tafari whose distinctively grounded identity represents the understatedly comfortable masculinity of a lion, these intimate words come across as a noble affirmation, a straightforward encapsulation of an easily understood truth.

A decolonial reading ultimately gives scope for analysing the play in response to the question that Walter Mignolo associates with Sylvia Wynter: What does it mean to be human? This involves imagining ‘the “right” or “noble” or “moral” characteristics of Human’ (2015, p. 108). The Rastafarian voice is that of ‘the man at the bottom of the social ladder, the suffering Jamaican’ (Pollard, 1994, p. 60) but the language of Rastafari privileges the individual as subject not object (always using ‘I’ not ‘me’); asserts membership of a royal priesthood as part of the identity of the ordinary man; establishes a personal identification with the lion as a symbol of African power, courage and nobility; employs vocabulary that carries the severity of the Old Testament prophets; and transforms words so that they reflect a commitment to the elevation of dignity and freedom over the lure of materialism symbolised by ‘Babylon’ (that is, the culture of the industrialised west).

One has to remember, too, that the wordsmith – the teller of tales – has played a significant part in the decolonial story. Brother Man, the eponymous character created by anti-imperialist journalist and novelist Roger Mais, who is the hero of his novel of the same name (1954), a philosophical ‘Rasta cobbler with a gift for healing’ (Paul, 2004) would fit comfortably into the opening scene of Liam Martin’s Julias Ceazaa. Furthermore, to follow on at another social level, the conversation of ‘dhat magga tincka’ Cassius and his associates in the second scene of the play easily resonates with the culture, accent and beat of contemporary parliamentarians in Jamaica, engaging in a political discourse built on foundations laid down by the country’s 20th-century national heroes: William Alexander Bustamante, Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Norman Washington Manley.

For the most part, however, the founding fathers would have articulated their decolonial visions in Jamaican Standard English, as illustrated in an extract from a 1932 speech by Marcus Garvey which the governor general used to inspire Jamaicans at home and abroad on Independence Day in 2003. His Excellency the Most Honourable Sir Howard Felix Hanlan Cooke ON, GCMG, GCVO, CD, referred in his message to rhetoric that stirred the early days of the island’s struggle for sovereignty but which was still applicable:

Interestingly, the label ‘small island’ could also be applied to Great Britain with respect to its physical size in proportion to its impact on the global stage. The reality of the enduring legacy of empire shows that it is not the size of the country that matters so much as the imagination and ambition of its people. Not dissimilar to the dynamic of the early Roman republic but in a more osmotic way, the Jamaican nation is characteristically spirited and resilient, gritty and resolute and punches well above its weight in terms of the soft power of cultural influence. On the international stage of the 21st century, phrases like ‘What a gwaan?’ [What’s going on?] have moved from London street talk to hip banter among intellectuals on BBC Radio 4 in response to President Barack Obama’s use of the term on a state visit to Jamaica in 2015 (Gloudon, 2015).

Alongside this, though, the Jamaican ‘national’ story – which could easily be cast as a series of power struggles – arises out of a continuing substratum of internecine conflict.¹⁰ Consequently, within the landscape of that small, tropical island at the heart of the Caribbean Basin, as in so many other postcolonial societies, there rages a politics of violence encouraged by ‘de ambitious Ceazaa dem’ which enmeshes the citizenry in latent, as well as blatant, aggression. Analysing the dynamics of Shakespeare’s text also presents the challenge of subjecting our own matrices of empowerment to scrutiny in evaluating the ‘crab antics’ of political leadership in a decolonisation project that intensified in 1938 and – it is to be hoped – continues with vigour in the present. Freedom is fragile and its durability is dependent on the power of equality, which has to be guarded by checks and balances.

Ironically, the values of honour, dignity, equality and civic duty are prized qualities within an island social structure still influenced by a nuanced skin-tone continuum of shades of brown as a measure of individual worth; also of an education system which privileges mastery of Jamaican Standard English (ostensibly the language of the head) over Jamaica Creole/Patwa (purported to be the language of the heart). The process of counteracting the British government’s colonial, racist policy, which maintained – ‘a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed’ – is a battle that has to be fought in the mind.¹¹ This was the strength of Marcus Garvey’s contribution to the world of 20th-century politics. Historically, social stratification in Jamaica has been closely aligned to gradations in skin tone and even in the 21st century the phenomenon of ‘shadeism’, a Jamaican form of racial prejudice, remains a social reality. Therefore, a significant challenge for Jamaica as an independent country has been a sovereignty of the imagination which might truly conceive of all human beings as equal in terms of intrinsic worth. Almost eight decades since the death of Marcus Garvey, who did so much to promote the idea that ‘Black is Beautiful’,¹² the island nation is still trying to emancipate itself from the mental slavery of institutionalised racism.

The key players in establishing architecture of decolonisation in Jamaica were Norman Washington Manley, the distinguished barrister, and his cousin William Alexander Bustamante, ‘one of the four principal usurers in Kingston’ (Hart, 1999, p. xiii). They were in opposition to His Excellency Sir Arthur Richards, GCMG, the authoritarian governor of Jamaica from 1938 to 1943 and then to each other. Professor Edward Seaga, the country’s fifth prime minister, makes this observation about the two political heavyweights (as they were when he met them in the 1950s): ‘In a crowd, it was easy to recognise that the handsome features of the two cousins, Bustamante and Manley, had been chiselled from the same stone, Manley being the darker, brown-skin version of the two. Bustamante stood out visually as a figure and personality: Manley had to be engaged in conversation for his outstanding mind to be appreciated. Both men were attractive and respected leaders in the true sense of the word’ (Seaga, 2009, p. 90).

In a sense Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante could have been Brutus and Cassius versus the Caesar-like representative of imperial Britain. As he tries to explain some of the dynastic intricacies at the heart of Jamaican politics, Adam Kuper makes the point in his anthropological study Changing Jamaica that ‘both parties are regarded as the expression of the personalities of their founders’ (1976, p. 120). The contrasting characters of the ‘noble patrician’ Norman Manley and the ‘daringly flamboyant’ Alexander Bustamante presented a choice between ‘the man who thought too much’ like Cassius (1.2.195) or ‘the man who loved the name of honour more than he feared death’ like Brutus (1.2.88–9). The choice between ‘the intellectual’ or ‘the entrepreneur’, the prophet or the trickster, can be equated to that between Manley, the statesman whose strategic vision was to build the bakery and Bustamante, the vote-winning politician who promised to give the people bread. Caesar, the oppositional figure, was represented by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the mother country but locally by the governor Sir Arthur Richards. Captain R. W. Thompson, a British naval intelligence officer posted to Jamaica in late October 1942, refers to the island situation in his account Black Caribbean (1946) in these terms: ‘It was clear at the outset that Great Britain had a considerable headache thumping away in the Caribbean, and only the voice of the Old Warrior, baying his faith to resound to the ends of the earth, showed that there was nothing amiss with the spirit: . . . I did not become the King’s first minister to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire!’ (p. 60).

When, as an 82-year-old historian, the trade unionist and griot, Richard Hart (1917–2013) mapped in Towards Decolonisation (1999) his first-hand account of the political, labour and economic development in Jamaica between 1938 and 1945, he presented a story in which one man – like Alexander Bustamante – could in fact play many parts: Cassius, Antony and Caesar. In his early 20s, Hart himself was a major player among that cast of types – patriots, statesmen, rogues and opportunists – who developed the Jamaican nationalist framework in the 20th century. He trained to be a solicitor and became ‘a trouble-making journalist and a key trade union organiser ... detained ... twice [by the colonial government] as a subversive during the second world war’ (Drayton, 2014). He had been a founder member of the PNP in 1938 at the age of 21 but was expelled for being too radical in 1952. Yet it was Hart who took on the role of historian as griot, deliberately eschewing autobiography in favour of ‘an objective history’ of the Jamaican struggle for nationhood. Rupert Lewis, professor of political thought at the University of the West Indies (Mona), saw Richard Hart as ‘a symbol of the nationalist awakening and the twentieth century struggle for decolonization in Jamaica and the Caribbean’ (2012). During the course of a long life, Richard Hart was also a good example of the Jamaican character’s propensity to stand against oppression and fight to the very end. Like Cassius, he never stopped being a ‘magga tincka’.

As Hart was the main archivist for that period, however, it is his collection of primary source material which underpins much of the history of the time as it continues to be written. Very honourably, however, he strove to bring to our attention the potential dominance of his version – he would say ‘understanding’ – of events as the evidence is all provided from the same source.¹³ At his death, Ken Jones dubbed Hart ‘a giant of a man’ for his service to the national story in the 20th century and also pointed out that ‘as far as his monumental work in the interest of Jamaica’s trade union and political development is concerned, further respect may still be due’ (2013).

The road to Jamaican independence gathered pace in 1938 following the return of Alexander Bustamante to the island in 1934. In 1905, at the age of 21, he had left Jamaica ‘to work and live abroad, and did so for thirty years in Central America and the United States’ (Seaga, 2009, p. 36). Bustamante had some of the qualities of Anancy, who ‘can change himself into whatever and whoever he wishes at certain times, and his stories make it quite plain that he is able to get away with tricks which ordinary mortals can’t’ (Bennett, 1979, p. xi). Richard Hart says of him: ‘There are so many conflicting stories about his early life that it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. One of the more fanciful and improbable stories which he himself contributed, was that he had changed his name from Clarke to Bustamante on being adopted by a Spanish general and that he had seen active service with the Spanish army’ (1999, p. xii).

When the PNP was founded in 1938 it was the brainchild of O. T. Fairclough (1904–70), a black accountant whose experience of class prejudice in Jamaica prompted him to look for political solutions to the problem of inequality, which went in tandem with shadeism.¹⁴ Fairclough invited the distinguished lawyer Norman Washington Manley to be co-founder, and eventually persuaded him to become leader, of the party.¹⁵ The Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) and the PNP were established in the same year (1938) and the original intention was that there would be one union and one party trying to set the stage for the vision of the New Jamaica. Edward Seaga notes: ‘The PNP was founded on the principles of Fabian socialism, named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus who believed in gradual rather than revolutionary change’ (2009, p. 41). However, the ‘heroics’ of Bustamante during World War Two meant that he was jailed for 17 months for allegedly violating the Defence of the Realm Act. He emerged a hero from detention at Up Park Camp and, by consolidating his power base in his trade union, set himself up as a rival to Norman Manley, forming the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1943.

In the role of leader, Bustamante ruthlessly dealt with rivals for his position as chief. He was courageous and could control the mob, but he was also a potential Caesar and highly skilled in the tricks of politics. Consequently, in the tussle over who would be Jamaica’s first prime minister, it was the maverick moneylender who had also begun ‘to take a personal interest in the problems which affected the ordinary man’ (ibid., p. 36) who came out on top. Bustamante ‘was not learned in an academic sense and never pretended to be, although he came to prominence through incessant letter-writing. He was street smart and understood, as only a few others did, the nuances of the life of working-class and rural people’ (ibid., p. 37). He was principally an oppositional (anti-authoritarian) figure who lived by his wits but, as Edward Seaga adds, ‘knew the language of the people and what key references to draw from their lifestyle for impact’ (ibid.).

Hart reports: ‘The PNP was an organised expression of Jamaica’s nationalist aspirations’ (1999, p. 261). Norman Manley’s campaign in 1944 was based on a carefully worked-out plan for self-government within five years. However, Bustamante won the elections for the JLP by discrediting the PNP in the eyes of the masses by adopting the slogan ‘self-government means brown man rule’ in his campaign. Richard Hart tells us that ‘the black masses were only too conscious of the contemptuous attitude towards them of many members of the brown middle class. “Brown man rule” was the last thing the majority of black people wished to see in Jamaica . . . For the 1944 election, the first to be held under full adult suffrage, the slogan effectively served its purpose’ (1999, p. 253).

By 1958 the dream of a West Indian Federation had begun to take shape as a serious postcolonial option for Jamaica. However, Bustamante in opposition allied himself with the business sector, which had been unsettled by the presence of PNP radicals (like Richard Hart) in the leadership of the unions. In a referendum in 1961 the Jamaican public voted in favour of national sovereignty as an independent island state. Bustamante’s role as agitator might have made him seem like a Cassius, but as ‘a demagogic orator’ (Seaga, 2009, p. 37) he was much more of an Antony and his rhetoric only enhanced his popularity. Consequently, it was he, as the first prime minister of the new Jamaica, who welcomed Princess Margaret on the runway of Palisadoes Airport (Kingston) when she arrived to represent Queen Elizabeth II at the declaration of independence in August 1962.

Julius Caesar certainly occupies a valid space as a postcolonial text because it maps the destruction of the ‘dream’, the specific set of ideals which once held the republic together and gave it strength. This ‘problem play’ (Schanzer, 1963; Maquerlot, 1995, pp. 72–86) presents the strain and kinaesthetic dynamic of a centre that cannot hold because it is beset by the sort of internecine rivalry that triggered and fuelled the two world wars in the 20th century and, indeed, the battle between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 American election, during which truth became the most significant casualty. The danger of conflicts in which the public is divided between its gratitude to a Pompey and its love for a Caesar is that clever people and thinking heads become ‘blocks . . . stones . . . worse than senseless things’¹⁶ – as dense as wood – when baited with the short-term satisfaction of greed and can so easily be tempted to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage (Genesis 25.29–34).

There is significance in the lyrical sweep of the action in Julius Caesar from a triumphal display of sovereignty to nothing. We see the tragic consequences of the freedom struggle in the ensuing violence. As Tom Holland describes it, ‘everywhere, what had once been scenes of luxury were converted to the needs of war’ (2011, Kindle edition, 70%, Loc 5468 of 7487). The ‘problem’ that is unpacked in the second half of Shakespeare’s play is that despite their best efforts to the contrary the conspirators manage to destroy the Rome they know when they try to save it. How could they have guessed that by assassinating Julius Caesar and prompting a change of regime the people would exchange ‘black dog fi monkey’ in the ascension of Octavius, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, to the role of ‘first citizen of the state’ for life – Augustus Caesar, Rome’s autocratic first emperor.

In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Julius Caesar under the direction of Angus Jackson in 2017, the dialogue is crystal-clear and so Shakespeare’s words are given the opportunity to speak above the action. As the audience engages with the nuances of relationships, the characters do not come across as types but rather as individual personalities reacting to a collective crisis. Within this context, the friendship between Brutus and Cassius occupies the centre stage of our imagination, and the humanity of all the participants in the story is underscored.

The play Julius Caesar is a tragedy. The outcome is dire for Brutus and Cassius, whose death tips the balance in favour of Antony and Octavius. The classical historian Tom Holland says: ‘Octavian was the man whom those defeated at Philippi chiefly reviled as the murderer of liberty’ (2011, Kindle edition, 70%, Loc 5454 of 7487). The importance of the second half of Shakespeare’s play is captured by Kamau Brathwaite’s rejoinder: ‘so let me sing | nothing | now’ (1973, p. 13). This is what Anancy does. He endures the storm of conflict and begins to spin and enact his stories of freedom again.

Over the years tragedians have plied their wares with trepidation on the Jamaican stage because the less sophisticated in the audience can be guaranteed to respond to the most distressing scene with uproariously disruptive laughter. I have written and spoken elsewhere (2004) on the redemptive approach to the figure of Anancy within Jamaica’s Little Theatre Movement and the new nationalist drama of the LTM Pantomime tradition as a showcase of decolonial identity.¹⁷ The Jamaican Pantomime is an example of nationalism producing a progressive cultural practice based on the importance of unity.

To signpost is the ultimate purpose of this experiment in indigenous theatre, which organically supported the exercise of nation-building from 1941, and found that, as it became translated into something else, it could not shed the name ‘pantomime’. Furthermore, this label guaranteed that the Christmas show would be a comedy and so no matter how strong the compulsion to tackle serious issues, the treatment would be undertaken in a spirit of joviality and conclude with a happy ending and, always, hope. Within the LTM National Pantomime process, therefore, the figure of Anancy has to be redeemed.

In order to be true to ourselves as Jamaicans, we need to acknowledge the Anancyesque as an ‘inner spring’ in the decolonisation process.¹⁸ Adaptability is a quality which seems to be reinforced in the Anancy stories, which ‘record the stupidities of the less quickly assimilative in meeting new conditions of life’ (Beckwith, 1929, p. 221). Traditionally, where Anancy comes a cropper is in his motives, for he is supremely, even cruelly, selfish. The folk tales warn us about so many of the other animals in the forest (Anancy frequently assumes the shape of a spider) who ‘are too easily trusting . . . [who] seem almost to want to be deceived’, says Mervyn Morris as he responds to the work of the virtuoso storyteller Louise Bennett. Morris adds that perhaps ‘now is as good a time as any to re-read Anancy stories as a warning against credulity’ (1979, p. x).

Despite his appeal, in the folk tales Anancy is an anti-hero from whom the Jamaican student can learn much about the kind of negativity that ultimately leads to violence, tragedy and social destruction. The importance of the biblical warning ‘humble yourself’ (Luke 18:14) is firmly integrated into our trickster stories, for as the proverb says, ‘di more monkey climb, di more im expose’.¹⁹ However, within the comedic framework of the Jamaican National Pantomime tradition, Anancy sees the error of his ways and is redeemed through the love and forgiveness of others; and his cleverness is put to good use to save the day for the embattled community. Consequently, in order to maintain this heroic status and to consolidate his reputation with respectability, Anancy on stage has to shift his default position from selfishness to altruism.

William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is an exercise in reasoning around the impact of political power on the human condition which remains uncannily current across geographical space and historical time. Liam Martin’s two adaptations of Julius Caesar in Jamaican English, if used in staging the play, would provide Jamaican audiences with the opportunity to engage so seamlessly with the uncomfortable political questions posed by Shakespeare’s drama that it would be really difficult to shirk responsibility for truly thinking in ‘new’ terms, maybe even with a response from the heart, about the island’s problems. A ‘new Jamaican’ audience should be charged to watch its political leadership closely and wisely. That this challenge could be delivered in Patwa, the nation language, with full access to the catharsis of tragedy showing that Shakespeare can speak his truths just as comfortably in a Jamaican accent, is in itself a reminder to the audience that we as human beings – on a global, as well as on a national, level – should be relating as equals.

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1 The Shakespearean line most commonly associated with Cassius in the Caribbean context comes from Caesar’s first reference to him in the play: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, / He thinks too much: such men are dangerous” (1.2.194–5). In Jamaica, it is not unusual for the epithet to be misquoted as ‘mean and hungry’, which supports a negative perception of the character as an untrustworthy figure.

2 Berlin says of Montesquieu: ‘According to him each type of society possesses an inner structure, an inner dynamic principle or force, which makes it function as it does – and this “inner” force differs from type to type. Whatever strengthens the “inner” principle causes the organism to flourish, whatever impairs it causes it to decay. His catalogue of these forces is very famous; monarchy rests on the principle of honour, aristocracy on that of moderation, the republican regime on that of virtue (that is, public spirit, civisme, almost team spirit) and despotism on that of terror. Montesquieu conceives of social organisms in the manner of Aristotle as teleological – purposive – wholes, as entelechies. The model is biological, not chemical. The inner spring of these societies is conceived by him as that which causes them to fulfil themselves by moving towards an inner goal, in terms of which alone they can be understood’ (1981, p. 140).

3 See Wilson (1969) Crab Antics, first published in 1973. ‘Crab antics’ is an anthropological model in relation to Caribbean men distilled by Wilson through his observations of life and culture on the island of Providencia. The term refers to the behaviour of crabs (caught in a bucket), which pull each other down as they try to get out and is used to explain a social dynamic of non-productive self interest, within Wilson’s analysis. However, J. Besson’s anthropological riposte to Wilson’s model from the Afro-Caribbean peasant woman’s perspective is also highly important and should be considered in tandem in future research.

4 R. Minott Egglestone, ‘“A place with no style of its own”: a dialectic of dominance in the pantomime’, unpublished lecture given to the Caribbean Team, Department of Education at the University of Sheffield, 23 May 2011.

5 This was Macbeth’s fatal flaw: ‘I have no spur | To prick the sides of my intent, but only | Vaulting ambition, which o’er-leaps itself | And falls on the other’ (Macbeth, I. 7. 27–30).

6 The phrase comes from Mignolo (2015, p.107). The full quotation underscores the attitude of this chapter: ‘It is across both neurobiological cognition and decolonial practices that Sylvia Wynter’s work and her intellectual disobedience emerge. Wynter suggests that if we accept that epistemology gives us the principles and rules of knowing through which the Human and Humanity are understood, we are trapped in a knowledge system that fails to notice that the stories of what it means to be Human – specifically origin stories that explain who/what we are – are, in fact, narratively constructed’.

7 ‘The interdisciplinary scholarship of a Caribbeanist: a tribute to Dr. Mervyn Alleyne’ was a discussion panel organised by the Institute of Caribbean Studies, which was held on 20 Oct. 2011 at University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.

8 ‘Nation language’ is the term that K. Brathwaite (1984) uses to refer to the Creole languages of the Caribbean.

9 Originally published in 1980; reprinted as ch. 1 in Pollard (1994).

10 Some key dates in the island’s ‘national’ story: 1494, 1655, 1831–2, 1865 (‘Jamaican history: 10 facts: things you need to know about the country you love’, The Voice, posted 6 Aug. 2012, http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/jamaican-history-10-facts [accessed 9 Feb. 2016]). The arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494 secured the island for Spain and heralded the ultimate destruction of its indigenous Taino inhabitants. In 1655, Cromwell’s expeditionary force seized the island from the Spanish and ushered in over 300 years of British colonial rule. These were punctuated by various slave revolts like the 1831–2 Christmas rebellion, led by the Baptist deacon Sam Sharpe, who was convinced that the entitlement of freedom for the enslaved was being withheld by the plantocracy. The 1865 Morant Bay rebellion grew out of protest marches by the freed peasantry against mounting social and economic injustice. This seditious behaviour was savagely repressed under martial law with the resultant imposition of Crown Colony status on the island, indefinitely placed under the sole control of the colonial governor.

11 This phrase from Commander R. C. Bodilly, a retired English naval officer who was a resident magistrate in Jamaica in the early 1930s, is cited in Hart (1999, pp. 147–8 and p. 149, n. 15). The full quotation is: ‘Our rule exists in the last resort on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed. As soon as we lessen that we lessen the security of our laws’ (p. 148).

12 The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (5.20) lists this phrase as an anonymous slogan of civil rights campaigners in the mid 1960s, cited in Newsweek, 11 July 1966. The political phrase gained international currency from the 1960s but the idea comes out of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and was promoted in the 1950s and 1960s through the work of Brooklyn photographer Kwame Brathwaite, who was inspired by Marcus Garvey.

13 As the trade union scholar Jeffrey Harrod points out, Hart, as a centrally involved participant, is himself all too often the common source of unattributed documents from the period ‘relating to the nature of Jamaican trade unions, regional trade union organisations, trade union education and history’ (1972, as cited in Hart, 1999, pp. xix–xx and n.10).

14 A. Bertram (historian, teacher, journalist, former politician) explains the basis of the phenomenon of shadeism: ‘Plantation slavery, the greatest wealth producing system of the 18th century, systematically created and legalised a racist society in Jamaica, which separated whites at the top, browns in the middle and blacks at the base’ (2005).

15 ‘“The People’s National Party (PNP) was founded by Norman Manley in 1938.” Not quite, he was a co-founder, and he said so himself. If there is any one man who is to be credited with the founding of the PNP it is O.T. Fairclough, who also founded the Public Opinion newspaper. Fairclough it was who invited Manley to be the leader of the party.’ E. Walters of Carlton University submitted this comment (as a point of clarification) to Fact 6 in this online newspaper article: ‘Jamaican history: 10 facts: things you need to know about the country you love’, The Voice, 6 Aug. 2012.

16 The tribune Murellus, infuriated by their fickle nature, refers to the Roman tradesmen as ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!’ as they capriciously shift their loyalty from Pompey to Caesar at the start of the play (I. 1. 34).

17 There is an earlier version of this chapter online: Minott Egglestone (2001). See also Minott Egglestone (2010). For access to a spoken account, see Minott Egglestone (2014).

18 See I. Berlin’s observations on Montesquieu in note 1.

19 In English rather than patwa, this proverb reads: ‘The higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his tail’. This means: ‘The further an unsuitable person is promoted, the more obvious his inadequacies become’ (Simpson and Speake, 2015, p. 151).