“Ceremony of Return” The Piarco homecoming- C.L.R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James – better known as C L R James, was born Jan. 4, 1901, in Caroni, Trinidad, then a British Crown colony, the first child of Ida Elizabeth James (née Rudder) and Robert Alexander James, a schoolteacher.
In 1910 C.L.R. won a scholarship to Queen's Royal College (QRC), the island's oldest non-Catholic secondary school, in Port of Spain, where he became a club cricketer and distinguished himself as an athlete (he would hold the Trinidad high-jump record at 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) from 1918 to 1922), as well as beginning to write fiction.
After graduating in 1918 from QRC, he worked there as a teacher of English and History in the 1920s; among those he taught was the young Eric Williams, who would become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.
After graduating from Queen’s Royal College he pursued a writing career, His short story "La Divina Pastora" was published in October 1927 in the Saturday Review of Literature, and was widely reprinted.
Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anticolonialist "Beacon Group", a circle of writers associated with The Beaconmagazine, in which he published a series of short stories.
The family moved to Tunapuna, where James' friend Malcolm Nurse (George Padmore) lived.
James married his first wife, Juanita Young, in Trinidad in 1929, but his move three years later to Britain led to their estrangement.
At a similar time, he befriended the cricketer Learie Constantine, who moved to England in 1929.
In 1932, James left Trinidad for the small town of Nelson in Lancashire, England, at the invitation of his friend, West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine, who needed his help writing his autobiography Cricket and I (published in 1933), before moving to London in 1933.
James had brought with him to England the manuscript of his first full-length non-fiction work, partly based on his interviews with the Trinidad labour leader Arthur Andrew Cipriani, which was published with financial assistance from Constantine in 1932.
James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad.
An abridged version of his Life of Captain Cipriani was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933 as the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government.
In October 1938, James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), then the US section of the Fourth International, to facilitate its work among black workers.
Following several meetings in New York, which garnered "enthusiastic praise for his oratorical ability and capacity for analysis of world events," James kicked off his national speaking tour on 6 January 1939 in Philadelphia.
He gave lectures in cities including New Haven, Youngstown, Rochester, and Boston, before finishing the tour with two lectures in Los Angeles and another in Pasadena in March 1939.
He spoke on topics such as "Twilight of the British Empire" and "The Negro and World Imperialism."
He met his second wife, Constance Webb (1918–2005), an American model, actress and author, after he moved to the US in 1938; she wrote of having first heard him speak in the spring of 1939 at a meeting in Los Angeles and reflected on it in her memoir, writing: "I had already heard speeches by two great orators, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now I was hearing a third. The three men were masters of the English language, a skill that gave them extraordinary power."
James and Webb married in 1946 and their son, C. L. R. James Jr, familiarly known as Nobbie, was born in 1949.
In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa.
In his attempt to remain in America, he wrote a study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate.
He wrote the book while being detained at the immigration station on Ellis Island.
His most famous work is The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian Revolution.
In 1958 James returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People's National Movement(PNM) party.
James also advocated the West Indies Federation.
It was over this issue that he fell out with the PNM leadership.
He returned to Great Britain, and spent his last years in Brixton, London.
CLR James, died on May 31, 1989, in London, England from a chest infection on 19 May 1989, aged 88,
After a long continental displacement and a minor governmental controversy, the body of Cyril Lionel Robert James—or Nello, as friends called him—his funeral was held a few weeks later and he was buried in Tunapuna Cemetery, Trinidad, on the afternoon of Monday, June 12th, 1989.
A state memorial service was held for him at the National Stadium, Port of Spain, on 28 June 1989.
On the arrival back in Trinidad of his body, his long-time comrade John La Rose read passages of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal - the great Caribbean poem of exile and return.
In this article, Jackqueline Frost investigates the continental connections of James and Césaire, and the politics of return.
The funeral itself was divided between a “Ceremony of Return” held at the national airport, and a “Celebration of a Life” at the Trinidad Oilfield Worker’s Trade Union’s club, and included tributes by famous novelists and calypso singers.
One photo shows James’ body being brought out by a file of O.W.T.U. members under a plane’s wing.
This moment, in which James’ body arrives from London at Piarco Airport, the literal moment of arrival back into his country, seemed to James’ long-time friend and political comrade John La Rose to be the most symbolic.
On the tarmac at Piarco, La Rose and the actor Errol Jones enshrined this moment of return by reading long passages from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] in English translation.
Neither biographical accounts nor the extensive photos of the funeral recall this moment. It is a moment that we would perhaps not know of, or not remember, had La Rose not scribbled his passage selections in the back cover of his copy of the Cahier.
Among other details, biographers note that steel drum versions of the Rite of Spring and the International were played for the over one thousand people who attended.
Photographs of the event show the hearse in slow procession, the casket flocked with bromeliads and bird-of-paradise, and the umbrellas of the funeral attendees on their way to the graveyard. (Source Darrel Lou Hing, August 19, 2021)