Making Trouble by Lynne Segal

Author:Lynne Segal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Living with difference

Much the same could be said about the presence and impact of the man who penned those words, Stuart Hall. He is, in my view, the most charismatic of all the New Left figures, and the one I personally know best. Crucially for me, Stuart has spent much of his life locating political matters in their cultural and historical conjuncture, while also exploring private worlds of identification and belonging. Half a century after arriving in Britain from Jamaica, he is still politically engaged, still constantly rousing audiences on public platforms, still offering friendship and encouragement at every turn. Again, it is only late in life that Stuart has felt able to look back and assess the significance of his Jamaican past. His childhood, he now reflects, was a crucible of the destructive permutations of class, ‘colour’, fantasy and all the longings for status that are implanted as lasting legacies of colonial subordination, ‘lived out as part of my personal history’.26 Recalling the anguish he escaped from as a black West Indian embarking on his own long political journey, he concludes: ‘In a sense, it has taken me fifty years to come home … It was a space I couldn’t occupy, a space I had to learn to occupy.’27

It was not just that skin colour was such a prominent feature in the middle-class family Stuart was born into, in 1932, but his paler-skinned mother, with relatives who could pass as ‘local white’, identified completely with the island’s white settler past. The older he grew, the greater his alienation from his parents’ unrelenting aspirations: the school friends he liked were too ‘black’ to bring home; the sports clubs his father wanted him to join were places in which the son saw his father demeaned by white people; the old colonial world his parents identified with was one others were working confidently to overthrow. Indeed, the very week Stuart first attended secondary school, he recalls that Michael Manley, already a teenage rebel, was expelled from school for throwing a textbook at the English history teacher for his colonial interpretations – proleptically revealing (in ways self-styled postmodernists would quickly forget) the unique impact of a combined practical and deconstructive textual assault. But it was only in England, after winning a scholarship to Oxford, that he learnt for the first time that he really was ‘black’: ‘I became Caribbean there, in Oxford.’28 It was this experience which accentuated Stuart’s characteristic stress on the contingency of any identity, its lack of fixed origin, only called into being through the different ways we find ourselves placed, or position ourselves, in narratives of the past. It was this experience too, reflecting back upon the toxic colonial mix he had escaped that he suggests broke down forever the distinction between the public and the private self:

I could never understand why people thought these structural questions were not connected with the psychic – with emotions and identifications and feelings because, for me, those structures are things you live.

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