Or: What’s going wrong with education?
Well, Talk Like a Pirate Day is over for another year (hurrah! I hear you all saying), and this morning I opened my inbox to an email about Hackney Council.
Apparently, once the rebuilding work is done in Dalston, the plan is to drop the name of the CLR James Library there, and change it. To something even more aspirational for local people? Yeah: “Dalston Library & Archives.”
CLR James even came to the original naming ceremony! He was 84 years old then, and died four years later.
Let’s just recap. Cyril Lionel Robert James, the Afro-Trinidadian historian born in 1901, was influential on an international scale in Socialist thinking. He was also well-known as a cricket journalist. In 1939 he wrote the book The Black Jacobins, about the revolution in Haiti – as far as I know, still the seminal work on the subject. He was a very distinguished man. Not just, like, “is it cause I is black” distinguished – proper distinguished. Distinguished in a way none of these jobsworths at Hackney can even begin to understand, let alone appreciate.
I’v got a long history with my poor beleaguered kids of flipping out when it’s Black History Month or LGBT month or whatever.Why? Because they don’t know who George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, George Bridgetower or Toussaint L’Ouverture were. Because, to teach them about being gay, they got them singing that “You spin me round round baby” song, because apparently the fat-lipped tranny who was on Celebrity Big Brother was in it. So no Oscar Wilde, no Gertrude Stein. There is a difference between awareness and history. Do our Hackney kids even know about the history of Haiti?
Ngoma Bishop, chairman of Hackney’s Black & Ethnic Minority Arts (BEMA) network, told the Hackney Gazette:
“I think the council, at the time the library was named, was making a statement and commitment regarding the literary contribution of African Caribbean people worldwide. Given the high percentage of African and Caribbean people in Hackney, I feel that taking a decision to drop the name is making an equally strong statement in the opposite direction.”
So, CLR James. Too old? Too left-wing? Too elitist? Too boring? Mlle Baroque, getting ready for school, says: “It’ll be just because they think nobody knows who he is.”
Here’s what I think they could do, to use the association of the library with this important thinker on freedom to boost local education.
1. Put James’ picture in the window.
2. Buy some copies of his books, including the cricket ones. Put them on the shelves in the proper section, and also in a special display section.
3. Pull out pictures of the naming ceremony when the historian was there at the library.
4. Maybe do some outreach work with local secondary schools. It might mean going a little bit off-curriculum, though. Bad.
5. And maybe admit to the kids that, by entering the halls of academe, by engaging with world history and even the colonial sport of cricket, CLR James was not giving anything of his identity or heritage up – he was adding to it. You know, at the Stoke Newington School leavers’ ceremony this year they had an inspirational speaker, this guy who used to be a pro basketball player, and his central message to the kids was: You can do better. Don’t aim for sport. Aim to do something really meaningful with your life. He says: “One day I realised I was… good at putting a ball into a net.” Now he’s a psychologist. By bolstering this kind of message they cold be joining up an approach which might just result in something, if enough institutions across the borough did it.
Instead, a Hackney Council spokesman told the Gazette: “We feel it’s important for the names of our libraries to reflect their location. We also had to consider the fact that Hackney’s archive service will be situated in the building.”
But be of good cheer! “This is the not the end of the council’s affiliation with CLR James, who we are proud to be associated with. As part of the new library, there will be a permanent exhibition to chronicle his life and works and an annual event in his memory, and we are pleased to report the state-of-the-art education room will also be named after this influential figure.”
Apparently the seven other libraries are named after their locations. You have to admit, “Dalston Library and Archive” sounds pretty snappy & great. But I still can’t help wondering if this the council is missing a trick.
And that weird, random room. Will it be like the old Inclusion Room at Stoke Newington School…?
There is a petition, if you feel like doing something or making a sarcastic comment.
Amd you can read more about CLR James on the excellent blog, Loving Dalston.
Baroque in Hackney 