Lucille Mathurin-Mair: A Tribute

Alissa Trotz is Director of Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto, and edits the weekly In the Diaspora Stabroek News column.

On Friday last, the Chapel on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) opened its doors to celebrate the life of Dr. Lucille Mathurin-Mair, who died at the age of 85 on January 28th.  After searching online, I had to conclude that with the – obvious – exception of Jamaica, there was little or no column space in other Caribbean newspapers dedicated to this story, a silence that underlines both the necessity as well as the regrettable failure of national media today in promoting a genuine regional consciousness. The omission is particularly short-sighted in this case, as Mair’s contribution moved across national, regional and global scales, united by a dignified commitment to social justice, and particularly to the vexed question of gender equality.

Tributes have poured in from all over the world, including from Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, who described her as a lifelong champion of the rights of women who served as Secretary-General of the World Conference on the United Nations Decade for Women in 1980, and was the first woman to be appointed in 1982 as the UN’s Under-Secretary-General. Professor Edward Baugh, offering the citation in 1993 on the occasion of her Honorary Doctorate from UWI, described the leadership and consummate diplomatic prowess (he referred to Mair as made of finely tempered steel) that resulted in Mair’s appointment as Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the question of Palestine. She received two of Jamaica’s highest awards, the National Order of Jamaica and the order of Distinction (Commander Class), as well as Honorary Doctorates from UWI, the University of Florida and the University of Ulster in Ireland.

For me, the most compelling tributes have been those that identified Mair’s unstinting dedication to women’s equality, and that have described, in the words of historian Verene Shepherd, “her pioneering role in the evolution of Caribbean women’s history”. In this area, Mair’s work at UWI Mona was supervised by Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia (who had also taught Walter Rodney in an earlier period when Mair was warden of Mary Seacole Hall, the newly opened campus residence). In 1974 she defended her doctoral dissertation. Based on extensive archival research, it was pathbreaking on a number of counts. First, it challenged the invisibility of women that was at the time prevalent in the scholarship, and centred them instead as historical actors. Secondly, by looking at women in Jamaica across class and colour (black, brown and white), Mair complicated ideas of all women as the same, and challenged simplistic assumptions of an easy sisterly solidarity. One of her major findings at that time – that in plantation society, the white woman consumed, the coloured woman served and the black woman laboured – put the difficult question of difference on the table as a feminist issue from the start. Not difference as biological, but as historically constructed in ways that shape our relations with each other and in ways that can teach us about how inequality works and how to change it. In later years she wrote an influential piece, The Rebel Women in the British West Indies During Slavery, which dispelled any notion of women as victims, underlining instead the courage and strength of our ancestors. These female protagonists responded to the violence of plantation life in a variety of ways that were both confrontational and indirect, spectacular and spectacularly ordinary, that ranged from rebellion, work stoppage and go slows to trickster humour and mocking words and gestures. Nothing escaped this historian’s careful eye, no action was too small or too insignificant. They all added up to a complex totality defined by a refusal to bow down before the dehumanization of plantation slavery. As Verene Shepherd notes, Mair’s dissertation was the most widely requested unpublished text by students of Caribbean history and culture, and has had an enduring influence on generations of scholars, from Barbadian Hilary Beckles’ analysis of gender in Caribbean slave society, to Trinidadian Patricia Mohammed’s wonderful social history of Indian women’s and men’s struggles during and in the first decades following the ending of indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago. In 2007, three decades after its first appearance in dissertation form, and fittingly on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, Lucille Mathurin-Mair’s magisterial book, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica 1655-1844, was published by the University of the West Indies Press.

Honor Ford-Smith, performer, teacher and founding artistic director of the Jamaican women’s group Sistren, says that Mair’s forwardness and example inspired many Caribbean women to name themselves in public space as feminists and to draw on regional histories for a foundation of committed feminist practice. As Ford-Smith comments, “Lucille’s writing was the intellectual bridge to the struggles of all the unnamed women who came before. She was the link to a past and to the past in the present. She was a bridge person – linking past struggles to new ones and sustaining a tradition that allowed us to find our voices.” It is hardly surprising that Mair was such an instrumental figure in the establishment of the Centres for Gender and Development Studies across the three UWI Campuses (since 1998, the Mona campus has honoured her with the annual distinguished Lucille Mathurin Mair lecture).

Just as Lucille Mathurin-Mair’s work has never been about the heroic individual, so too I believe that we should resist any attempt to remember her in ways that set her apart from or above the Caribbean people that she always saw herself in service to. In her commitment to her own children, Adrian, David and Gail (in a public tribute last Friday, her son Adrian described her humanitarianism and devotion to women’s issues as an amplification of her unconditional love for her family), in becoming a channel for the communication of our collective pasts, in working to ensure that women and questions of gender equality would become central to Caribbean struggles, in engaging these questions with women at a transnational level, in serving her country in Cuba and at the United Nations, in bringing the Caribbean to the world and the world to the Caribbean, Lucille Mathurin-Mair is an inspiration to countless rebel women at home and in the diaspora. When we look at the Caribbean today it is very easy to feel despair, but Mair’s example reminds us to always believe in the horizon of possibility, a belief that must respond to two questions: What are we going to do about it? And who are we going to do it with? We should commit to ensuring that the amnesia about our collective history that she fought so hard to combat should not threaten an ongoing appreciation of her own life. We must remember her across the Caribbean, beyond the narrow confines of diplomatic corridors and academic circles, so that future generations can become conscious inheritors of her legacy. Let us pay tribute to Lucille Mathurin-Mair not just in words but in our efforts to continually strive for that horizon she so steadfastly had faith in.