The Point is to Change the World

Andaiye (September 11, 1942–May 31, 2019) was one of the Caribbean’s leading radical political figures, social and political thinkers, and public intellectuals. She spent all of her adult life in left and women’s politics in Guyana, the Caribbean and internationally. In Guyana, she was a member of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), serving on the party executive and as party coordinator/editor, international secretary and women’s secretary through the period of political turbulence and anti-dictatorial struggle that culminated in the assassination of Walter Rodney on June 13, 1980. Part of her political work was editing some of the last writing by Walter Rodney. From the mid-1980s Andaiye’s activism was largely with women in Guyana, the Caribbean, and globally. She was one of the founders of Red Thread, a women’s organization in Guyana, worked with the Women and Development Unit of the University of the West Indies, was attached very briefly to the regional integration organization (CARICOM) as Special Advisor to the Secretary General on Women & Gender, helping prepare Ministers of Women’s Affairs for the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, and was a member of the Regional Executive of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) in the mid-1990s. Internationally, she was associated with the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) and Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike. A cancer survivor herself twice over, Andaiye was a founder of the now defunct Guyana Cancer Society and Cancer Survivors Action Group. For many years, she wrote a weekly newspaper column titled “Woman’s Eye View,” and she has written and published articles and chapters on women in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean.

Alissa Trotz is Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. She is a member of Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana and editor of “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News.

Black Critique

Series editors: Anthony Bogues and Bedour Alagraa

We live in a troubled world. The rise of authoritarianism marks the dominant current political order. The end of colonial empires did not inaugurate a more humane world; rather, the old order reasserted itself.

In opposition, throughout the twentieth century and until today, anti-racist, radical decolonization struggles attempted to create new forms of thought. Figures from Ida B. Wells to W. E. B. Du Bois and Steve Biko, from Claudia Jones to Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral produced work which drew from the historical experiences of Africa and the African diaspora. They drew inspiration from the Haitian revolution, radical black abolitionist thought and practice, and other currents that marked the contours of a black radical intellectual and political tradition.

The Black Critique series operates squarely within this tradition of ideas and political struggles. It includes books which foreground this rich and complex history. At a time when there is a deep desire for change, black radicalism is one of the most under-explored traditions that can drive emancipatory change today. This series highlights these critical ideas from anywhere in the black world, creating a new history of radical thought for our times.

Also available:

Moving Against the System:

The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness

Edited and with an Introduction by David Austin

A Certain Amount of Madness:The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara

Edited by Amber Murrey

Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance

Edited by H. L. T. Quan

Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X

Michael Sawyer

Red International and Black Caribbean Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919–1939

Margaret Stevens

The Point is to
Change the World

Selected Writings of Andaiye

Edited by Alissa Trotz

First published 2020 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Alissa Trotz 2020

David Scott, “Counting Women’s Caring Work: An Interview with Andaiye,” in Small Axe, Volume 8, no. 1, pp. 123–217. Copyright, 2004, Small Axe, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu

The right of Andaiye to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4126 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4127 9 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0622 2 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0624 6 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0623 9 EPUB eBook

Published in Canada 2020 by Between the Lines
401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8

www.btlbooks.com

Cataloguing in Publication information available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978 1 77113 507 8 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 77113 508 5 EPUB eBook

ISBN 978 1 77113 509 2 PDF eBook

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Printed in Canada

The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, 1845

FOREWORDS

Andaiye’s Radical Imagination—with Special Reference to Her Engagement with the Working People’s Alliance
Clem Seecharan

Between Home and Street: Andaiye’s Revolutionary Vision
Robin D. G. Kelley

The Principle of Justice as a Labor of Caring
Honor Ford-Smith

Editor’s Note: On the Politics of Precision

Preface and Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

PART ONE LEARNING LESSONS FROM PAST ORGANIZING

Section I The Good and Bad of Some Earlier Feminist and Left Organizing in the Region

1 The Angle You Look from Determines What You See: Towards a Critique of Feminist Politics and Organizing in the Caribbean [2002]

2 The Historic Centrality of Mr. Slime: George Lamming’s Pursuit of Class Betrayal in Novels and Speeches [2003]

3 The Grenada Revolution, the Caribbean Left, and the Regional Women’s Movement: Preliminary Notes on One Journey [2010]

4 Conversations about Organizing: Revised Excerpts from an Interview with Andaiye by David Scott [2004]

Section II Notes on the Guyana Indian/African Race Divide, and on Organizing within and against it

5 1964: The Rupture of Neighborliness and its Legacy for Indian/African Relations [2008; 2018] (with D. Alissa Trotz)

6 Organizing within and against Race Divides: Lessons from Guyana’s African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa, Indian Political Revolutionary Associates, and the Early Working People’s Alliance [2008, 2017/2018]

7 Three Letters against Race Violence [2004, 2008]

PART TWO A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE: STARTING WITH THE UNWAGED CARING WORK OF MAINLY WOMEN WE REACH ALL SECTORS

Section I Why and How to Count Unwaged Work

8 Valuing Unwaged Work: A Preparatory Brief for CARICOM Ministers Responsible for Women’s Affairs Attending the 4th World Conference on Women [1994]

9 Grassroots Women Learning to Count their Unwaged Work: Summary Report on a 2001–2002 Trial [2009]

10 Looking at the Legalization of Abortion from the Perspective of Women as Unwaged Carers [1993]

Section II Breaking the Frontier between Home and Street, Unwaged and Waged

11 Strike for a Millennium which Values all Women’s Work and all Women’s Lives: A Call to Action [2000]

12 The Impact of the IMF Structural Adjustment Programme on Women’s Unwaged Work and How We Can Resist It [c.mid-1980s]

13 Housewives and Other Carers in the Guyanese Resistance of the Late 1970s and Early 1980s: Looking Back [2010]

14 Four Letters in Defense of Workers, Unwaged and Waged, and their Families [2011, 2012, 2018]

PART THREE THE POLITICAL IN THE PERSONAL

Section I My Breast and Yours, and the Inequalities of Power

15 The War on Cancer as Seen by an Embattled Survivor [2017/2018]

16 Sister Survivor: For Audre Lorde [1992]

Section II Women and Depression: Auto/biographies

17 Asylum: Diary of the Last Seven Days in a Women’s Psychiatric Ward [c.1973]

18 M: A Daughter’s Tale [c.1982]

Section III Undomesticating Violence

19 Against the Beating of Children: Submission to a Parliamentary Sub-committee on the Corporal Punishment of Children [2013] 192

20 Three Letters against Sexual Violence against Children [2010] 194

21 Knife Edge: Living with Domestic and Economic Violence [2013] 201

22 Women as Collateral Damage in Race Violence [2002]

23 Sexual Violence is a Question of Whose Honor? [2000] 210

24 Sexual Abuse and the Uses of Power [2018]

25 Letter to the Police Complaints Authority on an Allegation of Rape against a Police Commissioner [2012]

PART FOUR TOWARDS STRENGTHENING THE MOVEMENT

26 Gender, Race, and Class: A Perspective on the Contemporary Caribbean Struggle [2009]

Last Word

27 Walter Rodney’s Last Writing on and for the Guyanese Working People [2010]

Afterword: Andaiye and the Caribbean Radical Organizing Tradition
Anthony Bogues

Index