Q&A: ORLANDO PATTERSON ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF SLAVERY, JAMAICAN PRIME MINISTER, AND CRICKET

ogist, but also, I felt that there are limits of social science that I couldn’t really express in a sociological treatise or an economics model, which I thought I could best explore through fiction, understanding the world.

Something major happened while I was at college. It was a critical period in the growth of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica.

They were going back to Africa. They sang about it, but they believed it, and they believed the Emperor would come and take them back. A large number of them gathered in Kingston on the shores of the slums there, under a man called Claudius Henry, who was a kind of millenarian leader, and are waiting for the ship to come with the Emperor.

So as an undergraduate studying sociology with anthropologists, I had to get involved with this.

So I was down there waiting with them for the Emperor. And my original idea is that I do a sociological treatise on this, but I said, “Nah, there’s no way I could capture that in a dry sociological text.” So, I turned to fiction.

I felt that there are limits of social that I couldn’t really express in a sociological treatise or an economics model, which I thought I could best explore through school when you get a break, recess, you head for the little pitch, which is just a dust strip.

FM: You served as a special adviser for Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley from 1972 to 1979. What is something people get wrong about working in public service?

FM: You graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1962 with a degree in economics.

By 1965, you earned your Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics where you wrote your thesis “Sociology of Slavery.” What motivated this interest in researching slavery academically?

OP: That came naturally. Growing up, as I mentioned, I was surrounded by sugarcane plantations. My little town was the center of the plantation system.

Plantation culture was all around you. And the sugar plantation was the scene of the great tragedy of slavery. Jamaica was a slave society for hundreds of years from when Columbus discovered it in 1492 and started to enslave the Indians, right through the coming of African slavery, to the British conquest of the island in 1655, and then large-scale slavery.

Most of our history was in condition of slavery.

FM: In your 1982 book “Slavery and Social Death,” you mention that what distinguishes slavery from other oppressive systems is this idea of social death: the denial of humanity and participation in society. You also mention that it exists to some extent today, so where do we see remnants of social death today?

OP: I should clear one thing up. There is a movement among some Black intellectuals, Afro-pessimism, they call themselves, who have taken up the idea argue that it exists today. I don’t hold that view. I think this is too extreme a view. I think that there are consequences of slavery, which persist today. Segregation, I see as, in many ways, one of the most important consequences of slavery. What is essential to the idea of social death is that the slave did not belong to the society, has no place in the society. It’s just incredible that America should still have such a high level of segregation. The idea of not living with the Blacks, even in spite of all the many changes, still exists. And I see that going straight back to the notion of natal alienation, the fact that the slave does not belong.

FM: As much as you have work that is purely academic, you also have written a few fiction novels, namely “The Children of Sisyphus,” “An Absence of Ruins,” and “Die the Long Day.” How does your approach to fiction writing differ from your academic process?

OP: I was always involved with exploring the world, both as a sociol-

They were trying to introduce a democratic socialist revolution. It didn’t quite work, and it scared the hell out of the Americas. I don’t know how they let me back into the country cause I used to go back and forth. They were suspicious of what I was up to because I’d go between Harvard and Jamaica. Manley and Castro fell in love, I mean, they loved each other. They’re both very charismatic. There are only 90 miles away from Cuba to Jamaica, so they said, “What the hell, let’s get together.” They just adored each other. And that just scared the hell out of the CIA. And so we had a hard time, a pretty hard time. I don’t know all the details. But you know, a lot of the violence that emerged is part of the kind of underhand things which were done to destabilize the country. It is a strange kind of existence, but was fascinating. I got things done. Not everything succeeded, and the overall plan to take the country towards a democratic socialist system collapsed for economic reasons. I am now involved again, this time with a major project — total transformation of the education system of Jamaica.