From Publishers Weekly
Founder of the humanitarian group TransAfrica, Robinson has been eloquently angry in his calls, including The Debt and The Reckoning, for America to recognize the depredations suffered by the descendants of slaves. Part meditation, part rant, this book takes off from Robinson's move to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts (his wife's home country), but he has hardly mellowed. The book's first part is titled "Five Hundred Years of White Crimes and Self-Absolution in the Americas," contrasting the modest, decent nature of life in St. Kitts with a wealthy, harsh, racist, complacent America. Regarding violence, for example, "Americans only ask: who? Never: why?" The book's second part is a Chomskyesque essay of political manipulation regarding Iraq. The third circles back to contrast cash-obsessed America and the social goals of places like St. Kitts and Haiti, which, despite their modestness, are grounded in the commonweal of all. Robinson makes casual checkable errors (a proposal to put a U.S. base on St. Kitts did make the U.S. press) as well as more profound ones: the pronouncement "Only white countries are capable of killing so many at one time" immediately raises the specter of Rwanda. But incontrovertible wrongs fuel Robinson's ire: the U.S. government protects Haiti's leading human rights violator; slavery defender Robert E. Lee is widely commemorated; President Bill Clinton helped wreck the Caribbean banana trade during the U.S.-Europe feud over imports in 1999. Adding it all up, Robinson sees the difference between the status of blacks in America and blacks he sees in St. Kitts as the result of the "post-slavery American experience." Readers will find it difficult to disagree.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Randall Robinson's new book straddles several genres. It is an impassioned jeremiad against the war in Iraq. It is a fascinating history of the Caribbean, from the horrors of slavery and colonialism, through the battle for independence, to the economic dilemmas of the 21st century. But, above all, Quitting America is a love story; more specifically, a wrenching tale of unrequited love.
"I tried to love America, its credos, its ideals, its promise, its process," Robinson writes. "I have tried to love America but America would not love the ancient, full African whole of me." As a driven political activist and social critic, Robinson struggled to get America to live up to its declared standards of justice and equality. His best-known fight was the as yet unsuccessful effort to get the U.S. government to pay African Americans reparations for the 250-year atrocity of slavery.
Today, Robinson has given up on America. Sick of banging his head against a wall of resistance and obliviousness, he quit his native country in the summer of 2001. "America. America. Land of my birth and erstwhile distress. Hypocrite immemorial. My heart left long ago. At long last, I have followed it." He is clearly enamored of the tiny Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis, where his wife, Hazel, was born. His evocation of life in this lush and beautiful island nation forms the strongest section of the book. St. Kitts is filled with gentle, trusting people, the overwhelming majority of them black. It is a place where violent crime is rare and health care is universal. After his 11-year-old daughter, Khalea, received emergency treatment for a brief illness at a local hospital, Robinson was astonished to learn what he has to pay: nothing. "Our job here is to get your daughter well," the nurse told him.
In St. Kitts, Robinson discovers, America's overriding fixation is no big deal: "Money is not the only thing and it is never the first thing." He writes compellingly of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of St. Kitts in 1493 and of the subsequent extermination of the island's indigenous Carib people. He also includes a long history of Haiti and its successful slave revolt. Black independence there and the relatively early end of slavery in the region (it was abolished in St. Kitts in 1834) served as a "psychic tonic." Robinson writes: "The cultural, social, political, and economic successes of the Caribbean arguably qualify it as the healthiest quarter of the black world. It is our jewel to be relished and protected, small but exquisite, unboastful but luminous."
But he fears that his island paradise is in danger of being despoiled. St. Kitts's economy has relied heavily on sugar production. Due to falling sugar prices around the world, the nation is rapidly losing money. So, like other Caribbean islands before it, St. Kitts is increasingly looking to tourism as a way of bringing in revenue. A Marriott hotel is preparing to open its doors. A representative of the chain advised St. Kittians "to greet every tourist with a 'big bright shiny smile.' " And to make its guests feel more comfortable, Marriott has offered to build a police station and holding pen right near the new hotel. "It is my profound conviction," Robinson writes, as a warning to St. Kitts and Nevis, "that given the smallest opportunity, the United States will gobble up the hard-fought relative independence of the Caribbean."
Despite Robinson's affection for his adopted home, it is America that obsesses him. He's like a man in a happy second marriage who cannot stop thinking about the ex-wife who broke his heart. He relentlessly dissects the ruined relationship, picking at the wounds, reliving the hurt. "For all of my life, I had wished only to live in an America that would but reciprocate my loyalty," he writes. He wants "an official confession of all the lurid details, a report, for once, of brutally candid self-investigation, a book from on high of awful truths about what all had been done to me and why." None was forthcoming.
Robinson's pain is made palpable in this fiercely eloquent, nakedly honest book. But there is an uneasy question lurking beneath the surface. Why has the vast majority of black Americans with the resources and wherewithal to quit America opted to stay? There are millions of African Americans who share Robinson's disgust with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, who share his tortured knowledge of America's race-crazed history and his despair about the future, yet choose not to live in another country. Surely America must offer a great many black citizens -- who have had the opportunity to leave -- something that they have not found elsewhere.
"We wanted to leave America with as much conviction as we wanted to come here," Robinson says of his family's decision to move to St. Kitts. But one gets the distinct impression that his sunny love for St. Kitts will never be as powerful as his stormy love-hate relationship with America. It would not be surprising if he wound up back in the USA someday, fighting the same old "American social battles," giving no quarter, refusing to surrender. Perhaps Randall Robinson's exile is, ultimately, internal.
Reviewed by Jake Lamar
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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