For Norman

For Norman

St Augustine, Trinidad, May 10, 2014.
Brian Meeks

Click link below:
http://www.uwi.edu/salises/pdf/ForNorman_BMeeks.pdf

Tribute to Norman Girvan

Tribute to Norman Girvan
Memorial Service, UWI Chapel, Mona

The last time I saw Norman he did not see me. He was on his way, with an energetic bounce, to his exercises in the park. So much in contrast to my sedentary ways, my family chastised. Looking back now, nearly half s century,  I can see that that energy, not only physical, but even more so, intellectual and social and political defined the man.

Over the years we shared, in particular, a special interest in Caribbean integration. In fact our careers began on that note, and it was the subject of our latest endeavors. I used to teasingly enquire how after half a century he    still had the energy to continue batting, still not out. And he would regale me with his characteristic humor that a young man had just asked him if he was the son of that Girvan who wrote those books on the bauxite industry.

Although his range of interest and activities was extremely wide, the common thread running through them was "imbalance  of power" , as he called it; the force that stultified economic growth in the impoverished countries of the South. And, therefore it followed, the imperative of collective action by these countries to countervail this asymmetry in power. Whether at the level of Caribbean Community, the wider Caribbean, or the South as a whole, or groups within it. The impact of power was to be put in dramatic relief in his clash with the IMF over so-called structural adjustment, that proved to be more destructive than constructive. And with the European Union over their Economic Partnership Agreement with the Caribbean, that was anything but a partnership. For his/ our generation of economists power  was far from mainstream theory on development, trained as we were to think, in the Euro-American manner, in terms of  mechanistic models built around value-free descriptive concepts,  such as savings and investment rates, and the like. Interestingly our colleague George Beckford would at the same time be re-defining the notion and policy implications of development in terms of persistent poverty, ideas that were not to gain recognition in the North for the next thirty years.
Norman's tour de force, in both an intellectual and practical sense, was to be the single development vision for the Caribbean he set forth, and made into a road map as the way forward for our Community. In essence it was both a practical and intellectual distillation of his understanding of the path to development for small States such as ours. This was no easy task. Certainly not another academic paper reviewed by two or three peers. But a vision with a plan of action,  subject, in endless open debate, to the scrutiny  of fifteen government representations, each with briefs from their various agencies. It put all his enormous virtues of patience, perseverance and energy to the severest test. I recall that in the end, on reaching final agreement, he was accorded a lively ovation, something unheard of in such a setting.

This was followed up by an undertaking of a more overt political orientation, a venture in which I collaborated-- a strategic approach to regional development, and  tactics for re-energizing Caribbean Community. Norman thought that we had at last got it right.for how could governments fail to grasp the felicitous, the brilliant,  significance of  benefits to participating States offered by regional public goods and services, that did not  at the same time themselves generate costs, and inter-State conflict over distribution. Some time has passed since all this raised our energy level. But, as was characteristic of Norman, not even the leisurely pace of Caribbean culture, if I might thus  describe our politics, could tame his energy.

My dear friend Norman, farewell. You have done more than your fair share for Carib people. I will miss your your urgent video calls for intellectual consultation, or asking me to find some long forgotten paper, or  challenge my math skills, or for letting off steam. I will miss your so very hearty laughter, and that sparkle in your eyes when something really excited your interest.  

Havelock Brewster
May 3, 2014

“La Deuda es Impagable” (The Debt is Unpayable): For Norman Girvan by D. Alissa Trotz

“La Deuda es Impagable” (The Debt is Unpayable): For Norman Girvan

by D. Alissa Trotz

Editor, ‘In the Diaspora,’ Stabroek News

“La Deuda es Impagable” was how Norman Girvan paid tribute to the living example of the Cuban Revolution when he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Havana in December 2008. “La Deuda es Impagable” is how Norman’s colleagues and friends in Cuba, that country that he loved so much and where he spent his last days, have paid tribute to his own contributions for a united and independent Caribbean. As we struggle to come to terms with the fact that Norman is no longer physically with us, we know too that he has left us with an extraordinary gift, a template of connection, solidarity and love for this region, these spaces we call home, these neighbours across sea and river and border and language. And we will keep Norman close, never far from thought and heart, by drawing from, enriching and extending the wellspring of his outstanding contributions. 

There are so many places to start, like Norman’s revisiting of the dependency theory debates and his caution that while the Caribbean faces new and different challenges, we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Two years ago, and before a capacity audience gathered for the 50^th Anniversary of Jamaican Independence (which Norman pointedly described as In-Dependence), he compellingly argued that what we were facing in the region was policy recolonisation, providing us with the incredible example of how this played itself out in the IMF requirements that the Jamaican government provide daily reports “on 13 items, weekly reports on 6 items; monthly reports on 22 items, and quarterly reports on 10 items.”

In his discussion of existential threats facing the Caribbean, Norman has given us a language beyond the failed state discourse that he so disliked, challenging us to think of what he described as “connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena.” One example would be his recognition of the significance of climate change to the viability of the region, and his participation in a workshop with the Climate Change Centre in Belmopan, Belize a few years ago to discuss an integrated approach to and the importance of economic modeling for discussions of environmental sustainability. 

Norman played a leading role mobilizing critical discussion of the Cariforum (Caricom plus the Dominican Republic) negotiations with the European Union (EU) that led to the signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) over five years ago. He set up and managed a list-serv that kept us informed of the issues: the meaninglessness of trade reciprocity when the playing field is so uneven; the divide and rule logic framing the EU’s decision to pursue separate EPAs with Africa-Caribbean-Pacific members; the fuzzy chain of command, particularly with regard to the Caricom Secretariat and the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery; the dangerous precedent the EPA sets for future trade negotiations with Canada and the US. Norman was at the forefront of a campaign that was carried in the regional media calling for a full and public review of the EPA. He supplied memorable terms to describe the three card trick that we were played: sweetification, the dangling carrot that came in the form of hollow promises of development funds; treatyfication, binding legal documents that arguably contravene elements of the Caricom Single Market and Economy itself; and technification, the dense language over hundreds of pages of the Agreement that mystified the entire process. On this last point Norman was deeply reflective of the way in which the anti-EPA campaign – with the exception of Haiti where there was popular mobilization - remained largely at the level of an intra-elite disagreement, removing from plain view the devastating effects the agreement could potentially have on people’s everyday lives. The lessons to be drawn are many, as we were reminded just two weeks ago when at a meeting in Guyana, the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce (CAIC) noted that the EPA “has not allowed us full access [to the European market] that we have envisioned.” At the time of signing, provisions were put in place to evaluate implementation after an initial five years – meaning that a full and frank public accounting was due to the people of the region in 2013. CAIC’s comments suggest that little to nothing has been done by Caricom, or the CRNM, or the Heads of Government, to ensure that we were collecting systematic information to enable meaningful discussion of what the EPA has (not) delivered to the region. Addressing this shameful lapse head on is part of the work to be done, while also engaging Norman’s efforts (rooted in his idea of a Caribbean beyond the narrow insularities of the Anglophone countries) to think about different kinds of integration possibilities outside of neoliberal free trade arrangement logics, represented for example by The Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) and PetroCaribe.

Most recently and at the time of his tragic accident, Norman was actively involved in a campaign that brought together colleagues from the Caribbean, North America and Europe, outraged by the discriminatory and racist Ruling 168-13 of the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic (DR) that effectively stripped citizenship from potentially hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The position that Caricom eventually took (condemning the ruling and suspending consideration of the DR’s request for membership of Caricom) cannot be understood outside of this activism that pressured the region’s governments to take a stand. Norman’s online blog kept us abreast of ongoing developments, taking care to feature oppositional voices from the Dominican Republic to remind us to always take our cue from those most affected by and mobilizing against the ruling. In late November, in what was perhaps his last public appearance to be captured online, he participated on a panel hosted by the Institute of International Relations (IIR) on Ruling 168-13, opening the event with a clear and passionate outlining of the facts of the case and why it was politically, ethically and morally imperative to oppose it. The following day he was member of a small delegation appearing before the Caricom Bureau in Port-of-Spain and presenting them with the petitions from Jouvay Ayiti and Concerned Caribbean Citizens.  And just two weeks later, Norman would attend the annual Conference organized by the Caribbean Chair of the University of Havana in December, where he spoke of the importance of Cuba and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) speaking out against the ruling. He understood that it is only continued pressure that can keep this in the public eye and that can deliver justice for the women, men and children of the DR facing civil death. We must extend Norman’s work, in the face of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hearings last month where Juliana Dequis Pierre (whose application for a Dominican identification card is the act that triggered the court case and the ruling) was prevented from leaving the DR to appear before the Commissioners; in the face of the fact that the Dominican Republic has astonishingly been allowed to assume the Chair of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States; and in the face of the fact that Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who led the call for Caricom to take a clear and definitive position, is now Caricom Chair.

Norman has bequeathed to us all the blog he started some seven years ago (www.normangirvan.info) and that now stands as an incredible archive, a living trace of these and other tireless examples – at one talk in Jamaica, he returned to his seat to a standing ovation and even before he was approached for copies of his paper he had already uploaded it to his blog! Given Norman’s facility with social media, we asked him once how he operated in the days of New World when computers were not around. His response – he quipped that they would do things like stuff their suitcases full of copies of New World Quarterly when they were moving between islands, or ask people who were travelling to take pamphlets for them – underlined how for Norman, connectivity was a way to practice and deepen connections born out of a decades-old commitment to the region. For him public intellectual work was a loving obligation and form of giving back, a process that involved not just putting what one learned at the service of a wider community, but crucially of being enriched by the conversations this act of sharing initiated. The Stabroek News diaspora column, which I began in 2008, is indebted to Norman’s mentorship and encouragement. He has contributed several pieces and ideas over the years, and we have jointly published articles in the blog and column as a way of reaching a wider audience. And just over a year ago a small group of faculty and students (headed by Norman and social activist Alex Gittens) launched 1804caribvoices.org, a web forum intended to connect groups and individuals across the linguistic divides of the Pan-Caribbean. Even after his accident, Norman requested that we send publishable material to editor@1804caribnews.org. A fitting tribute is to nurture this regional initiative he was part of, and in so doing to honour the inter-generational collaboration that was such a significant part of his life. Aleah Ranjitsingh, one of his doctoral students, puts it best when she says simply that he will always be her teacher and that she is (not was) his student. Cuban economist and lecturer at the University of Havana, Laneydi Martínez Alfonso spoke of being afraid to meet Norman at first because of his international reputation, and of being overwhelmed when she finally did by “his infinite curiosity, his humbleness, his fearless and also carefulness, his endless spirit for collaboration and help, his extremely beautiful and genuine humanity.”

In his keynote speech at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies to mark the 50^th anniversary of Jamaican Independence in 2012, Norman concluded on a personal note:

“My son, Alexander, is also presenting at this Conference.

You, and your generation, stand on the cusp of your own life’s

journey as Jamaica faces the challenge of its second independence;

as I and my generation did on the cusp of Jamaica’s first, half a

century ago. It is like the handing over of the baton. But I want to

remind you all that the runner who passes the baton, doesn’t stop

running; he keeps on for a while longer, and cheers on his successors!”

It was a moving and public affirmation of how he was shaped by his commitment to his family, of the ways in which the familial, the national and the regional were deeply interwoven in his life’s journey. We thank Norman’s partner and wife Jasmine, and his children Ramon, Alexander and Alatashe, for sharing him with us, and whose grace and positive spiritual energy over the last four months have been an example, comfort and inspiration.  May you all now find support in the outpouring of love and respect. And we know, amidst our unspeakable sorrow, that Norman Girvan continues to cheer us on with his unceasing optimism and excitement for the incredible promise and joy that is the Greater Caribbean, a promise only to be made real through our collective labour and commitment.

Comments and Reminiscences on Norman Girvan

We have created this blog for sharing of photos, comments and reminiscences 

on Norman Girvan.

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UCWI Pelican Annual 1960-61, by Carlyle Dunkley:

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Reflections on Nyak

Michael Witter

April 11, 2014

“Nyak” is what GBeck called Norman Girvan, and I followed suit in all the years that I enjoyed his friendship and shared the many projects on which we collaborated.  I had met his ideas on multinational corporations as mechanisms of underdeveloping the Caribbean and the wider Third World, in my first attempt at a doctoral thesis on the growth of multinational corporations.  This work led me to the wider world of dependency economics and structuralist thought on economic development, and back through the writings of the New World thinkers of the 1960s in the Caribbean.  This was one path.  The other path led me from George Beckford’s Persistent Poverty back to the same core of critical thinking that distinguished Norman and the Caribbean scholars of his generation.

Till the painful imprisonment of his fertile and extremely active mind in the broken body that led to his untimely passing, Norman was a beacon of scholarship in the service of the Caribbean people.  To be sure, he was heir to the work of his father, D. T. M. Girvan, and the other pioneers of community development as a strategy for national development of the 1940s and 1950s in anti-colonial, pre-Independence Jamaica.  In addition, he was profoundly influenced by the remarkable minds of the New World scholars, and their counterparts in Latin America immediately, and the wider world of radical critique with which he was always engaged.  But, to my certain knowledge, he brought to those with whom he exchanged ideas, an unshakeable abhorrence of injustice, an instinct for service to, and respect for, his fellow human beings, an openness to learning, a mind of exceptional critical capacities, a boundless energy for disciplined work, commitment to principled positions that allowed for compromise but never betrayal, and the courage to stand up to the abuse of authority and power.

In the last five or so years, Nyak seemed to acquire a new flow of intellectual energy that he creatively shared through his remarkable web site that became a major research source for contemporary issues of Caribbean development, especially as they were shaped by the unfolding of global capitalism through its various crises.  He was one of the few intellectuals from the Anglo-Caribbean who engaged fully with the rest of the Caribbean, and particularly the Hispanic Caribbean, on a consistent and comprehensive basis.  I recall being profoundly moved by the citation and his response in Spanish, at a ceremony in Havana at which he received one of Cuba’s highest honours.  Many were the compliments paid to his intellectual leadership by English-, Spanish-, French-, and Dutch-speaking scholars for his leadership of the Association of Caribbean Economists.  His leadership as secretary-general of the Association of Caribbean States and most recently his appointment by the UN secretary-general to mediate the border disagreements between Venezuela and Guyana are just two of many instances of international recognition for his intellectual work, his personal integrity and his leadership.

Even his critics from both the right and the left who cast slurs on the positions he took in what he believed was in the interest of the people of the Caribbean, acknowledged his profound contribution to critical thought in their own back foremost ways.  For some, he was out of touch with the narrowing concerns of mainstream economics, and for others, he was propagating out-dated radical nationalism.  Both views had to engage his intellectual campaigns, and in so doing, recognize the import of his ideas.

Nyak has left a body of work that will support research for many years to come.   Too few of his students have become academic partisans like him in the cause of social and economic development for the Caribbean people, but these few will live the values of critical thought, courage, and social justice that he espoused.  The older ones of us will give thanks to Norman, each in his or her own way.  But, it is the younger ones who will stand on his shoulders, and see further, that will keep his memory alive in the academic journals and the popular mind. 

There are two projects that the older and the younger generations can collaborate in to give Norman a sense of intellectual closure.  He wanted a critical review of the struggles over development policy in Jamaica in the 1970s, properly situated in the global context, the history of the Caribbean, and the class struggles of Jamaica.  And he wanted the volumes of the New World Journal to be re-published for the benefit of the young.  Academics can honour his memory with these two publications.

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