By Sean Douglas
Express Woman
July 21, 2002
Pages 10, 11
After 40 years of activism Pearl Eintou Springer is as passionate as ever in advocating her Africaness. She has devoted her life to the cause of promoting Africanist icons as benchmarks to give local people a sense of their identity.
Springer is the founder / director of the National Heritage Library, activist, poet and author, mother and grandmother. The Circle of Poets is soon to honour her as poet laureate of the City of Port of Spain.
She is a controversial figure.
A member of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) in the 1960s and now the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC), she has more recently angrily protested issues like racist admission to nightclubs, and the banning of cane-row hairstyles from a school. In a vehement letter to the editor she wrote: "Who is daring to attack my traditional way of doing mine and my children's hair! What retrograde idiocy and blatant racism is this ...? ... At a time when every bone in my body is screaming REPARATION for hundreds of years of enslavement, I will not now be victim to another kind of imperialism."
Her search for identity is so strong that she has even joined the Orisha faith, saying Christianity's Eurocentrism makes it insufficient to accommodate an Africanist outlook.
Explaining her name Eintou (black pearl) was the same as the name Ntu which
meant "spiritual essence", she said: "That's what my life really
has been - a search for spirituality, direction, self, oneness with the cosmos
and nature. My poetry is simply an expression of that search."
She recalled how she got into the library. After graduating from St George's College, lack of funds made her decide to go into librarianship rather than law. She's been in the library service since age 19.
"My work has been in setting up this national heritage library and in articulating an ideology for it - a people need a sense of self. We came from societies of slavery and indentureship where information was dispensed to us, not shared with us because the colonial powers didn't believe we needed to know about ourselves."
She saw the first roots of Caribbean literature as being in a 1889 book Froudacity (from "Froud audacity") by local author JJ Thomas responding to a negative travel review of Trinidad by a British writer JA Froud.
"For me Froudacity starts a literature of sovereignty rooted in our landscape. The literature of heritage is different - it emerges from a point of view of society. Eric Williams said British historians on the Caribbean had a totally alien point of view."
She praised Williams for debunking the myth that European altruism had entered slavery, it instead being slave resistance to make the plantations uneconomical. Springer effused: "The works of Walter Rodney and Eric Williams, Lamming and Lovelace, scholars who have iconised our nation and languages, and brought us from the background where we were either handing a tray or wielding a hoe, or warming the bed and satisfying the lust of the enslavers. Our story is centre-stage. That's the function of a people's literature, emancipating the mind from mental enslavement, giving cultural confidence and helping us look at ourselves, providing the social history that is absent even now from our curriculum."
She praised Earl Lovelace's Wine of Astonishment for rewriting Baptist history, his Salt for its possibilities of introspection, and Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey for its perspectives on Eurocentrism in the education system.
Other important local literature she identified as establishing identity were
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