Michael X

1. Michael X

2. Instructions • Read this Powerpoint, not to “know everything in it” but to stimulate thinking. • Answer the questions as you go – this will reinforce your thinking and your understanding. • In this unit you not only need to understand how different opinions, conflicting perspectives help to broaden your understanding of things – but HOW writers cleverly position us. • “Learning” all that is contained here will guarantee that your time will be mis-spent. • Think and engage. This is the only sure way to succeed in a unit like this.

3. Michael X • Black activist, England • Became well-known after he made racist statements • Set up commune in Trinidad • Comes to believe that a white woman, in relationship with one of the men of the commune, was an MI6 operative, that she was sabotaging their activities. • She is murdered by MX’s lieutenants. • Joe Skerrittknows about her murder and threatens to dob them in • Michael X kills Joe Skerritt. • In short: He is a murderer! • Sent to Royal Gaol, Trinidad.

4. Conflict Between… • Justice and law • Life and death • Death penalty and Human Rights • Perpetrator and victim • The State and criminal • Good of society and individual • Wardens and onlookers • Institutionalised perspective vs outsiders • Readings (dominant, resistant) • OTHERS?

5. Conflicting Perspectives • Officious - bureaucratic perspective: • “Death warrants were always read on Thursdays between 2 and 4pm” • Vs • Geoffrey Robertson’s / Human Rights Advocates’ compassion “The inmates spent those hours in terror…”

6. Conflicting Perspectives • Do you accept or reject Robertson’s positioning? Why? • Do you think that the victim’s mother might have a different perspective about Michael X’s right to life? • Can you find a “pro-death penalty” piece on the net, quickly ?

7. What is Robertson’s perspective? • “Capital punishment induces vicious behaviour…in the prisoners on death row” • “…the death penalty brutalises all involved in it, including the State and its high officials” • “I believe that of all the wasteful acts of violence done in this world, the tiem and money and imagination invested in despatching prisoners out of it tops the bill.” What are some OTHER perspectives on the death penalty? Use a visual organiser to organise them, briefly.

8. Conflicting Perspectives • Prison governor (as a symbol of the State) “unravelled his scroll and announced “In the name of Queen Elizabeth the second by the grace of God of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the British dominions beyond the seas, Queen, defender of the Faith, Greetings!” • Jovial/highfalutin/excited tone conflicts with the inmates’ “terror”(inmates’ perspective, through Robertson’s voice) • How does this contrast position us to perceive the Prison Governor (and therefore, the state?) • Robertson’s subjective description of this is a “grotesque salutation”

9. Act of representation • Let’s not forget, Geoffrey Robertson, as a lawyer, is very good at selecting evidence. • His text is deliberately constructed and he only includes evidence and ideas if they serve his purpose.

10. Imagery • “…Dressed in a clean white gown, soon to be stained with his bodily fluids” • How does this imagery help to evoke sympathy for the inmates and Michael X?

11. Sympathy Through Images of Death Row • “dragged him across the narrow corridor of death row to the gallows-room and strung him up” • “the screaming rage begins again, at the loss of a fellow inmate whose body the meanwhile twists slowly to and fro, suspended through the trapdoor.” • How does this affect your response to the prisoners? How do you perceive them?

12. Conflicting Perspectives • “On Sunday the executioner came, to eye his victim and check his apparatus…” • Explain how we make meaning here. How are we being positioned to view the executioner? • This then contrasts with the victim’s relatives who “wailed, screamed and sometimes had to be carried out on stretchers”

13. Conflicting Perspective • “The official party has tea and a cooked breakfast for a macabre sixty minutes” • Unlike the reader these people are accustomed to this ritual. This furthers his argument that systematic capital punishment desensitises people (is inhumane) • How does his (selective) inclusion of this detail help to serve his purpose? • Draw an image of this bizarre scene.

14. It continues… • “the body will be cut down and taken to the prison hospital for a last, secret, degradation – an orderly will slash the wrists and the tendons of the feet” • “on no account may [the body] be handed over to the family for burial.” • What do you think about this practice?

15. Positioned to Receive Michael X • “Michael (first name basis!) discussed all this softly and carefullyas if an observer at his own ritual slaughter” • “His brow was furrowed, there was fear and pleading in his eyes” • Concession: “There must, I thought, have been fear in Joe Skerrit’s eyes, too, when this man hacked at him with a cutlass” (sympathy for victim)

16. “A different man” • “He now cared about others, for a start.” • Michael X is given voice: • “Stop and listen. Just listen….This place is always full of noise. but listen now…” Robertson - “I realised there was total silence…I saw that every man…was pressed against the wire of his cage” • “You see, [Geoffrey], for them you represent hope. Their only hope” How does this position you? How do you feel about Michael X? How do you feel about Robertson?

17. Selfless? • “That’s why you should [take this case on], not for me, but for them. They will hang me, whatever happens.” Have you seen other documentaries where killers are repentant and “changed”?

18. Conflicting Perspectives • Robertson includes a perspective which conflicts with his own, but contradicts it immediately: • Darcus Howe, The Guardian, wrote (about MX): “He made absolutely no impact on anyone” • Robertsonsays, immediately: “He made an impact on me in 1973 sufficient to make me devote a lot of spare time to realise the hope…”

19. Perspectives • “The token black on board the carnival of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” • Just swept up in it all? • “He was not quite the ogre in these years that some of his biographers have made out” • Robertson includes MX’s good deeds: “He helped to expose Rachman (which took some courage), attacked the corruption and irrelevance of high-living High Commissioners from Caribbean countries and tried to apply the ‘black power’ rhetoric from America…to the urban ghettos of London”

20. Retrospective • He “gave the media what they wanted: he played the uppity nigger with a soul on ice. Filling in at the last moment for Stokely Carmichael, he addressed some while rhetoric (“if you ever see a white laying hands on a black women, kill him immediately”) • How does Robertson’s inclusion that this rhetoric was because he was “filling in” at “the last moment” help you dismiss the importance of Michael X’s statement? Have a go at writing this statement in a way that would inflame readers to perceive MX as a despicable, racist person inciting murder.

21. Reading • Look at the second paragraph on p. 80, beginning “Michael gave…” • How does Robertson use subtle words here to help make us perceive that the government may have over-reacted to Michael X’s statements? • How does he minimise Michael X’s actions?

22. Positioned… • “Michael X became a martyr to the good intentions of his time.” • “He was a hustler and a posuer” • “At best a provocateur who dared society to do something about its endemic racism…” “He was hyped up by hubris, by familiarity with the famous… and by constant media attention. He came to believe he really was a leader, because the press said so, and he looked for a country to lead…the luckless prize was Trinidad…”

23. Whilst his Commune in Trinidad begins to fail… murder • Why doesn’t Robertson launch into the details of the murder from the beginning of this chapter? • What is the effect of us hearing about other things before the murder?

24. Other books - dismissed • The murder is “the subject of several other books, none of them convincing because they mainly rely on witnesses who incriminated Michael…to save their own necks” • “I did not talk much to him about the killings…no fresh evidence had emerged to cast real doubt upon his responsibility”

25. Followers • “…were some wide-eyed locals and Gale Benson” • What is the effect of lumping her with “wide-eyed locals?

26. Gale Benson • “She had stepped off the Kings Road into an adoring relationship with Hakim Jamal, a black Muslim from Boston who had hitched himself to Michael, but her father was a former Tory MP so the English press portrayed her murder as if it were an horrific warning against miscegenation” (black/white relationships) How much time does Robertson give to evoking sympathy for Gale Benson, compared to MX? • How does Robertson position us to perceive Gale Benson? Which words are used to do this?

27. Her killing defies rational explanation. • The lieutenants simply dug a pit one morning, beckoned her over, stabbed her mercilessly…and then covered her writing body with compost. Michael and Hakim, meanwhile, were off on an alibi tour of the island. • “Her killing was both brutal and cowardly.” • “All the Muslim purification rituals Micahel X religiously underwent could not wash her blood from his hands, even though he was miles away at the time it was shed”

28. Michael X kills Skerritt • “So Skerritt met the same fate, this time at Michael’s own hands. He was lured to his grave…” • “Michael produced a cutlass and stabbed him ferociously”

29. The Privy Council • Robertson goes into some detail about the Privy Council which makes laws for and upholds laws for Commonwealth countries. • Robertson is in favour of Britain and Australia having constitutions – and he uses this chapter to make this point: • “It decides their law…interprets their consititutions and it guarantees the human rights of their citizens, (often more securely than the same judges, sitting across the road in the House of Lords, can garuantee the rights of British citizens, because Britain, unlike its former colonies, has no written constitution…”

30. Includes Others’ Perspectives • “in its absolute renunciation of all that is embodied in our concept of humanity” (Justice Stewart) • “the calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person’s humanity…is uniquely degrading to humanity” (Justice Brennan)

31. Includes Prison Ward’s Description • “when the trap springs the prisoner dangles at the end of the rope….his eyes pop almost out of his head, his tongue swells and protrudes from the mouth, his neck may be broken and side of the face that the noose is on. He urinates, defecates, and droppings fall to the floor while witnesses look on…” How does this inclusion serve Robertson’s purpose?

32. Michael X, executed • “There was no time for the traditional last meal, let alone any last minute legal action…” • “Reports of his death say he went quietly.”

33. Prolonged Stay on Death Row – Inhumane and Degrading? • Robertson makes this argument and he provides strong reasons for it: • “The death is a hot house, in which mental derangement runs riot in doomed men who do not have a kill-by date. Time is measure by the days on which death warrants are read and executed. All minds are concentrated on their own extinction…by the ever-presence of the sordid machinery of despatch; the weighting, the greasing and the testing of the trap, the shrouding and the last hooded walk of the fellow inmate… Each execution time brings a collective terror…”

34. America and the Death Penalty • “It is one of the great ironies of our time that the nation to which the world looks for a lead on human rights should be so obsessed with inflicting the death penalty” • JR highlights the irony here. • “It is hardly a cure for violent crimes – this escalates most strikingly in those states…which conduct most executions…”

35. Death Penalty Does not Deter murder • “On the contrary, I believe that it tends to increase it by socially sanctioning violent revenge.” • He puts forward that the death penalty, rather than reducing violence in America, “contributes to a culture which violence is perceived as a solution, or at least an exercise which achieves something…”

36. Robertson – Human Rights • “the setting of a grisly example by a justice system which should be committed to promoting the values of humanity” • “The mistake is to use the legal system in an attempt to dignify killing by the State.”

37. Final lines • “Behind all the truculence and dishonesty of State officials lies a grim determination to kill – not merely as machines performing the dictates of the court, or as honest executors of the will of the people, but as human beings consumed by a positive wish to take other human life”

38. 1850 Quote John Bright • “If you wish to teach the people to reverence human life, you must first show that you reverence it yourselves”