MICHAEL X
Instructions
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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.
Michael X
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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 Skerritt knows 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.
Conflict Between…
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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?
Conflicting Perspectives
Officious - bureaucratic perspective:
 “Death warrants were always read on Thursdays
between 2 and 4pm”
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 Geoffrey Robertson’s / Human Rights Advocates’
compassion
“The inmates spent those hours in terror…”
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Conflicting Perspectives
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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 ?
What is Robertson’s perspective?
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“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.
Conflicting Perspectives
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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”
Act of representation
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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.
Imagery
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“…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?
Sympathy Through
Images of Death Row
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“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?
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”
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Conflicting Perspective
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“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.
It continues…
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“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?
Positioned to Receive Michael X
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“Michael (first name basis!) discussed all this softly
and carefully as 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)
“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?
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Selfless?
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“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”?
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”
 Robertson says, immediately:
“He made an impact on me in 1973 sufficient to make
me devote a lot of spare time to realise the hope…”
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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 highliving High Commissioners from Caribbean countries and
tried to apply the ‘black power’ rhetoric from
America…to the urban ghettos of London”
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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.
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Reading
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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?
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…”
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Whilst his Commune in Trinidad begins
to fail… murder
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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?
Other books - dismissed
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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”
Followers
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“…were some wide-eyed locals and Gale Benson”
What is the effect of lumping her with “wide-eyed
locals?
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?
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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”
Michael X kills Skerritt
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“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”
The Privy Council
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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…”
Includes Others’ Perspectives
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“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)
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?
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Michael X, executed
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“There was no time for the traditional last meal, let
alone any last minute legal action…”
“Reports of his death say he went quietly.”
Prolonged Stay on Death Row –
Inhumane and Degrading?
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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 everpresence 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…”
America and the Death Penalty
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“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…”
Death Penalty Does not Deter murder
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“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…”
Robertson – Human Rights
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“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.”
Final lines
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“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”
1850 Quote
John Bright
 “If you wish to teach the people to reverence human
life, you must first show that you reverence it
yourselves”