Street Fighting Years: an autobiography of the sixties by Tariq Ali

At last the door opened.  Two men walked in, sat opposite me and started asking me questions in Spanish.  I repeated several times that I did not speak the language.  One of them spoke English and muttered in classic B-movie style that ‘we have ways of making you speak Spanish’.  I replied calmly that I did not speak Spanish, but if he was suggesting that a few days of torture might lead to my acquiring a new language, I would be eternally grateful.  The sarcasm was totally wasted and the man informed me that I had been recognised by two soldiers at Lagunillas.  These men had been captured and then released by Che’s group.  I was amazed, and the incredulity must have convinced them to some degree.  ‘Are you saying,’ I shouted, ‘that I am a Cuban guerrilla?’…  ‘You are not any Cuban guerrilla,’ the inquisitor continued.  ‘You are Pombo, Che Guevara’s bodyguard.’

- from Chapter Six, The Last Year in the Life of  ‘Che’ Guevara: 1967

Street Fighting Years is a hell of a book.  Not just in scope -  although chances are that if you can think of a major event of the sixties, Tariq Ali was there and has an opinion.  (Few of us could out-anecdote a man who once mimed the Vietnam War to a hall full of Bolivians.)    The events described are only part of it.  What makes this memoir such a remarkable thing to read is the narrative, which is sometimes deadly serious, sometimes hilarious, sometimes gossipy and always interesting.  Sometimes it’s irritating, when it slips into factional denunciation or celebrity name-dropping, but that doesn’t last long.  Like its author, this book has a lot to say.

Tariq Ali makes an impassioned argument for the importance of the sixties: that is, for the sixties of the New Left.   There is no soft-focus hippie nostalgia here, despite the groovy cover.  This is a book about party congresses, mass mobilisations, intramural tensions and arguments about Stalinism.  While the polemic can sometimes become overbearing, the effect of the whole is inspiring.  Ali’s narrative voice is brisk, bracing and unapologetic.  The last point is particularly cheering, given just how many sixties firebrands have excoriated themselves in print.

This is a memoir of conviction, and ultimately of conviction justified.  Tariq Ali’s politics have evolved since the sixties; some of the causes he espoused then, and some of the things that inspired him, are not part of his political identity today.  (This may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious, and indeed it should be.)   But his ideological analysis is consistently socialist, and he clearly regards the values of the sixties as transcending the limitations of their time.  Sometimes his political rigour translates into a certain rigidity of perspective; sometimes one senses that the big picture comes at the cost of inconvenient details (a tendency that undermines some of his writing, notably his paean to ALBA, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope).  But Street Fighting Years doesn’t make any claim to be a definitive history of the sixties; it is a personal, political account that wears its bias on its sleeve.  Read it, and see what you think.

The edition reviewed is the extended 2005 edition, Verso, ISBN: 1844670295

Advertisement