Jan Carew


Jan Rynveld Carew was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, the UK, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.
Carew's works, diverse in form and multifaceted, make Jan Carew an important intellectual of the Caribbean world. His poetry and first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were significant landmarks of Caribbean literature then attempting to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy.
Carew worked with the late Guyana President Cheddi Jagan in the fight for Guianese independence from Britain. He also played an important part in the Black power movement gaining strength in Britain and North America, publishing reviews and newspapers, producing programmes and plays for radio and television. His scholarly research drove him to question traditional historiographies and the prevailing historical models of the conquest of America. The way he reframed Christopher Columbus as a historical character outside his mythical hagiography became a necessary path in his mind to build anew the Caribbean world on sounder foundations.

Biography

Childhood in British Guiana

Jan Rynveld Carew was born on 24 September 1920 at Agricola, a coastal village also called Rome, in British Guiana, the South American colony of the British Empire that would become present-day Guyana. He was the middle child and only son of Ethel Robertson and Alan Carew. From 1924 to 1926, the Carews lived in the United States but Jan and his elder sister Cicely returned to Guyana after the kidnapping of his younger sister Sheila in New York in 1926. The child would be recovered and reunited with her family in 1927. Carew's father lived on several occasions in the United States and Canada, working for a while with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and thus crossing the American continent from Halifax to Vancouver. His memories would fuel the imagination of the young Carew.
From 1926 to 1938, he was educated in Guyana, first attending the Agricola Wesleyan School, then the Catholic elementary school, and then Berbice High School, a Canadian Scottish Presbyterian School, in New Amsterdam. He passed his Senior Cambridge Examination in 1938.
After leaving education in 1939, he became a part-time teacher at Berbice High School for Girls, but was called up to the British Army as the Second World War broke out in Europe. He served in the Coast Artillery Regiment until 1943. From 1943 to 1944, he was a customs officer in Georgetown. At that time, he published his first text in the Christmas Annual and was working a lot on his painting and drawing. From 1944 to 1945, he worked at the Price Controls Office in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.
Carew felt himself to be part of the Caribbean world that for him included "the island archipelago, the countries of the Caribbean littoral and Guyana, Surinam, and Cayenne." He found the paradoxical unity of the Caribbean way of life in the "successive waves of cultural alienation" that shaped the Caribbean frame of mind from "a mosaic of cultural fragments – Amerindian, African, European, Asian."

The university years

At the age of 25, Carew left Guyana for the United States, where he studied science at Howard University and Western Reserve University, the predecessor of Case Western Reserve University, but left without graduating. Later, he attended Charles University in Prague and Sorbonne University in Paris.

Exile and later years

In what he described as his "endless journeyings", Carew lived at different times in the Netherlands, Mexico, the UK, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In 1951, while in the Netherlands, he was editor of De Kim. In Britain, he acted alongside Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post in 1953. He also worked as a broadcaster and writer with the BBC and lectured in race relations at the University of London. He was the first editor of the black-oriented publication Magnet News, launched in London in February 1965.
He always maintained his Caribbean links, and in 1962 served as director of culture in British Guiana under the Jagan administration. According to York University Professor Emeritus Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, "He was a strong supporter of the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the People's Progressive Party. He was quite fearless when it came to politics."
Between 1962 and 1966, Carew lived in Jamaica with his then wife Sylvia Wynter, subsequently moving to Canada for some years before settling in the US. During this period he served as editor of African Review in 1965, and in 1969 became publisher of Cotopax. Carew taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities and was Emeritus Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University.
Jan Carew died at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, US, at the age of 92, survived by his widow Dr. Joy Gleason, his daughters Lisa St Aubin de Terán and Shantoba Eliza Carew, and his son, David Christopher Carew.
Carew's memoir Potaro Dreams: My Youth in Guyana was posthumously published in 2014. Envisaged as a first volume, covering the period from birth in 1920 to 1939 when Carew was drawn into the Second World War, the book was described by the author as "the prism" through which he would approach life.

Activism

The black movement and the problem of culture

Carew was a pioneer in the field of Pan-African Studies. Some of the noted figures to whom Carew has been connected are W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima.

The invasion of Grenada and the redefinition of colonial history

In his book Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again, published two years after the United States invasion of Grenada, "Carew unearthed and revealed sources of independence in the country itself. went back to and beyond the struggles of the rebellious African captives, but to the epic resistance of the island's indigenous population."

The environmental issue

As noted by Eusi Kwayana, Carew "was an environmentalist long before it become fashionable" and made a recommendation to the government of Guyana for an international involvement for a million acres of forestland in Guyana, which inspired an Act on the Guyanese statute book to provide for approximately 360,000 hectares of tropical rainforest for the purposes of research "to make available to Guyana and the International Community systems, methods, and techniques for the sustainable management and utilisation of the multiple resources of the Tropical forest and the conservation of biological diversity and for matters incidental thereto."

Selected literary works

Carew wrote novels, short stories, plays, memoirs and other non-fiction, as well as children's stories and books, but he remains best known for his first novel, Black Midas. He was a contributor of reviews, articles, short stories and essays to many periodicals, including John O'London's Weekly, Time and Tide, ArtReview, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, The New York Times, Saturday Review, New Statesman, African Review, The Listener, Journal of African Civilizations, Black Press Review, New Deliberations, Journal of the Association of Caribbean Studies, Black American Literature Forum, Pacific Quarterly, and Race & Class. His many works include:

Novels / novellas

  • Black Midas ; published as A Touch of Midas in US
  • The Wild Coast
  • The Last Barbarian
  • Moscow is Not My Mecca ; published as Green Winter
  • The Riverman – novella
  • The Sisters – novella
  • The Sisters and Manco's Stories
  • ''The Guyanese Wanderer: Stories''

    Poetry

  • Streets of Eternity
  • Sea Drums in My Blood
  • ''Return to Streets of Eternity''

    Juvenile / young adult fiction

  • Sons of the Flying Wing
  • The Third Gift, illus. Leo and Diane Dillon
  • Children of the Sun, illus. Leo and Diane Dillon
  • Stranger than Tomorrow: Three Stories of the Future
  • Save the Last Dance for Me, and Other Stories,
  • The Twins of Ilora
  • The Lost Love, and Other Stories, Longman
  • The Man Who Came Back, Longman
  • The Cat People, Longman
  • Dark Night, Deep Water
  • Dead Man's Creek: Two Stories
  • House of Fear: Two Stories
  • Don't Go Near the Water
  • Time Loop
  • Death Comes to the Circus
  • ''Computer Killer''

    Non-fiction

  • Cry Black Power
  • Rope the Sun
  • Out of Time, illus. Howard Phillips
  • Indian and African Presence in the Americas
  • Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again
  • Fulcrums of Change: Origins of Racism in the Americas and Other Essays
  • Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England and the Caribbean
  • Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Birth of Racism in the Americas
  • Potaro Dreams: My Youth in Guyana
  • Episodes in My Life: The Autobiography of Jan Carew — edited by Joy Gleason Carew

    Essays

  • "Being Black in Belorussia is Like Being from Mars"
  • "Look Bwana, in East Africa you carry a bicycle on the bus, eat crocodile tail and get to know the people who married the wind"
  • "The Caribbean writer and exile"
  • "The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths"
  • "Estevanico: The African Explorer"
  • "Columbus and the origins of racism in the Americas: part one"
  • "Columbus and the origins of racism in the Americas: part two"
  • "United We Stand! Joint Struggles of Native Americans and African Americans in the Columbian Era"
  • "Columbus: a harbinger of slavery and racism"
  • "Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Enlightenment"
  • "Culture and Rebellion"
  • "Jonestown revisited"
  • "The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold"
  • "The Synergen project"
  • "The Amaranth project"