Jan Rynveld Carew (24 September 1920 – 6 December 2012)[1] 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 (both published in 1958 by Secker & Warburg in London), 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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5]
After leaving education in 1939, he became a part-time teacher at Berbice High School for Girls,[4] 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.[4] 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."[6] 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."[7]
In what he described as his "endless journeyings",[9] he 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 (multilingual poetry magazine in Amsterdam). In Britain, he acted alongside Laurence Olivier[10] and edited the Kensington Post in 1953.[11] He also worked as a broadcaster and writer with the BBC and lectured in race relations at the University of London.[12] He was the first editor of the black-oriented publication Magnet News, launched in London in February 1965.[10]
He always maintained his Caribbean links, and in 1962 served as director of culture in British Guiana under the Jagan administration.[10] 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."[13]
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.[17]
The invasion of Grenada and the redefinition of colonial history
In his book Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again (1985), published two years after the United States invasion of Grenada, "Carew unearthed and revealed sources of independence in the country itself. [The book] went back to and beyond the struggles of the rebellious African captives, but to the epic resistance of the island's indigenous population."[15]
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."[15]
"Being Black in Belorussia is Like Being from Mars" (The New York Times, 19 September 1971)
"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 New York Times, 24 October 1971)
"Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Enlightenment" (in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Golden Age of the Moor, New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1992, pp. 248–277, OCLC945916328)
"Culture and Rebellion" (Race & Class: Special issue – Black America: the street and the campus, Vol. 35, No. 1, July – September 1993)
"Jonestown revisited" (Eusi Kwayana, A New Look At Jonestown: Dimensions from a Guyanese Perspective, Carib House, 2016, OCLC1013544834)[20]
"The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold"
^"Negro Named Assistant Editor of London Weekly", Jet, 21 July 1955, p. 29: "In London, 33-year-old British Guiana-born Jan Carew was hired as assistant editor on the Kensington Post, a London weekly. The first and only Negro on the staff of an English newspaper, Carew, who attends royal functions in Kensington, borough of the British elite, holds a degree in political economy. During his spare time, he lectures on race relations at London University and reads poetry and short stories on BBC."
