Jan Carew

Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. His works, diverse in form and multifaceted, make Jan Carew an important intellectual of the Caribbean world. His poetry and his first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were significant landmarks of the West Indian literature then attempting to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy. Carew also played an important part in the Black movement gaining strength in England and North America, publishing reviews and newspapers, producing programs and plays for the radio and the 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 an 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 24 September 1920 at Agricola, a coastal village in Guyana also called Rome. Guyana was then a South American colony of the British Empire. From 1924 to 1926, the Carews lived in the United States but Jan Carew and his elder sister had to come back to Guyana after the kidnapping of his younger sister in New York in 1926. The child would be recovered in 1927 and sent back to her family in 1927. Carew's father lived on several occasions in the United States and Canada, working a while the Canadian company, 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 got his Senior Cambridge Exam in 1938.

In 1939, he became a part-time teacher at the Berbice High School for Girls, and then was called up to the British Army as the 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 the 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.

Jan Carew feels himself to be part of the Caribbean world that for him includes "the island archipelago, the countries of the Caribbean littoral and Guyana, Surinam, and Cayenne." He finds 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 17, he left Guyana for the United States, where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8), the predecessor of Case Western Reserve University. He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948–50) and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Exile and literature

He has taught at the University of London, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities.

Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post^{[citation needed]}.

Literary works

The novels and short stories

Carew has written fiction and stories for children, and is the author of several books, including: Black Midas, The Wild Coast, The Last Barbarian, Green Winter, Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again, Fulcrums of Change, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England and the Caribbean, and The Guyanese Wanderer (Sarabande Books, 2007).

Poetry, theater, television and radio

He wrote (with Sylvia Wynter) the screenplay of a television drama, The Big Pride (ITV, 1961).

The scholar

Academic career

His essays include: "The Caribbean writer in exile", "Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas", "The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths", "United we stand","Culture and Rebellion","Black America: the street and the campus", "Jonestown revisited", "The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold", "The Synergen project", "The Amarnth project", "Estevanico: The African Explorer," "Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas," and "Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment".

Activism

The black movement and the problem of culture

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.

Select Bibliography

• Black Midas (1958)
• The Wild Coast (1958)
• The Last Barbarian (1961)
• Moscow Is Not My Mecca (1964)
• Cry Black Power (1970)
• The Third Gift (1975)
• The Children of the Sun (1980)

External links

• [1]