Jan Carew

Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September, 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. His works, diverse in their forms and multifaceted, makes of 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 through writing to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy. Carew also played an important part within 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 firstly 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 the British Guyana

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, Joy Gleason and Hazel Waters (ed.), "The Gentle Revolutionary : Essays in Honour of Jan Carew", "Race & Class", vol. 43, n° 3, 2001, p. 81.] 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. [Birbalsingh, Frank, Jan Carew Interview, Journal of Caribbean Studies, 1988.] From 1926 to 1938, he was educated in Guyana, firstly attending the Agricola Wesleyan School, then the Catholic elementary school and the Berbice High School, a Canandian Scottish Presbyterian School, in New Amsterdam. [Carew, Joy Gleason and Hazel Waters (ed.), "The Gentle Revolutionary : Essays in Honour of Jan Carew", "Race & Class", vol. 43, n° 3, 2001, p. 81.] He got his "Senior Cambridge Exam" in 1938.

In 1939, he became a part-time teacher at the Berbice High School for Girls, [Carew, Joy Gleason and Hazel Waters (ed.), "The Gentle Revolutionary : Essays in Honour of Jan Carew", "Race & Class", vol. 43, n° 3, 2001, p. 81.] 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 working a lot on his painting and drawing. [Carew, Joy Gleason and Hazel Waters (ed.), "The Gentle Revolutionary : Essays in Honour of Jan Carew", "Race & Class", vol. 43, n° 3, 2001, p. 81.] From 1944 to 1945, he worked at the Price Controls Office in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.

Jan Carew feels 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." [Carew, Jan. "The Caribbean Writer and Exile", p. 2.] 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." [Carew, Jan. "The Caribbean Writer and Exile", p. 1.]

The university years

At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). 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 Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post Fact|date=April 2007.

His literary works

The novels and short stories

He is the author of Green Winter, Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again, Black Midas, The Wild Coast, Fulcrums of Change, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England and the Caribbean, The Last Barbarian, and The Guyanese Wanderer.

Poetry, theater, television, radio and children books

The scholar

The 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".

Amerindian cultures and the revision of the figure of Columbus

The Activist

The black movement and the problem of culture

Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, 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 redefintion of colonial history

The environmental issue

Carew's Bibliography

References and bibliography

References

Bibliography

External links

* [http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsC/carew-jan.html]

ee also