More Than Marley and Sandals
I declare that this is not just one more cheap plug for my book, but I wrote my first book painstakingly. It was a labor of love, because I had to show the Deep South and the publishing establishment that the Caribbean is more than Marley and Sandals resorts. It has a long literary history that has gone through several movements and it deserves study.
Do we know the Caribbean past Bob Marley’s music, references to marijuana, and Sandals Resorts? I fear that most Americans don’t. Moreover, I fear that most Americans in literature do not even notice or care that the Caribbean has a literary tradition that is now about a century old and has gone through several phases of development. And for me, that is a tragedy. For me, that was part of the driving force behind my first book.
I assure you, reader, that this is not a cheap plug for my book. Rather, I want to chat with you, just for a brief second, about some of the primary texts that I wrote about in the book. First, Reader, I wish that I could share with you some of the rejections that I received for my book. When I say that they were soul-crushing, I mean I couldn’t believe some of these things were written down and sent for the eyes of another human being. And these rejections came from academic publishing houses. I was despondent for a while until an African colleague of mine from Nigeria laughed at my brooding. Acting as that sage father figure, he said, “LaToya, people stateside don’t know that Africa is more than a jungle with Nelson Mandela as the governor. Do you think they know that the islands are more than Marley music and marijuana?” Reader, he was too tickled at himself! His laughter made me realize something: most of us do not know the Caribbean at all. We do not know that people live there. They eat there. They work there every day. They love there. They get married there. They have children there. They go to school. They watch tv. They go to the beauty shop. They have petty neighbor disputes. They fuss with their spouses. They play childhood games. They go through bitter, nasty divorces. They die. They commit crime. They have cherished family recipes. There are traditions. In short, the Caribbean has culture independent of the United States. And those cultures include literary texts that have nothing to do with Bob Marley.
And I do not write this to disparage Bob Marley. No. As a matter of fact, my favorite Marley song is “Slave Driver.” Something about the bass line soothes me. But I digress. I want to share some of the primary texts that I wrote about with you.
First of all, much of early Caribbean literature was written and dominated by white men who mimicked literature from their respective metropoles. Then, came Jean Rhys’ Wide Saragossa Sea. However, something else happened. A woman from Jamaica, Una Marson, EXPLODED onto the literary scene! Before leaving Jamaica, she became the first woman on the island to publish and edit her own periodical in the 1920s.
In 1932, Marson emigrated to London where she edited the Pan-Africanist journal, The Keys. She also contributed poetry to it. Marson had several plays staged in London: At What a Price, London Calling, and Pocomania. With Pocomania, she became the first person ever to use African drums on stage. In addition to writing plays and editing, Marson published three collections of poetry in this short time: Tropic Reveries, Heights and Depths, and The Moths and the Stars. James Weldon Johnson published several of her poems in one of his collections of upcoming Black poets.
If that were not enough, Marson pioneered social working techniques in Jamaica. Before leaving for London, she established the Jamaica Save the Children Fund and founded a drama club for young people. While in London, she became a delegate for the twelfth Congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Legal Citizenship. I almost forgot that she was also the personal secretary to the Honorable Haile Selassie and accompanied him to the United Nations. Is it any wonder that Marson suffered a breakdown and had to return to Jamaica for a short while? When Marson returned to Jamaica, after resting, she promptly returned to nationalist politics!
When Marson returned to London, she became a producer for the BBC and a host. She had a 30-minute show, Calling the West Indies. The show eventually evolved into Caribbean Voices. Over 200 authors appeared on Caribbean Voices.
The many authors who appeared on the show are a veritable roll call of the giants of Caribbean literature. I will name just a few here: V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter, Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, and Kamau Brathwaite. As stated, these are just a few. I want to paraphrase Brathwaite when he said that Caribbean Voices was the single most important catalyst for promoting creative and critical Caribbean writing in English. The show featured stories, poems, and criticism by Caribbean writers. Writers were allowed to come on and read from their pieces and discuss them. This show provided an outlet for Black Caribbean writers, many of them women, when all others were closed!
Sadly, Una Marson and her giant contribution were forgotten for many, many years until feminist scholars such as Honor Ford-Smith and Alison Donnell started to publish on her again. I am so thankful to these scholars and several others for their effort. I mined those resources for another publication project that I worked on.
Personally, publishing my own book was such a lonely effort. It started as a dissertation, and I received no help in graduate school. Honestly, I believe folks thought I was crazy. But the primary material was ALWAYS there. Always. I never doubted it. I had been introduced to C.L. R. James somewhere (for the life of me, I cannot remember), but the book I was introduced to was Beyond a Boundary. I did not find it much help for my purposes. I would read Minty Alley and Black Jacobins later. Independent study taught me that C.L.R. James was detained on Ellis Island as a prisoner during the Cold War for one full year. Instead of being a symbol of freedom, for many Black Caribbean people, it was literally a prison.
Another victim of the Cold War/Ellis Island prison was Claudia Jones, who was also of Caribbean heritage. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she emigrated to America with her family. She became a member of CPUSA. An outspoken feminist and Communist, she was eventually arrested and imprisoned on Ellis Island. A victim of the McCarran Act, she was moved to another facility where she suffered a heart attack at the age of 36. When she was released, Jones would not go back to Trinidad and Tobago. She was offered asylum in Britain. She published the West Indian Gazette. Sadly, Jones, who was instrumental in bringing Dr. King to Great Britain to speak to the students there, died at the age of 49, several months before her 50th birthday.
I must say that the research for most of my book came from reading about Una Marson, Caribbean Voices, and the subsequent Caribbean Artist Movement that followed her activities. Though Marson was at her height in the early 1930s and the 1940s, her activities spurred the CAM in the 1960s, because she provided the foundation for those artists.
The artists who participated in Voices and CAM were transnational and taking part in transnational conversations BEFORE it became an academic buzzword. The book that I produced is an example of this Black literary sophistication and it features Black masculinity. This conversation has been ongoing with Black male writers since at least 1940 with Wright’s publication of Native Son, with participants across languages, continents, and religious barriers. This includes the Black Caribbean, which was very active in the process. For example, Black Caribbean writers adapted and adopted the figure of Caliban in their conversations about Black masculinity. They critiqued masculinity. I am thinking of Earl Lovelace’s Salt here.
And I did not have to use masculinity or war-time novels. I could have done my first book on the fact that Langston Hughes spoke several languages and translated Black Caribbean authors for American consumption. Langston Hughes went to Haiti and translated Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, alongside Mercer Cook.
Hughes also translated Nicolas Guillen.
Hughes was not just a figure of the Harlem Renaissance who sat in his Harlem apartment listening to Bessie Smith while pecking at his typewriter. He was an international figure! I could have written that.
Overall, I am proud that my book is able to introduce audiences to the literature of the Black Caribbean. But I am disappointed that my book is just an introduction. I was not able to include all of the books that I’d read from the Black Caribbean. For example, I had to scrap While Gods Are Falling by Lovelace, The Hills Were Joyful Together by Roger Mais, and Masters of the Dew by Roumain. I could not cover any Marson in this text, because she was simply out of my time range. I began in 1940 and ended in 1989 (roughly World War II era until the end of the Cold War). The Black Caribbean texts covered are: A Tempest by Aime Cesaire, In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming, The Chosen Place the Timeless People by Paule Marshall, and General Sun by Jacques Stephen Alexis.
I can say that my love of Black Caribbean literature continues to blossom every day. And I can see the continuities and divergences that occur between the Black Caribbean and African American writers. For example, Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica for her anthropological study, Tell My Horse, and I see its influences in Moses, Man of Mountain. Yet, I do not see the word, “transnational” applied to her works. I see similarities in her literature, Una Marson’s and Maryse Conde’s, though Conde is Francophone. Black Caribbean writers continue to write EXCELLENT literature. Even though I ended my study with the falling of the Berlin wall, I plan to expand in the future. The Caribbean has so much to offer the world in literature. It’s about time we look.
This comes from my research efforts. I read or write something pretty much every day.
