Jan Carew

Guyanese writer and professor (1920–2012)

Jan Rynveld Carew (24 September 1920 – 6 December 2012) 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. 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.

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. 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 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."

At the age of 25, he left Guyana for the United States, where he studied science at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1945–1948), the predecessor of Case Western Reserve University, but left without graduating. Later, Carew attended Charles University in Prague (1948–1950) and Sorbonne University in Paris. 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 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. 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. 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 was a pioneer in the field of Pan African Studies. but he remains best known for his first novel, Black Midas (1958). 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: