Welcome to Caribbean Writing Today

Welcome to Caribbean Writing Today, the Caribbean’s online literary magazine. We use ‘Caribbean’ expansively, to include creative writing coming out of the great West Indian diaspora, mainly in London and Toronto, Brooklyn and Miami, but elsewhere as well, of course.

The Caribbean ‘heartland’ is quixotic, comprising islands large and small and a stretch of the South American coastland, and its people have long lived separated into tribes – later, nations – by ‘the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea’. And this fragmentation accelerated in the 1950s with the first wave of West Indian migrants to England.

Not coincidentally, however, the ’fifties was also the decade in which our first generation of internationally acclaimed writers – Mais and Mittelholtzer, Selvon and Lamming, CLR James, VS Naipaul and Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, John Hearne and others – broke like a different wave over the ebbing tide of imperial literature. Soon the home-based writers – most notably Walcott, Lovelace and St Omer – had joined them; and by the end of the ’sixties Caribbean writing was established most everywhere in the west.

Profoundly, it testified to the authenticity, persistence and essential unity of Caribbean societies and their culture/s. There may be subtle differences among the sensibilities of the different island nations, and between them and the diaspora populations – that is arguable from the poems, stories and memoirs arising from them. But easily trumping such differences was their immediately recognizable Caribbean-ness. It didn’t matter whether you were reading Martin Carter’s Poems of Resistance (written in British Guiana in the 1950s) or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (England, 1960s) or Tony McNeill’s Reel from the Life Movie (Jamaica, early 70s) or Rachel Manley’s Drumblair (Toronto, mid-90s): in such books the Caribbean reader found the gloom and glories of his own world and life.

So we read them in a way that was different from the way in which we read – however ardently – even the greatest classics of the language, born of other climes and other times; we read them standing at moral attention, so to speak. All true literature retains the power to address the stilly souls of humankind, anywhere and down the ages. But in the robust and turbulent sphere of the heart, there is that in us which especially recognizes, celebrates and/or grieves our own.

So we read Caribbean literature and knew who we were; and were given moreover a most expansive view of ourselves. Reading it, we were no longer Trinidadians, say, but West Indians; no longer ‘just’ West Indians, but ‘lonely Londoners’, members of the diaspora ourselves. Bar only the West Indies cricket team, nothing has given our island peoples a more spacious, far-flung and inclusive understanding of themselves than Caribbean literature has. Through it, Arnold’s ‘estranging’ sea became instead our sunlit, shared inheritance: part of what Walcott meant when he called the Caribbean the Western Aegean. Or what CLR James was seeing when – in his brilliant early-60s essay on the great Guyanese batsman Rohan Kanhai (republished here, in our first, sample issue) – he summed up Kanhai’s batting thus: ‘Distinction, gaiety, grace. Virtues of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, city-states, islands, the sea, and the sun.’

In its outreach and inclusivity, Caribbean literature was also unwittingly prescient – for the condition of exile is of course no longer what it was. We live today in a world of cheap travel and instant communication. Our writers, like our people, are always traveling among the islands or back and forth between the diaspora and ‘home’; and in between, emailing – a phone call made with fingers rather than voice – keeps them continually and informally in touch with one another and with ‘home’.

Caribbean Writing Today is the natural extension of these synthesizing developments – of Martin Carter’s call to ‘collect [our] scattered skeleton’. The authors of its high-quality poems, stories, memoirs, reviews and columns live and work variously in the Caribbean, North America and Europe. But their theme is always some aspect of Caribbean-ness, and those for whom primarily they write are the Caribbean nation, at home and abroad.

The magazine’s sections [see Sample Issue] balance hitherto unpublished and republished work, old and new. They are also designed broadly – if somewhat whimsically – to reflect the different population centres from which the work comes.

Each work is linked to its author’s bio, and invites the reader’s comment – a vital component, since creative writing is always an implicit dialogue between the writer who creates and the reader who completes a story, poem or memoir.

The section titled ‘From the French/Spanish Caribbean’ reflects our unshakeable belief that, however separated still by language and their somewhat different colonial histories, the people of the Caribbean are essentially one people.

The final section of each issue constitutes a sort of re-grounding: non-fiction accounts and/or opinion columns, written by writer-columnists living in the various Caribbean territories.

Lastly, Caribbean Writing Today takes advantage of a technology that has not only collapsed distance, space, but also drastically concertinaed time. The days or weeks it takes a letter to arrive, the years that may elapse between the composition of a book and its publication, today seem outmoded and unnecessary delays.

Beginning Saturday March 31, 2007 – and on the third Saturday of each month thereafter – subscribers going online will find in their inbox a new edition of Caribbean Writing Today, waiting to be perused and read at their leisure. One or two items – in the section ‘Classic Corner’ – may be half-a-century old, or older. But others – some of the columns, eg – will have been written as recently as the day before.

A recent television ad showed a householder assiduously surfing the Net – then sitting back startled as his screen freezes and an automated voice announces: ‘You’ve reached the end of the Internet. Please go back now.’ By every indication, Caribbean writing today is every bit as inexhaustible as the Internet. It’s our pleasure to be able to deliver it directly to you.

Wayne Brown Editor