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, England, 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 West Indian literature then attempting to cope with its colonial past and assert its wish for autonomy.
Carew worked with the late President Cheddi Jagan in the fight for Guianese independence. He also played an important part in the Black movement gaining strength in England 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 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 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 the present-day Guyana. He was the middle child and only son of Ethel Robertson and Alan Carew. From 1924 to 1926, the Carews lived in the United States but Jan and his elder sister Cicely, returned to Guyana after the kidnapping of his younger sister Sheila, in New York in 1926. The child would be recovered and reunited with her family in 1927. 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 passed his Senior Cambridge Examination in 1938.
After leaving education in 1939, he became a part-time teacher at Berbice High School for Girls, but was called up to the British Army as the Second World 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 that 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.
Carew felt himself to be part of the Caribbean world that for him included "the island archipelago, the countries of the Caribbean littoral and Guyana, Surinam, and Cayenne." 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."
The university years
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 the Sorbonne in Paris.
Exile and later years
In what he described as his "endless journeyings", he lived at different times in the Netherlands, Mexico, England, 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 England, 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 London University. He was the first editor of the black-oriented publication Magnet News, launched in London in February 1965.
He always maintained his Caribbean links, and in 1962 served as director of culture in British Guiana under the Jagan administration. According to York University Professor Emeritus Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, "He was a strong supporter of the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the People's Progressive Party. He was quite fearless when it came to politics."