Jan Carew

Jan Rynveld Carew, born on 24 September 1920 in Agricola, a coastal village in British Guiana, was a novelist, playwright, poet, educator, and Broadway performer whose career spanned multiple continents and disciplines. He died on 6 December 2012 at his home in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of 92, survived by his widow Dr. Joy Gleason, his daughters Lisa St Aubin de Terán and Shantoba Eliza Carew, and his son David Christopher Carew.

The middle child and only son of Ethel Robertson and Alan Carew, he spent part of his early childhood in the United States before returning to Guyana following the 1926 kidnapping of his younger sister Sheila in New York. The child was recovered and reunited with the family in 1927. Carew received his education in Guyana at the Agricola Wesleyan School, a Catholic elementary school, and Berbice High School in New Amsterdam, passing his Senior Cambridge Examination in 1938. After leaving school in 1939, he taught part-time at Berbice High School for Girls before being called up to serve in the Coast Artillery Regiment during the Second World War, remaining in military service until 1943. He subsequently worked as a customs officer in Georgetown from 1943 to 1944, and at the Price Controls Office in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, from 1944 to 1945.

At twenty-five, Carew left Guyana for the United States, where he studied science at Howard University and Western Reserve University between 1945 and 1948 without completing a degree. He then attended Charles University in Prague from 1948 to 1950, followed by studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1951, while living in the Netherlands, he served as editor of De Kim, a multilingual poetry magazine based in Amsterdam. That same year he appeared on Broadway in Antony and Cleopatra. In Britain, he acted alongside Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post in 1953, while also working as a broadcaster and writer with the BBC and lecturing in race relations at the University of London.

Carew's literary output was broad in form and subject. His first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were both published in 1958 by Secker and Warburg in London and are regarded as significant works in Caribbean literature. He contributed reviews, articles, short stories, and essays to numerous periodicals, among them The New York Times, New Statesman, Saturday Review, African Review, and Race and Class. His memoir Potaro Dreams: My Youth in Guyana, covering the period from his birth in 1920 through 1939, was published posthumously in 2014.

Beyond literature and performance, Carew was active in political and cultural life across several countries. He served as director of culture in British Guiana under the Jagan administration in 1962 and was a supporter of President Cheddi Jagan and the People's Progressive Party in the fight for Guyanese independence from Britain. He was the first editor of the Black-oriented publication Magnet News, launched in London in February 1965, and served as editor of African Review that same year. In 1969 he became publisher of Cotopax, a literary magazine. He played a role in the Black Power movement in Britain and North America, producing programmes and plays for radio and television and publishing reviews and newspapers.

Between 1962 and 1966, Carew lived in Jamaica with his then wife Sylvia Wynter before moving to Canada and later settling in the United States. He taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern, and Lincoln Universities, and held the position of Emeritus Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He was a pioneer in the field of Pan-African Studies and was connected to figures including W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Malcolm X. His book Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again was published in 1985, two years after the United States invasion of Grenada. Throughout his life he resided at various times in the Netherlands, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada, and the United States.