Stewart Brown | Celebrating my return to Jamaica

In mid-October this year, I was privileged to be the guest of the Department of Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, Mona, attending the 41st annual West Indian Literature Conference. I had a connection to the two books that were being celebrated at the conference: Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Woman Version and Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood, both published in 1993. They are foundational texts for the study of different aspects of Caribbean literary and cultural studies. I was surprised, honoured, and delighted to be back in Jamaica for that event. It was an excellent conference, with many fine speakers alongside younger scholars making their first academic presentation. I spoke on the opening day and was then able to enjoy listening and mixing with friends and colleagues old and new.

I also had personal reasons to celebrate my return. Exactly 50 years ago, in the autumn of 1973, I was beginning my second year as a teacher at what was then the St Ann’s Bay Junior Secondary School – now the Marcus Garvey Technical High School. I had arrived in August 1972, sponsored by Voluntary Service Overseas, a British non-governmental organisation. After the initial culture shock, I settled into my role in the school and the town. Soon, I was just ‘Teach’ to anyone who couldn’t recall my name. It was an exciting time to be in Jamaica, a decade after Independence. The colonial dust was settling and the realities of the new order of things were starting to be understood.

AN INSPIRING DEVELOPMENT

On my recent visit, I was able to claim a day to travel back to the north coast, to revisit St Ann’s Bay and on to Rio Bueno, where I had lived for the second year of my stay. The journey across the island and along the north coast on the ‘new’ highways was very different from the old meandering route through Bog Walk, Moneague, and Lime Hall. The highways are very impressive and efficient, but nostalgically, I lamented the stop-start, harum-scarum trips along the old road. It was unfortunate that the day I was able to travel was a public holiday, so the school was closed. However, I was able to walk around the site, which, unsurprisingly, is much extended since my days there. It seemed a much brighter and more welcoming place than I remembered.

The school had only been open for a year when I arrived. There was the bare, unpainted shell of the building and many, many children, but not enough staff and hardly any teaching materials. It was quite a challenging experience. From the look of the school today, and from what I can see on social media and in the press, it is a very different place. The focus on Marcus Garvey, invoking his determination to think critically and to acquire the tools to become self-reliant, is an inspiring development. It would be fair to say that in 1973 St Ann’s Bay was rather ambivalent about its most famous son.

MANY DISCOVERIES

My early 20s was a time of many discoveries. Not least among them was my initial encounter with Caribbean literature. I had come across Derek Walcott’s early poetry collections in the UK, and a search of the public library in St Ann’s Bay uncovered a couple of recent anthologies – John Figueroa’s Caribbean Voices and, especially, Anne Walmsley’s The Sun’s Eye. I was on my way to a lifetime’s fascination with the literature of the region. The life I was reading about in the poems and stories in the anthologies was going on all around me – the languages the characters spoke were literary versions of the language my pupils in the secondary school used to describe their world.

I, myself, was writing poems, several of which were published in The Sunday Gleaner. Two of my poems are on the current CXC/CSEC syllabus: “West Indies, USA” and “Test Match Sabina Park.” In the spirit of those times, I started a ‘little magazine’, NOW, with the ambition of providing a platform for local poets and others from across the region and beyond. It was a very amateur affair. The earliest issues were reproduced on a duplicating machine in the back room of the town’s betting shop!

NOW attracted interest from writers like Kamau Brathwaite, Mutaburuka, and Dennis Scott. Supportive reviews of the magazine were published in The Gleaner, which inspired contributions from across the region. What turned out to be the final issue, number 4/5, was properly printed, with the aid of a grant from the Institute of Jamaica and an ad for Red Stripe beer!

MYSTIC REVELATION OF RASTAFARI

Those connections with the writers and the writing of the region encouraged me to focus my post-graduate studies on Caribbean literature. I spent the next 40 years or so – in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean – teaching, anthologising, writing about and generally ‘bigging up’ Caribbean literature in whatever ways I could. With Mervyn Morris and Gordon Rohlehr, I co-edited Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean.

Just before I left the island in 1974, I was lucky enough to catch a concert by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari. It was a hauntingly memorable occasion. Almost 50 years later, I fortuitously encountered the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari at the Kingston Night Market, performing in honour of National Heroes Day. Another incredible circle! The performance was not so dramatic, the players assembled casually and many of them looked as if they might have been playing at that concert I had attended so long ago. Perhaps they had. The music was still as spiritual and hypnotic as I remembered it.

- Stewart Brown is a hon. senior research fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham.