Discuss the Caribbean literature of the 1930s.

Several events occurred in the Caribbean, beginning really in 1929, that set an anticolonial movement in motion throughout the islands. First, in 1929, Marcus Garvey returned to Jamaica in order to spread his African pride movement to his native land. Second, the Great Depression greatly exacerbated the poor social conditions (as we have read in the barrackyard fiction), low wages and high infant mortality rate. Third, there were a series of significant labor strikes on several islands that sent ripples throughout the empire.

In Trinidad and Tobago, there were demonstrations and strikes by the sugar workers in 1934, and an oil-workers strike in 1937 that escalated to a general strike. Then, there was a wave of riots in Barbados, British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. In 1938, there was a dockworkers’ strike in Jamaica that resulted in a clash with colonial law. Fourth, many people, in the past, traveled to the Panama Canal zone to find work, better living conditions, and good wages. Well, those things were dried up by the 1930s, and people had nowhere to go. Fifth, many islands began to agitate for freedom from their respective metropoles –at least the right to vote on important issues as adults. Sixth, many people of the islands took the crowning of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 as a sign. At the same time, the Ras Tafari movement was birth in Jamaica. Jamaicans familiar with the Old Testament prophecies of the coming Messiah saw Selassie as Jah Ras Tafari. Honestly, Rastafarianism is based upon the Old Testament. There is the verse, “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” That is Psalm 68:31, and that is your basis for much of the Rastafarianism movement. Since the British did not support the crowning of the Emperor God, people in the Caribbean started to question and critique Europe, and Rastafarianism grew to be an international force.

Seventh, the United States of America began to establish bases in the Caribbean, and this greatly demystified white folk. American soldiers, who were white, often did hard manual labor – something many Black Caribbean islanders did not see. And as Americans are wont to do, they sometimes drank too much and behaved very badly on the weekends with little regard for how the Black islanders would view their behavior. At any rate, the Americans gave the islanders better jobs and paid higher wages –setting social mobility expectations upward and sometimes away from the dismal conditions described in the barrackyards as the only condition for Black islanders. What has all of this have to do with writing? Actually, quite a bit. It is during this time that Una Marson, C.L.R. James, George Lamming, Aime Cesaire, Jane and Paulette Nardal (sisters), and Roger Mais became some of the most anticolonial voices and writers of the Black Caribbean. As Black Caribbean islanders began to question and challenge empire, they also began to change the way they wrote and publish their own writings. There were those writers like McFarlane (who we have already read and you all decided that you hated thoroughly) who felt that poetry should be beyond politics, and that young poets should stick to “traditional” forms. There were those young writers like George Lamming and C.L.R. James who simply said, “no.” As Black Caribbean islanders began to express themselves through their own writing styles, they also published newspapers and magazines that were concerned with galvanizing a Black Caribbean culture void of European forms and influences.

The textbooks states that during the1930s, several magazines which concerned themselves strictly with culture in the Caribbean were published. I am glad to have that correction and clarity because I thought they were published around the late 1950s and early 1960s. These publications included Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the magazines Picong, Progress, the Forum, Callaloo, The Beacon, and Public Opinion. Now, some of them were short-lived, but they had an impact on literature. Some magazines, such as Public Opinion, had many women artists featured and on their boards

Caribbean during that turbulent decade were closely intertwined. Both the wider world and the Caribbean region experienced severe disruptions during the Great Depression.2 Both suffered prolonged consequences from the Second World War at the end of it. For both, the adjustments to an unprecedented combination of depression and war would be painful and protracted. Yet the principal forces that created the distinctiveness of that important decade were not confined narrowly within a ten-year framework. Forces of serious change manifested themselves long before 1930 - in some cases as early as the eighteenth century and lasted well beyond 1940. Worker unrest, political ineptitude, expatriation, forced return, economic uncertainty, natural disasters and soil exhaustion were not new issues in the Caribbean of the 1930s. Indeed, they all had a very long antecedence.

The answers to these questions reside in the combination of local and external factors then prevailing across the Caribbean as well as in the character of the individuals who emerged in positions of power at that time. As the decade unfolded the Caribbean peoples were all buffeted to a greater or lesser degree by actions taken far away in political and economic centres in Washington, London, Paris or Amsterdam. The experience was a quite familiar one in the past and would continue to be so in the future. In the case of the then nominally independent states - Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti - the most pervasive influences came from the United States.3 The United States had intervened belatedly in the Cuban War of Independence in 1898 and in the post-war years played an inordinate role in Cuban domestic affairs, making and unmaking local governments before 1959. United States domination was also characteristic of Puerto Rico, unfortunately drawn as an afterthought into the American military enterprise in 1898.

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