Childhood in the British Guyana

Jan Rynveld Carew was born 24 September 1920 at Agricola, a coastal village in Guyana also called Rome. Guyana was then a South American colony of the British Empire. From 1924 to 1926, the Carews lived in the United States but Jan Carew and his elder sister had to come back to Guyana after the kidnapping of his younger sister in New York in 1926. The child would be recovered in 1927 and sent back to her family in 1927. Carew's father lived on several occasions in the United States and Canada, working a while the Canadian company, 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, firstly attending the Agricola Wesleyan School, then the Catholic elementary school and the Berbice High School, a Canandian Scottish Presbyterian School, in New Amsterdam. He got his Senior Cambridge Exam in 1938.

In 1939, he became a part-time teacher at the Berbice High School for Girls, and then was called up to the British Army as the 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 the time, he published his first text in the Christmas Annual and working a lot on his painting and drawing. From 1944 to 1945, he worked at the Price Controls Office in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.

Jan Carew feels to be part of the Caribbean world that for him includes "the island archipelago, the countries of the Caribbean littoral and Guyana, Surinam, and Cayenne." He finds 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 age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8), the predecessor of Case Western Reserve University. He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948—50) and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Exile and literature

He has taught at the University of London, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities.

Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post .

The novels and short stories

He is the author of Green Winter, Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again, Black Midas, The Wild Coast, Fulcrums of Change, Ghosts in Our Blood: With Malcolm X in Africa, England and the Caribbean, The Last Barbarian, and The Guyanese Wanderer (Sarabande Books, 2007).

Poetry, theater, television, radio and children books

The academic career

His essays include: "The Caribbean writer in exile", "Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas", "The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths", "United we stand","Culture and Rebellion","Black America: the street and the campus", "Jonestown revisited","The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold","The Synergen project","The Amarnth project", "Estevanico: The African Explorer," "Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas," and "Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment".

Amerindian cultures and the revision of the figure of Columbus

The black movement and the problem of culture

Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima.

The invasion of Grenada and the redefintion of colonial history

The environmental issue