JAN Carew was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1920 and died ninety-two years later in Louisville, Kentucky. He had been a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Between those parentheses of birth and death, he lived a remarkably peripatetic life, residing in countries and regions across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, including Ghana, the Netherlands, Jamaica, England, Trinidad, Mexico, France, and Canada, as well as various parts of the United States. His wanderings, migrations, and encounters with diverse cultures informed much of his literary imagination, and particularly his final collection of substantial fiction, The Guyanese Wanderer (Sarabande Books, 2007).
The collection contains ten short stories and includes an introduction by the distinguished Barbadian writer, Austin Clarke, himself a master of the short-story form. Clarke’s collections, including When He Was Free and Young and Used to Wear Silk, Nine Men Who Laughed, When Women Rule, and There Are No Elders, are among the notable exemplars of Caribbean short fiction.
The Guyanese Wanderer appeared five years before Carew died in 2012. It was his last published collection of substantial fiction, bringing together work that reflects a seven-decade literary career. During much of that period, Carew was, as the phrase goes, “on the road,” moving between countries, cultures, and intellectual environments. His writing consequently possesses an unusually expansive geographical and cultural imagination.
Carew’s writing in The Guyanese Wanderer departs, at times, from the strictly realist mode of his classic novels, including Black Midas, Wild Coast, and The Last Barbarian, moving instead toward the surreal and the magical realism associated with Latin American writers, particularly Gabriel García Márquez. In his introduction, Clarke draws an important distinction concerning Carew’s use of these elements. He argues that Carew’s magical realism “presents a stronger narrative line as the literary conveyor belt” in his adoption of Latin American surrealism, rather than the more “single-minded mix of mystical and magical” that characterises some versions of the mode.
Clarke’s point is significant. In Carew, magical realism is not merely an attribute of a particular character or an unusual event within the story. It becomes part of the very mechanism of storytelling, the “conveyor belt,” as Clarke puts it, that carries the narrative forward. The supernatural is therefore not simply an interruption of reality; it is woven into the narrative structure itself. This is an insightful distinction, and Carew’s stories in the collection bear it out.
The strongest stories in The Guyanese Wanderer have a distinctly folkloric orientation. They mine the mythology, oral traditions, and folklore of Guyana and the wider Caribbean for their sense of place and cultural recognition. In “Tilson Ezejie Alias Ti-Zek,” for example, Carew tells a story about coconut thieves whose triumph extends beyond ordinary life and into the realm of the afterlife. He deftly employs the figure of the Mantop, often called Moongazer, a terrifying creature of the night. In this story and others in the collection, Mantop is allegorised as death. Its presence lends the tale a supernatural dimension that deepens, rather than diminishes, its realistic foundation.
Carew is also a beautiful lyrical writer, particularly when describing the natural world. Some of his landscapes are sumptuous without sacrificing precision. His descriptions of Guyana’s interior have an almost tactile quality, conveying the environment’s density, danger, beauty, and mystery. This ability to render landscape is one of the qualities that connects the stories in The Guyanese Wanderer to the world of Black Midas.
“Chantal” is one of the collection’s most powerful stories. It is a dramatically constructed and wonderfully written tale set in the interior of Guyana. Violent and intensely realistic, it chronicles the deterioration of a relationship between a man and his wife, showing how tensions that begin in private spaces, within the home and within the mind, eventually seep into the public world with devastating consequences. The story is informed by the cultural and social realities of Guyana’s interior, a setting Carew rendered with authority.
Unlike many stories in the collection, “Chantal” does not depend on real maravilloso or supernatural intervention. In this respect, it resembles the opening story, “The Visit,” in which a mother under severe economic pressure takes her young son on a visit, intending to give him away to an older woman. It is a heartbreaking story, restrained in its realism and emotionally devastating precisely because it does not require the intervention of the marvellous.
Carew demonstrates exceptional skill in sketching his characters’ psychology and establishing the motives behind their actions. He is equally effective at depicting sudden, explosive violence. Again, violence seems to be the first resort for characters trying to resolve conflict. In “Chantal,” the husband assaults his wife and attacks her would-be lover; she, in turn, uses a knife against him, knocking him unconscious. In “Ti-Zek,” the humorous and philosophical Ram is shot in the head while stealing coconuts. He falls on the iron bar of his coconut peeler, which pierces his throat. Yet his recovery from this grotesque injury gives the story its distinctive charge of sweet surrealism.
Violence, predation, and reversal are also central to “Hunter and Hunted.” Here the cutlass and the gun become instruments through which human beings attempt to assert power over each other and animals. During a hunting expedition involving a father and his three sons, events go horribly wrong, and the boundaries between animal and human violence begin to collapse. There is bloodshed on every side: a young boy has his legs eaten by hogs, and a jaguar that attacks and kills some of the hogs is also killed by them. Carew seems to suggest that predators are often themselves prey, that power exists at shifting levels, and that each creature may occupy both positions in the hierarchy of survival.
The prey in “Bra Nancy and Tiger” and “The Initiation of Belfon” are different. “Bra Nancy and Tiger” draws upon the Caribbean tradition of the trickster figure. Bra Nancy, the scamp and survivor who depends upon his intelligence and schemes, turns the tables on his wealthy landlord, Tiger, ensnaring him in a web of lies and half-truths from which there is no escape. Carew does not over-embellish the story. He tells it in a straightforward, matter-of-fact style, as an elder in a Guyanese village might tell it at night to children gathered around. Its simplicity is part of its effectiveness. The story understands folk-tale conventions and lets the trickster’s intelligence, rather than literary ornament, carry the narrative.
“The Initiation of Belfon,” as its title suggests, is a story of initiation, but the initiation is sexual only on one level. More deeply, it is a meditation on contradiction, human complexity, desire, and the strange ways in which one generation passes its knowledge and ambitions to another. Young Belfon is sent from his interior village, Biara, to Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, on his way to university in Trinidad. An orphan raised by a priest and another influential figure in the interior, he must stay with Couvade before continuing his journey. Through Couvade and her recollections, Carew gradually reveals the histories of Father Marquez and Atlassa, two powerful figures from Belfon’s past. Her memories also open a window into the wider interior community, introducing us to memorable figures such as an Englishwoman with three husbands and a strange Carib shaman.
Couvade initiates young Belfon into the art of lovemaking, but this is only one level of his initiation. Belfon is her sexual prey, but he is also, in a larger sense, a stand-in for Atlassa, who is living out his ambitions through the young man. The story is especially compelling in its treatment of generational change: the young inherit not simply the old’s dreams but also their contradictions, desires, failures, and unfinished ambitions.
“The Burial,” set in New Amsterdam, features one of the collection’s most engaging characters: the magnificent Belle. Like Ti-Zek, she is a survivor, a woman who depends entirely upon her intelligence, instincts, and common sense. She transforms her success as a prostitute into material independence and becomes a property owner. Although the local community does not respect her, she triumphs over those who judge her. Belle is a wonderful Carew creation: a morally complicated but deeply likeable character, much like Anancy and Father Marquez. These are people whose contradictions make them recognisable. They are neither simply good nor simply bad; their moral ambiguities are precisely what give them the texture of real human beings.
“The Burial” is a coastal story, a countryside tale, and one of the few in the collection not primarily concerned with the interior. It carries the unmistakable imprint of a coastal Guyanese experience, vividly rendered and mordantly humorous. Like many of the stories in the collection, it is carefully observed and beautifully written.
Most of the stories in The Guyanese Wanderer are set in Guyana, while the final four can be read as immigrant stories, dealing with West Indians living in London and Paris. These stories are less successful than those rooted in Guyanese landscapes, folklore, and social experience. They sometimes feel more like sketches of postwar England and Europe, subjects that had already been explored with greater depth and force by writers such as Samuel Selvon in The Lonely Londoners and The Housing Lark.
The two Caesar stories, “Walking with Caesar” and “Caesar in Paris,” follow the titular character through a variety of situations as he searches for a place to live, faces white prejudice, and struggles to survive London’s cold and darkness. Caesar is a convincing and engaging character, but the story lacks an incident substantial enough for a character with his potential. He is an attractive figure with little to do; there are no great obstacles for him to overcome, no decisive chasm to cross.
In “Caesar in Paris,” he appears as puzzled as the reader. He has been married and abandoned by his Polish wife on the same day, leaving him bewildered and emotionally adrift. He wanders from bar to bar, drinking with a friend, caught in despair and uncertainty. The story captures the dislocation of the immigrant experience, but it does not achieve the narrative force of the stronger Guyanese stories.
Despite these reservations, The Guyanese Wanderer remains an important addition to Jan Carew’s body of work. Carew successfully wrote across genres: plays, short stories, poems, novels, essays, philosophical works, and nonfiction, and his literary achievement is considerable. He was one of Guyana’s important writers, and the breadth of his imagination is evident throughout his work.
Carew’s particular value lies in his ability to move between realism and the marvellous, the psychological and the folkloric, and the interior of Guyana and the wider world. His characters are caught between opposing forces: predator and prey, tradition and modernity, home and exile, desire and duty, violence, and survival. His wandering life gave him an unusually broad perspective, but it was Guyana, particularly the cultural and natural worlds of its interior, which provided some of his richest literary material.
In The Guyanese Wanderer, Carew returns repeatedly to that world: its folklore, its violence, its humour, its mysteries, and its unforgettable people. The result is a collection that, despite its unevenness, demonstrates the enduring power and versatility of one of Guyana’s most accomplished writers.
