Introduction

Alison Donnell

Given that all histories involve acts of selection and therefore of exclusion, why is this focus on what has been neglected in Anglophone Caribbean literary history important? One response to this question may be to consider the highly charged and highly productive relationship between literature and history in the region. As Derek Walcott expressed so memorably, the encounter between History and the majority of the Caribbean's inhabitants was premised on foundational denial: "I met History once but he ain't recognize me."1 The transatlantic slave trade and indenture legitimised the violent denial of personhood and the erasure of ancestral histories, and colonialism's culture preserved the practice of disavowal into the mid-20th century through its institutions of law and church and schoolroom. As the refrain of Olive Senior's poem "Colonial Girls School" highlights, Caribbean subjects remained largely unrecognised, with "Nothing about us at all."2 Against this repudiation, one of the most significant hallmarks of Caribbean literary works has been their creative affirmation and recovery of a plurality of submerged and unappreciated histories. Yet the recovery of excluded literary histories within the now dazzling and burgeoning canon of Anglophone Caribbean literature remains under-researched.

In many ways, this study of unseen writers is all the more astounding because it looks at one of the most visible episodes in Caribbean literary history. The story of a sudden boom of male Anglophone Caribbean writing in 1950s London is a real one. As George Lamming described, this decade "witnessed the 'emergence' of the novel as an imaginative interpretation of West Indian society by West Indians".3 The arrival in England of a number of significant male novelists - Edgar Mittelholzer, Roger Mais, Vic Reid, John Hearne, and Andrew Salkey, as well as the soon towering figures of VS Naipaul, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Samuel Selvon - was, by the 1960s, to give shape to an enduring West Indian canon.4 This has rightly been a central event in literary histories, but what is less recognised is how this familiar flourishing has drawn attention away from an array of other mid-century writers and creative works that were written in and for the region. As a genesis story, the becoming of the Windrush generation of writers creates the impression of earlier literary silence rather than historical silencing - and it therefore writes over the expanse and variety of literary activity, including women's writing, to be found right across the region and throughout the 20th century.

This narrow account of the sudden emergence of Caribbean writers in the mid-century has also become deeply entangled with a particular narrative of an Anglophone Caribbean "literary" tradition that evolved through London publishing houses and the novel form. Just before he died in 1955, Roger Mais described the Caribbean writer as "essentially a travelling, 'gambling' man with a manuscript or two in his bag and a big dream of contributing to contemporary English literature".5 Mais's phrasing explicitly articulates the conjunction of migration, masculinity and metropolitan authorship that came to define mid-century Caribbean literature, along with the ambition to be recognised as a writer by the literary mainstream and implicitly therefore to be seen outside the region.

As the accounts of neglected writers gathered here show, location has certainly played a role in the relative recognition of mid-century Caribbean writers, with proximity to London and its literary networks being particularly important for entry into the circle of long-standing publishing success. But, so too has this idea of the literary conjugated with the Windrush generation. When more vernacular and more generically varied and hybrid writings from this period are addressed, they are commonly framed as being of cultural and educational value within a nation-making project but set at a distance from dominant literary histories. As the academic construction of West Indian or Caribbean literature began to take shape in the mid-1960s era of Caribbean independence the vectors of attention and neglect became more clearly defined. "A Preliminary Check-List of West Indian Fiction in English, 1949-1964", published in 1965 by academics LJ Harris and DA Ormerod lists 26 novelists, most of whom we would now name as canonical figures. In making their selection, they are clear about what they regard as unworthy of inclusion. Their list is "concerned only with works which have secured publication in England or the United States; locally published West Indian novels pose different bibliographical problems, and are, anyway, very few in number. Other deliberate omissions are anthologies of short stories by more than one hand; volumes by well-known novelists which come in the category of critical essays, travel, and autobiography, rather than under the heading of creative fiction; and children's fiction and school reading primers, irrespective of the eminence of their authors."6

Although interestingly not within Harris and Omerod's narrow optic of the literary, the anthologies of Caribbean writings published at this same time also had a powerful influence on shaping a mid-century literary history. Andrew Salkey's anthologising ventures, West Indian Stories (1960), Stories from the Caribbean (1965) and Caribbean Prose (1967) curated a West Indian literary template that would be repeated for decades to come.7 Three fiction anthologies published in 1966: Kenneth Ramchand's West Indian Narrative, Barbara Howe's From the Green Antilles and OR Dathorne's Caribbean Narrative, also all confirmed the centrality of Naipaul, Reid, Mais, Lamming, Selvon and as well as the now lesser known Jamaican novelist John Hearne.8 Not one of these anthologies included the work of a Caribbean-born woman Anglophone writer. As subsequent generations of literary critics followed these slender trails accessible in copyright libraries - never thinking to look to newspapers' Christmas annuals or schools' anthologies from the British publishers Nelson's, for creative work about which to write their articles or to teach their courses - the rich, and usually overlapping, traditions of mid-century local writings and women's writings fell into obscurity. As a consequence, the widespread account of mid-century Caribbean literature as a people-making project that gives voice and value to Caribbean experiences masks a much more complicated landscape in terms of both the sources and the stories of literary history.

The work of this volume is to restore attention to those mid-century Caribbean writers who have been neglected and to recognise the variety in character, volume, audience and material conditions across their work. It presents a body of writings that not only rewards attention individually but that collectively challenges the narrowly established people, places and periods through which Anglophone Caribbean literary traditions of the mid-century are narrated, offering a rich alternative canvas that expands this literary history. In speaking to the scale of loss, it might be helpful to point out that even a cursory glance at the index of the BBC's "Caribbean Voices" radio programme or of BIM, the little magazine published from Barbados since 1942, reveals tens of writers that we no longer know anything about. In her 1937 article, "Wanted: Writers and Publishers", Una Marson, the Jamaican woman writer, journalist and editor, issued a call to record Jamaica's literature in the making: "It would be of interest if readers who know of other books and possess them would send a note to PUBLIC OPINION, so that a full list might be kept before the public."9 Sadly, no such list has been recovered and Marson's sense of the value of documenting the expressive efflorescence of this decolonising moment was as far-sighted and as idealistic as her call for local publishing houses to strengthen the possibilities of professional authorship in the Caribbean. The absence of any inventory of self-published or manuscript works along with the stop-start nature of most local publication ventures in the first half of the 20th century, mainly associated with newspapers and their writer-editors, means that no reliable measure of the literary loss from within the Anglophone Caribbean can be taken and barely any synoptical records of the fragments remain.

Although the writers and works discussed here have largely faded from view entirely, to name them as neglected signals disregard as well as loss and highlights how acts of restoration need to reckon with the modes of evasion and denial that have led to their obscurity. To that end, this volume also accrues evidence from which to understand how such substantive loss happened in the relatively recent past, cumulatively identifying shared conditions for neglect. Much of the neglect has been shaped by critical attention simply being routed close to where it has concentrated before, as in "Sevcenko's law of the dog and the forest", which emblematises the tendency of historians to repeat the tracks of previous historians rather than venturing further afield. Just as this allegorical dog...