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Lost and found

We do not associate lively storytelling with history, but that is what history is, at its very best. We also do not associate history with fiction, poetry and reading for pleasure. Allison Donell, the literary sleuth and scholar who is professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Bristol has turned that on its head, however, with her easy-to-read, new book Lost and Found: An A-Z of Neglected Writers of the Anglophone Caribbean, published by Papillote press. It adds an episode to the history of Caribbean literature. She and her nine fellow contributors of enlightening short essays reclaim 25 writers, 17 are women, who were overlooked in our literary history due to a series of circumstances that had relate to the time in which they lived - one Barbadian, Belizean and Antiguan, two Grenadians, two Dominicans, six Guyanese, nine Jamaicans and three from TT. The narrative about our great Caribbean literature highlights the enormous success of our male writers during the 1950-1990s, two of whom received the Nobel Prize, VS Naipaul and Derek Walcott. Success came mainly because they were in London - the hub of the English literary world – in the 1940s-50s when the BBC World Service was broadcasting the history-making Caribbean Voices programme created by Jamaican Una Marston and later produced by Henry Swanzy. Swanzy made those writers’ careers. He spotted Caribbean talent at home in the islands, edited the work, broadcast it across the region and, importantly, paid the fledgling writers professional fees. The “greats” all went through Swanzy’s hands at Bush House in London, from Samuel Selvon and Andrew Salkey, to George Lamming, Wilson Harris and Edgar Mittelholzer, and others, including those who never became writers, eg, Ulric Cross, the Trinidadian war hero who worked as an editor. Among that generation were many women who, unlike many of the men, disappeared from literary history. Now they have been found again. Why they were lost is as important to Donnell’s history as how they were regained. The publishing world is obsessed, then as now, with novels, or long form writing, which is at the heart of the industry. Caribbean writing has always tended to the short form and poetry, putting many of our writers at a disadvantage. But some gifted novelists emerged, “the greats”. Their successful novels that told our fresh stories and won critical acclaim became the “canon” or the touchstones of West Indian literature. Women who could write novels and got lost along the way did so because their work was “commonly framed in a distinctly gendered fashion as pastimes rather than professions, as appetising tales rather than meaty narratives,” Donnell charges. The work did not appear in magazines, then get republished in anthologies, and is still not taught to students of Caribbean literature. Add on the demands of marriage and motherhood that can frustrate literary ambitions and oblivion is easy to understand. Writers writing in the region and lacking the sophisticated metropolitan infrastructure of literary agents and publishers were more prone to disappearance. Their body of writing was “generated through commissions and competitions and many were disseminated through educational publications, drama societies, reading circles and local radio stations” and received no literary criticism. Several other writers belonging to the Windrush generation in the UK had a similar fate, although both were influential in their immediate spheres. In both cases they are not in the canon because history repeats itself, or the telling of history follows what’s been established. It took Donnell 30 years of research to complete her dedicated task of reclamation. She delved to find what might have eluded others and found untapped sources, slowly creating, often helped by “neglected” writers’ families, colleagues and social media enquiry, a forgotten continent of Caribbean literary history. She concludes that by recognising the neglected local writers of the last century we can appreciate this region “as a place of extraordinary transition and creative potential” despite the challenges of becoming a writer. Among the found are three TT women writers. Olga Comma Maynard (1902-1998). My Yesterdays about her travels in the region is well known in TT, but she was also a poet and children’s author. Her complaints of the “drudgery” of raising funds to get published still resonate in 2025. Barbara Jones (1936-1969) was exceptional - poet, island scholarship winner to Cornell, plant genetics and the first Caribbean woman with a PhD in her field, Asst Professor at McGill University, radical thinker and Black activist. A copy of her erotic poetry collection Among the Potatoes was discovered hidden in a locked collection in a TT library. Olga Yatoff, was also a poet, dancer and arts activist, whose writing appeared in the important Beacon magazine. This “bright light on the Port of Span scene” of the 1930s later moved to the US and became an arts academic Lost and Found is available from PaperBased Bookshop. The post Lost and found appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.