By Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Carew
WESTERN BUREAU:
"IF YOU live long enough you can have many lives and many careers," Kwane Dawes said, quoting the man who he was introducing.
Jan Carew has had so many lives that he has divided his memoirs into 20-year segments, and counting. When he spoke for the first time in the lobby of the Treasure Beach Hotel at the 2002 Calabash International Literary Festival, it was immediately clear that the times had kept up with him.
"Can you hear me now?" he asked, his voice amplified by a clip-on microphone. "One of the problems I have at 82 is that the voice goes through some changes. It is difficult to get the right decibels."
"I will be reading some excerpts from the beginning of my memoirs, so you can know who I am and where I come from," the man who was born in Guyana said.
He prefaced his story with a telling comment: "The history we study in universities always concentrates on the things that divide us."
There was a hush in the room, as the reduced audience in the rain-induced venue, which was certainly more intimate than the 'big tent', listened to the early life of a scholar, writer, soldier and adviser to Kwame Nkrumah and so much more.
"One day when I was nine years old and suffering from malaria I died and came back to life," he read. The doctor ('a five past midnight black man') predicted that he would not outlast the night. Of course, he did, and "when I woke up cautiously the morning after I died and came back to life" he checked his face and listened for the bells tolling.
His grandmother would retell the tale of her blowing breath back into Jan many times, and his memories of that night were of standing on the bank of a river and a host of dead relatives on the other side beckoning him to cross over.
His early life, like that of so many Caribbean people, was dominated by his female relatives. "Mother and grandmother had married the wrong men and they had to live with their mistakes for the rest of their lives. Aunt Harriett was the only one who knew how to marry, and she did it twice," Mr. Carew read.
He told the fascinating story of the man who should have been his father, Edward Roehler, but who quarrelled with his mother and left in a huff to join the West India Regiment. He went to fight the Turks and there was no news for two years, then there was a report that he was missing in action. His mother met another man and was 'bowled over', but Roehler returned on the day they were wed.
His mother fainted.
Jan Carew told a tale of brief migration to New York, being shunted off to relatives back in Guyana as his mother concentrated on searching for his sister, who had been kidnapped in the United States. She was found after a year and Mr. Carew ended up with his mother boarding a bus in South Carolina, only to be ordered to sit in the back by a driver 'with the manners of a hog'. She decided that she would not stay in the United States, not with her pride and temper. She would do something rash and then, what would happen to her children?
"Politics is my life," Jan Carew responded in a brief interactive segment, explaining how the pictures of Fulani warriors his grandfather put up in his room had influenced him. In addition, his mother took the struggles of Black America to heart.
He also shed some light on a famous painter.
"The reason I met Picasso was because he was a communist. And he was absolutely dedicated to the liberation of the coloured peoples. That is the context in which I met Picasso. We believed in the same cause," he said.
There was a humorous note, as Carew the eager student did not recognise Picasso and proceeded to discuss art.
He also told a story of his naive encounter with racial discrimination. "When I went to Miami as an adult, the drinking fountains said white and coloured. I wondered why people drank coloured water. I turned them on and they were the same. I asked a white man passing by why the water wasn't coloured. He looked at me as if I was mad and walked away - hurriedly," he said.
"When I went to Howard University they gave me a crash course in survival in the United States."
"You become political," Mr. Carew said. "Not to be political is to be running around blindfolded. On the other hand, art is art and the apprenticeship you have to serve in it is ruthless, to hone the talent."
He ended on a starkly realistic note.
"There are certain dangers to being an artist. There are many of my friends and colleagues who have died under peculiar circumstances. It is hazardous to be an artist and search assiduously for certain truths," Mr. Carew said.
