Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Harper’s, the Believer, Artforum, and the Nation, among many other publications. Educated at Yale and Berkeley, he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. This is his first book.
‘Allows the Caribbean to stand on its own and shine . . . A celebration of culture, music and literature . . . shows the magic of the people of the Caribbean . . . infused with passion, love and vibrancy’
SHARMAINE LOVEGROVE, Monocle Arts Review
‘A creative hybrid of travel writing and in-depth reportage . . . Its balance of skepticism and enthusiasm is driven by both wide knowledge and a bracing sympathy for the oppressed . . . He has a journalist’s flair for interviews and is as deft with chance encounters as with pop idols. Above all he finds dignity as well as excitement in this beautiful archipelago’
COLIN THUBRON, New York Review of Books
‘This book illuminates, like no other I’ve read, the startling history and the complex present of the nations of the Caribbean. Written with passion and joyful music in the prose, Island People will become an indispensable companion for anybody travelling to the Caribbean – or dreaming of doing so’ SUKETU MEHTA
‘Many have tried this before – to get hold of, in its entirety, the volatile, beautiful, relentlessly shifting Caribbean. Nobody has succeeded as dazzlingly as Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’
MARLON JAMES
‘One of those rare writers who bridges worlds – between deep scholarship and lively and accessible writing, between islands and mainlands, between big ideas and precise details, between history and possibility’
REBECCA SOLNIT
‘Joshua Jelly-Schapiro possesses both a humanist’s irrepressible empathy and a journalist’s necessary skepticism. He reports carefully, researches exhaustively, cares deeply, and writes beautifully’
DAVE EGGERS
‘Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s grand book on the Caribbean is so striking in form and vision that it amounts to something new – a constant surprise . . . An important book filled with many truths’
HILTON ALS
‘A marvel of a book . . . Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a superb young writer who brings to this sea of dreams a scholar’s authority, a novelist’s way with character, and a top reporter’s talent for stumbling into exactly that tale, however improbable and fantastic, that most needs telling’
MARK DANNER
‘Sensitive to the power of place to anchor or disturb identity, Josh Jelly-Schapiro maps the Caribbean through its myth and its music, its history and its intellectual tradition. Erudite, reflective and savvy, Island People is as much a pleasure to read as it is an education’ GAIUTRA BAHADUR
This paperback edition published by Canongate Books in 2018
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High
Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, 2016
First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 562 5
eISBN 978 1 78211 560 1
For my parents
and for island people everywhere
The indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians, living by their own lights long before the European adventure, gradually disappear in a blind, wild forest of blood. That mischievous gift, the sugar cane, is introduced, and a fantastic human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported crooks and criminals, defeated soldiers and Royalist gentlemen fleeing from Europe, slaves from the West Coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans, and Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on an unfamiliar soil . . . in an unpredictable and infinite range of custom and endeavour, people in the most haphazard combinations, surrounded by memories of splendour and misery, the sad and dying kingdom of Sugar, a future full of promises. And always the sea!
—George Lamming
We’re all in the Caribbean, if you think about it.
—Junot Díaz
CONTENTS
Chapter 6 Autumn of the Patriarch
Chapter 7 Boricua and the Bronx
Hispaniola: Mountains Beyond Mountains
Chapter 11 Heading South (Cayman, Barbados, Grenada, Barbuda, Montserrat, Antigua)
Chapter 12 Au Pays Natal: On Martinique (and Guadeloupe)