Experiences of people across the Caribbean and Latin America

I have often said that so much of what I have learnt about history in general, and the history of the Caribbean and Latin America in particular, was learnt because I followed the path on which a novel or short story led me. I discovered so much about the colonial and ongoing postcolonial experiences of people across the Caribbean and Latin America because bold and curious writers fictionalised different periods in the experiences of people across the Anglophone and Hispanic Caribbean and the broader Latin American space. I learnt about Jamaicans who moved to Ecuador to build what is still dubbed “the most expensive railway line in the world, The Devil’s Nose” - because an Ecuadorian writer decided to represent that period of her country’s history in a novel by the same name, The Devil’s Nose.

Indeed, the amazing truths about the multiple ways in which Caribbean people crisscrossed the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to go to build the Panama Canal, railway lines in Costa Rica and Cuba, was first suggested to me through fictional works that led to my laborious hours of reading this important history. Who would have just simply known or discovered that a fiery, defiant Jamaican slave had helped to precipitate a rebellion in Haiti in the 19th century without Carpenter’s The Kingdom of this World?

In this same vein, Letters Home narrativizes the stories told and untold about West Indian migration to the UK. Now we have the clarification that they were not all Windrush people because there were many other ships that traversed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean with West Indian passengers. How many of us knew that some ships went to France and Italy, before arriving in the UK? Letters Home highlights these truths and some of the many challenges and defeats of these West Indians, but it also reveals the strength, courage and determination of many people to surmount the difficulties they faced.

The struggles to maintain individual and collective identities as recorded by history is both subtly and also patently portrayed. And if the history of the tremendous contributions of West Indians to British society has not been told enough, this little piece of Caribbean literature will lead people to read and research the truths of Caribbean migration to the UK and of how this branch of migration is also connected to other movements, such as the movement to Panama and Cuba. In the protagonist’s family, several members move to England, but before this, was a father who went to Panama and Cuba to work hard and earn a living and then return to Jamaica to sow the seeds of the benefits of migration to his own children.

All literatures are important for how they tell the histories of the people whose lives they centre. Indeed, the literature of Caribbean and other diasporic communities often attempts to retell colonial history and to explode the myth of historical objectivity. Writers may use humour and figurative language to soften their tone as they reinsert forgotten peoples into their history to correct the omissions, silences and erasures that have typified stories about them. 

Caribbean and other peoples need to read their literature and see their foods, dances, trees, sunsets and cultural habits held up before the world.

Paulette A. Ramsay is the author of Letters Home and Aunt Jen, which document the correspondence between a mother who has migrated to England as part of the Windrush generation and her daughter in Jamaica.

These books are part of the Caribbean Contemporary Classics series – deep and vibrant stories from the heart of the Caribbean. Find out more about the series here.