ISLAND PEOPLE
The Caribbean and the World
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
451 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
Over three centuries, as many as six million slaves from West Africa arrived in the Caribbean, more than 10 times the number who were settled in what became the United States. The Afro-Caribbean experience was thus able to dominate in a way that African-American life, segregated and oppressed, never could have. Finding creative expression under the influence of and in opposition to white rule, the island people of the Caribbean by the 20th century became renowned for the originality of their music, literature and revolutionary politics.
Jelly-Schapiro, a white kid who grew up in New England with Bob Marley posters on his bedroom wall, began traveling around the Caribbean as a Yale undergraduate. “Island People” is the product of more than a dozen years of extended visits to the region, and Jelly-Schapiro’s writing reflects an extraordinary intimacy with his subject. In Cuba, he got around by hitchhiking, just as ordinary Cubans do. In Haiti, he accompanied the women who crowd onto small cargo ships with their sacks of fruits and vegetables. “I curled up as best I could with my fellow passengers, against a sack of what felt like mangoes,” he writes.
Caribbean inventiveness is most evident in the region’s diverse musical traditions, and Jelly-Schapiro affectionately explores them all. A musician friend in Kingston says Rastafarianism and reggae arose in Jamaica because “we needed to connect some dots — between now and our past, between here and Africa.” He rummages through old Olga Guillot LPs at a record store in San Juan, discussing the salsa singer with the owner. In Trinidad, he learns that the steel-pan bands owe their existence to United States Navy operations that left an abundance of 55-gallon oil drums on the island.
But Jelly-Schapiro spends as much time in libraries as in music venues, and among the characters who figure large in his book are the writers and political theorists who have given intellectual voice to the Caribbean, from Frantz Fanon to C.L.R. James, the socialist historian of Trinidad and Jelly-Schapiro’s “first big intellectual crush.” His itinerary is dictated by the natural desire to explore “any place that features in the biography of someone you admire.” In Jamaica, he makes his way to St. Ann’s Parish, home to Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley and (part-time) Harry Belafonte. “This out-of-the-way parish,” he writes, “birthed not one but three totemic figures in the great 20th-century story of black freedom.”
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