Lindsay Barrett

Life in Jamaica

Lindsay Barrett was born in Lucea, Jamaica, into an agricultural family. His father, Lionel Barrett, was a lifelong farmer and senior agriculturist with the Jamaican Ministry of Agriculture; his great-uncle, A. P. Hanson, founded the Jamaica Agricultural Society in the early 1930s. Barrett attended Clarendon College in Jamaica, and he has written that he was inspired to decide to live in Africa by a visit that pan-Africanist Dudley Thompson paid to the school in 1957: "In that visit he spoke eloquently of the cultural links that existed between Africa, especially Ghana, and Jamaica. He told us that the future held great potential for the restoration of our souls if we found ways to renew our links with the continent."

After graduating from high school in 1959 Barrett worked as an apprentice journalist at the Daily Gleaner newspaper and for its sister afternoon tabloid, The Star. In early 1961, he became a news editor for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, where his mentor was the Jamaican journalist and political analyst John Maxwell.

Move to Europe: 1962–66

Less than a year later, Barrett moved to England, where he worked as a freelancer for the BBC World Service in London and for the Transcription Centre, an organisation that recorded and broadcast the works of African writers in Europe and Africa.

In 1962, Barrett left England for France, and during the next four years travelled throughout Europe and North Africa as a journalist and feature writer, based in Paris. There he was associated with many notable black poets and artists, including Langston Hughes, Lebert "Sandy" Bethune, Ted Joans, Beauford Delaney and Herb Gentry. In 1966 Barrett's book The State of Black Desire (three poems and three essays "focusing on the theme of black alienation, exile, and black art"), illustrated by St. Kitts painter Larry Potter, was one of the first publications of the press of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

Barrett's first novel, Song For Mumu, was written between April 1962 and October 1966, and published in 1967.

Migration to Africa: 1966 onwards

Barrett travelled to Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for the first World Festival of Black Arts, where – described by Negro Digest as "the fireball from Jamaica" – he organised a poetry-reading session at the US Cultural Center. After the Festival, Barrett decided to remain in West Africa.

He took up residence in Nigeria that year, and has said that he was urged to go there by the writer John Pepper Clark, whom he had met in London in 1961, and whose play The Raft had influenced Barrett's own decision to begin writing plays, particularly one called John Pukumaka. He has said: "I came to Nigeria directly because I was influenced by her literature. I came to Africa because I wanted to renew the spirit of ancestral hope. I felt that there was hope in knowing where you came from and that we could renew our links, that we could strengthen our systems."

From 1966 to 1967 Barrett was Secretary of the Mbari Artists Club, which was "a hub of literary and cultural activities" in Ibadan: "We were in a historic, literary setting," he recalled, "when the civil war broke out and disintegrated everything." He was Director of the East Central State Information Service during the Nigerian Civil War under Chief Ukpabi Asika. In the 1970s Barrett was a founding member of the Nigerian Association of Patriotic Writers and Artistes. He became a naturalised Nigerian citizen in the mid-1980s.

He has worked as a lecturer and has taught at many educational establishments in West Africa, including in Ghana, at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, and at Nigeria's University of Ibadan where he lectured on the roots of African and Afro-American literature at the invitation of Professors Wole Soyinka and the late Omafume Onoge.

Barrett is also a broadcaster, particularly in Nigerian radio and television, and has produced and presented critically acclaimed programmes on jazz, the arts, and Caribbean-African issues. He has been involved with many cultural initiatives, interacting with a wide range of African diaspora artists visiting Nigeria, including Ornette Coleman, Jimmy Cliff, Jayne Cortez, Melvin Edwards, and others.

Novels

Lindsay Barrett's first novel, Song for Mumu — "an allegorical novel of desire, love, and loss" — was published to acclaim in 1967 in London, where he took part in readings alongside writers associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement. Song for Mumu was reviewed favourably by critics such as Martin Levin of the New York Times, who commented that "What shines ... is its language." Reviewing the novel for Caribbean Quarterly, Edward Baugh wrote of "the way in which it moves in worlds of magic and madness, myth and primitive ritual, not so as to exploit their strangeness, but to make them familiar, to emphasise their immediate reality, no less real than the reality of the natural and everyday. In his own distinctive way, Barrett is doing something not dissimilar to what, in their separate ways, Wilson Harris and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier have done".

Barrett's second novel, Lipskybound, was published in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977. and has influenced the work of many young Nigerian writers who are interested in breaking the mould of traditional creative writing. As he himself described the work in 1972, having struggled for several years writing it: "It is an exposition of the heart of natural vengeance in the soul of the transplanted African and of the violent nature of the truth of his spirit out of necessity."

Barrett's third published novel, Veils of Vengeance Falling, appeared in 1985 and has been used as a set book in the Department of English at the University of Port Harcourt.

Plays and film scripts

From the 1960s onwards, Barrett authored many plays that were staged in England and in Nigeria. Jump Kookoo Makka was presented at the Leicester University Commonwealth Arts Festival in 1967 (directed by Cosmo Pieterse) and that same year Home Again was performed by Wole Soyinka's company.

In 1973 Barrett's play Blackblast — an exploration of Caribbean history through music, mime and dance — was performed in London, the first black play at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (with a cast featuring Yemi Ajibade, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, Leslie Palmer, Eddie Tagoe, Karene Wallace, Basil Wanzira, and Elvania Zirimu, among others, directed by Horace Ové) and filmed for a special edition of the BBC 2's arts and entertainment programme Full House (broadcast on Saturday, 3 February 1973) devoted to the work of West Indian writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers.

Barrett's And After This We Heard of Fire was produced by the Ibadan Arts Theatre in Nigeria. In 1972 his theatrical collage of drama, dance and music, Sighs of a Slave Dream, was the first major production to be staged at the Keskidee Centre, in north London, performed by a Nigerian troupe under the direction of Pat Amadu Maddy. It portrays the capture and enslavement of Africans, their transport across the Atlantic, and their suffering on American plantations. Various plays by Barrett have been performed at the Mbari Theatre of the University of Ibadan and on Nigerian National Radio.

Barrett has occasionally written film scripts and commentaries, as for Horace Ové's 1973 BBC documentary King Carnival.

Poetry

Barrett is in addition a poet, whose early militant poems dealt with racial and emotional conflict and exile, as evidenced in his collection, The Conflicting Eye, published under the pseudonym "Eseoghene" in 1973. That same year he produced a staged version of Linton Kwesi Johnson's poem Voices of the Living and the Dead at London's Keskidee Centre, with music by the reggae group Rasta Love. Barrett's subsequent volumes of poetry are A Quality of Pain and Other Poems (1986) and A Memory of Rivers; Poems Out of the Niger Delta (2006), both books published in Nigeria.

As editor and contributor

Barrett's work has appeared in anthologies, including Black Fire: an Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal, and Black Arts: an Anthology of Black Creations in 1969. He wrote the foreword to a new edition of Amiri Baraka's Four Revolutionary Plays: Experimental Death Unit 1, A Black Mass, and Great Goodness of Life, Madheart, published in 1997. Barrett has been an associate editor of several periodicals, including Afriscope in Nigeria, and Transition Magazine in Uganda, and he was a contributor to seminal black British publications in the 1960s such as Daylight, Flamingo, Frontline and West Indian World.

He has also contributed numerous short stories, poems, essays, and articles to journals that include Black Orpheus, Negro Digest/Black World, Revolution, Two Cities, New African, Magnet, The Black Scholar, Black Lines, West Africa magazine, and The Africa Report.

Journalism and non-fiction

As a journalist, Barrett wrote on the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and was the co-founder, with Tom Kamara, of the Liberian newspaper The New Democrat. He was a correspondent throughout Africa for the news magazine West Africa for more than three decades, as well as working as a photo-journalist for a variety of publications. He has maintained weekly columns in several Nigerian newspapers over the years, including his widely read "From the Other Side" in the Nigerian tabloid The Sun. Barrett continues to work as a political analyst and commentator on Nigerian current events. According to Ozolua Uhakheme: "In all the civil wars in the West coast of Africa, he has played the role of an interpreter of the essence for peace."

Barrett has regularly written on music, literature, film and other cultural and social issues. A long-time friend of Fela Kuti, he wrote a Prologue for the Cassava Republic Press edition of the biography Fela: This Bitch of a Life.

He has also written books of non-fiction and biographies.

Visual art

In the earlier part of his career Barrett was also on occasion a visual artist, as evidenced by his 1970s painting "Spirit Night", included in the exhibition Beyond Borders: Bill Hutson & Friends at the Mechanical Hall Gallery. University of Delaware (August 31–December 9, 2016).

Awards and accolades