Jamaica 
I saw my land in the morning
And O but she was fair
The hills flared upwards scorning
Death and failure here.
I saw through the mists of morning
A wave like a sea set free
Faith to the dawn returning
Dark tide bright unity.
I saw my friends in the morning
They called from an equal gate
“Build now: whilst time is burning
Forward before it’s late.”
The old Gods awake
Past and future break
On as the voices roll
Move as a single whole
Forward
Forward
Forward
O country to your goal.
MG Smith
Jamaican Fisherman
Across the sand I saw a black man stride
To fetch his fishing gear and broken things,
And silently that splendid body cried
Its proud descent from ancient chiefs and kings.
Across the sand I saw him stride:
Sang his black body in the sun’s white light
The velvet coolness of dark forest wide,
The blackness of the jungle’s starless night.
He stood beside the old canoe which lay
Upon the beach; swept up within his arms
The broken nets and careless lounged away
Towards his wretched hut beneath the palms,
Nor knew how fiercely spoke his body then
Of ancient wealth and freeborn regal men.
Sir Philip Sherlock
Kyk-Over-Al in British Guiana was one of five literary magazines in the Caribbean that were important partners to the shaping of West Indian literature in the first half of the 20th Century. Not only were they stimuli for the writers of that era and companions to the developing literature, but they extended the frontiers of form, independence, and identity.
The other four magazines were Trinidad and The Beacon in Trinidad, Bim in Barbados and Focus in Jamaica. Only two were long-lasting. Bim, founded in 1942 and edited by Frank Collymore, benefited from efforts to preserve it and was still being published more than 40 years later. Kyk-Over-Al, founded by the BG Union of Cultural Clubs in 1945, jointly with the BG Writers Association and edited by AJ Seymour, had a long, unbroken run until 1961 when it ceased. But it was revived in 1984 when Ian McDonald became joint editor with Seymour. When Seymour died in 1989, McDonald continued as sole editor until he was joined by Vanda Radzik as co-editor, helping the journal to survive, sporadically, well into the 2000s.
The life of Trinidad was brief, appearing between 1929 and 1930 after which it gave way to The Beacon, which continued until 1939. They were published and edited by the same group of Trinidadian writers, chief among whom were CLR James and Alfred Mendez, as well as Ralph de Boissiere. These were novelists and short-story writers with a mission to promote local literature whose language and preoccupations were those of the Trinidadian people with a considerable focus on the grassroots. The life of the tenement yards, the barrack yards and the proletariat of Port-of-Spain was dignified through the creation of a literature that advanced social realism.
Focus was published in Jamaica between 1943 and 1948, edited by the country’s most distinguished artist – Edna Manley, whose work in sculpture is among the most celebrated of Jamaican art. She holds the distinction of having been the wife of one Jamaican Prime Minister (Norman Manley) and the mother of another (Michael Manley). But she earned fame and acclamation in her own right and through her own considerable accomplishments. Edna Manley was primarily an artist who led the way for several decades as the face of Jamaican sculpture. Yet her work as organiser and editor of Focus saw her as a leader in the literary and cultural community. Such was her recognition and stature that when the four Jamaica Schools of Art, of Dance, of Drama and of Music were brought together in one institution as the Cultural Training Centre, it was then officially named the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. But neither was her place in national politics – as wife and mother of prime ministers – merely ornamental or coincidental.
She edited the magazine at a time when several factors were taking centre stage in Jamaica as a colony, and they were all coming together and taking shape without upstaging each other. The journal played a significant role. National politics, the rise of trade unionism, culture, art, and literature were major players in nation building.
Jamaica, as a colony of Britain, experienced a long period of transitioning into internal self-government before independence in 1962. This included industrial unrest, riots in the 1930s, upheavals among workers and the first elections under universal adult suffrage in 1944. There was the rise of the trade union movement, the formation of local political parties, the emergence of Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante – all part of the strengthening of a sense of nationalism. These were reflected in art, literature, and culture. Focus was founded in the spirit of the emergence of a national literature and the need to provide an outlet for new work and an incentive for writers. There was a group of writers around the magazine, including leading poets such as George Campbell, MG Smith, Sir Philip Sherlock, and novelist Roger Mais, among others. What was significant was the way poetry was shaping under that strong influence of nationalism and the political environment.
These developments saw light after a long period of imitation when Jamaican and West Indian poetry was dominated by Victorian verse. There were notable exceptions to that trend in poets like Claude McKay and Una Marson. Growth out of that period of imitation was strong among the Focus poets, and no doubt political consciousness played a role as well. Poet Vera Bell who wrote the powerful “Ancestor on the Auction Block” was personally involved in political movements. Her poem is an anthem for liberation, independence, and nation building, making connections with slavery, struggle, and development.
Sherlock was a historian, folklorist, and fiction writer, whose poetry reflects a strong sense of identity with the land, its people, and its beliefs. His career at the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) and later when it progressed to become the independent University of the West Indies (UWI), was distinguished. He was head of the Extra Mural Depart-ment and founder-editor of Caribbean Quarterly, eventually becoming Vice-Chancellor of UWI. His contribution to the arts was immortalised when the Crea-tive Arts Centre on the Mona Campus was renamed the Philip Sherlock Centre. Among his most acclaimed poems are “Pocomania”, based on the folk spiritualist religion, and “Jamaican Fisherman”.
Note in “Jamaican Fisherman” the poet’s almost pastoral and reverent attitude to the fisherman, and the repeated reference to blackness. It is a glorification of the folk common to poems of this nature and of that time, engulfing nationalism, an appreciation of the land and its people, and identity. There is also repeated reference to royal ancestry – that several Africans forcefully enslaved in the West were kings, princes, princesses, members of royal families who were captured. As a necessary transition from this is the observation of the regal bearing exhibited by the fisherman in what is a poem of glorification. This is a response to colonialism, to imitation of Victorian verse from which Jamaican poetry had liberated itself. The poet emphasizes the stark distinction between the poverty of his present environment and the wealth of his aristocratic ancestry.
MG (Michael) Smith was a prominent member of the Focus group as a poet, but he was better known as a foremost anthropologist and an academic at UCWI and UWI. Scrutiny of his verse will detect lingering fossils of the Victorian, but a stronger departure from it and the absence of thematic and formal imitation. The language is the main derivative factor, but it is a poem proclaiming liberation and a removal of the veil of colonialism. It uses the metaphor of early morning mist or fog which lifts as the day opens. Colonialism evaporates to reveal the beauty of the land. This is another poem of the type seen in Guyana, of a poet turning the imitative Romantic landscape poetry into landscape poetry that acclaims patriotism. This, also, is a factor of the highly nationalistic characteristic of the poetry of the 1940s and 1950s.
It is a point of great significance how these magazines helped to shape and stabilise the growing West Indian literature. Both Kyk-Over-al and Focus, like Bim, Trinidad and The Beacon, had that seminal role. Furthermore, they remain as sources of the literature in that pre-independence era, exhibiting several trends and characteristics of the writing, its historical environment, and the shaping of a consciousness.
