Calypso Jews: Holocaust Refugees in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Abstract

This essay examines the representation of Holocaust refugees in novels by Caribbean authors John Hearne and Jamaica Kincaid. Drawing on refugee memoirs as well as calypsos from the late 1930s, it reads Hearne’s and Kincaid’s novels against the background of a little known chapter of Holocaust history in which Jewish refugees found safe haven in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean. It argues that Hearne’s and Kincaid’s stagings of the Black-Jewish encounter ultimately signal their ambivalent authorial positionings while also illustrating their diverging approaches to the project of connecting diasporas and histories of trauma.