ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION Among the papers of the African-American writer, activist and professor James Weldon Johnson is a long and friendly letter dated 27 January 1938 from a young Jamaican woman writer, Una Marson. This letter is very important to me because it reinforces the link between the distinguished Black American writers of the time and Una Marson, whose life-story I have been researching.1 The letter’s contents indicate that these writers were part of the same ‘extended family’ whose members prize identical great-grandparents, although the first cousins have never even swapped phone numbers. These writers, living in different parts of the African Diaspora, share several cultural concerns which are reflected in their work. So, in examining the life of Una Marson, an extraordinary Black West Indian woman, I have seen Caribbean writing and, to a lesser degree, some African-American writing, through a different lens.