An Interview with Marsha Massiah
An Interview with Marsha Massiah
Marsha Massiah was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1979 and migrated to Brooklyn, New York, in 2003. She is the founder and executive director of the annually hosted Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF). The festival was established in 2019 and has featured Caribbean authors such as Barbara Jenkins, Kei Miller, Jamaica Kincaid, and Velma Pollard. In addition to book readings, BCLF offers a performance space for spoken word, storytelling, music, and child-focused engagements. In this interview we discuss the emergence of a Caribbean literary festival ecosystem and community-building practices of inclusion, care, and partnership in the Caribbean diaspora. I interviewed Massiah on 1 April 2025 during a virtual meeting.
amílcar peter sanatan: You once considered yourself an “outsider” in the “literary circle.” However, you share with the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter a dependence on “the only tool of imagination to examine and probe a condition.”1 So you started a literary festival! What was your original vision for the festival?
Marsha Massiah: BCLF was established to provide a corrective narrative for Caribbean existence and the Caribbean story. Caribbean people’s histories and stories do not appear to be entirely in the hands of Caribbean people. We felt that the Caribbean experience was being defined by people who did not live it and by people who did not own it. People who were not Caribbean became very powerful voices about the Caribbean. So we embarked on a mission to provide a corrective narrative for the Caribbean experience. We really started off to do something for Caribbean people, by Caribbean people.
AS: I want to acknowledge the role of BCLF’s leadership team, especially the directors at the beginning—Melissa Harper and Mellany Paynter. You were all born in Trinidad and Tobago and later migrated to the United States. Furthermore, you all had a strong regional consciousness and commitment to building an inclusive festival where many voices of the Caribbean were represented. Sometimes national literary festivals can be very inward looking or focus specifically on platforming people from a specific national community. You went wider. What do you think informed this approach?
MM: Yes, I think we bring a Trinbagonian perspective to the work. The Trinbagonian is from many places of the world. It is in our DNA. We organize, we activate, and we express ourselves freely. We may not always march, but we express our resistance through songs and dance. So our history and culture find outlets in a medium that is usually very entertaining. This brings people together.
I am going to make a comparison that might appear to be injurious to some. Whereas reggae music has many moral and deterministic codes, calypso, on the other hand, is less preachy and didactic. Calypso is tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted, but it tells a story. We like to use double entendre. We leave listeners open to arriving at their own conclusions, and that is important for a society and a social archive. I feel that Trinbagonians being raised in this kind of culture, maybe unwittingly and unknowingly, are very creative and provide spaces for people to tell many stories. BCLF was born out of that cultural material.
AS: Caribbean literature is a large tent. We cannot reduce our understanding of the Caribbean in terms of citizenship in Caribbean nations; we endeavor to understand Caribbean spaces and cultures in the widest sense. The poet, editor, critic, and program director of the Bocas Lit Fest, Nicholas Laughlin, thought of Caribbean diasporas as “a new form of creolisation, as elements of an already hybrid culture that go forth to negotiate with other (already hybrid) cultures to create new and unpredictable hybrids.”2 Brooklyn is a melting pot of cultures from around the world. Do you consciously think about BCLF’s efforts to shape and influence Caribbean diasporas?
MM: About ten years ago, I probably would have been rather dismissive about this diaspora question. But the diaspora is a new home. A diaspora is a new world that has to be recognized, like it or not. Diasporas are new seeding grounds. They are new worlds. They cannot exist alone. They exist in a state of postmemory. They exist in relation to the old world that they left. They exist always in a state of hankering, always in a state of looking back. Diasporas also radiate with a sense of hope. A sense of hope to make that place better than the one that they left. Due to whatever push force expelled them from that place. But they also radiate, and they pulse with the sense of a promise of return to where they came from, I think. The diaspora is kind of electric with this promise of return, a hope of return.
AS: Caribbean people are present on every continent, especially in the major cities of the world. In Helsinki, Finland, I’ve observed small but vital cultural initiatives organized by the Jamaican diaspora to enhance Caribbean community. What does BCLF do to build Caribbean community in Brooklyn?
MM: We are creating conversations about the place that we came from. How can we make that place better? What tools are we accessing in this “new country” that we are in? How do we transform the space we are in now? What are we accumulating in terms of knowledge and resources while we are here that can be valuable to the Caribbean? Lisa Allen-Agostini answers a number of these questions in her 2021 fiction Home Home. Our “return home” goes beyond the financial remittances that account for huge parts of economic life in some places like Jamaica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
If you just want to look at Caribbean diasporas and what they mean purely in terms of economics, you have answers there. But also in what is happening within first-, second-, and third-generation Caribbean children in the diaspora—there is a wealth of skills that can assist with growth in the region. How can we support the repair of Caribbean nations, homes, and families?
There is also a reparations conversation that I am very interested in between excolonial powers and the societies that they have reduced. But I think part of the reparation conversation we can probably begin to consider is how Caribbean diasporas and generational offspring can build up their communities with the skills and the talents that we have accomplished and accumulated.
AS: How can Caribbean literary festivals play a role in the decolonization process? And is there specific work to do on decolonizing literary festivals?
MM: Being located in the diaspora, we are partially free from colonial or postcolonial Caribbean political life. It frees us to say some of the things that can’t be said at home. People in the Caribbean feel the disenfranchisement and exclusion by elites. We do not have to follow the same rules and status quo in the diaspora.
Decolonization involves ensuring our children are raised on Caribbean literature. Particularly for children in the diaspora, but certainly for people at home and abroad, they are not nursed on the breast of Caribbean literature. This means that we are also leaving colonial and imperial narratives without response.
In literary festivals there is certainly a lot of elitism. I think that all we are trying to do at BCLF is democratize the story and democratize literature. We are simply trying to say that literature is for everybody. Everybody has a story and stories are for everybody. Everyone can find a place in literature, and the diaspora perspective is also a valuable perspective in Caribbean literature. A literary festival should not simply be an academic activity. It is a pedagogical activity. At BCLF, we are simply trying to make the literature that is in curricula and bookshelves at home an everyday topic among Caribbean first-, second-, and third-generation families here. We’re trying to make Caribbean literature commonplace in the US by introducing Olive Senior. We’re trying to make her a household name and we’re trying to make Marlon James and Celeste Mohammed texts people can get their hands on. Literary festivals can ignite the Caribbean immigrant imagination and stimulate Caribbean conversations in ordinary households. In Brooklyn, we are just trying to bring it into the fabric of Caribbean immigrant lives here.
AS: I appreciate how much you see the importance of families, cultural transmission, and literature. BCLF sees itself as a champion of culture, not just literature. Yet cultures must be handled with care. BCLF created the Elizabeth Nunez Award for fiction writers. The competition has a prize for writers living in the Caribbean and another prize for Caribbean American writers. What influenced this decision to create two categories for the prize?
MM: When we read the stories in the first year of the competition, the two categories emerged organically. We did not begin with a concept of writers living in the Caribbean and Caribbean American writers. We assumed that the entries would have come from writers who lived in the United States. It was an oversight on our part. We were really happy that it happened the way it did. When we received the entries, Elizabeth and I sat and we talked about it. We could close our eyes and know the difference between writers and the places they were writing from.
By the second year of the award, I called Elizabeth and we both agreed that there was no way that we could pitch those two sets of stories against each other. Elizabeth was a writer born in Trinidad who moved to the US. She was a Caribbean American writer. She believed the perspectives of these writers were invaluable. She did not want the competition to invalidate the stories of people living in the region or outside it. I asked her what she thought about a “Caribbean American Writers” prize and a “Writers in the Caribbean” prize. She fully endorsed the idea.
AS: Elizabeth Nunez died in November 2024. Nunez was a widely respected author and academic. She was also a guide and resource for the BCLF leadership team. Discuss Nunez’s legacy in relation to BCLF.
MM: Elizabeth was with us on the journey. She connected us to the literary circle. I had organizing skills and a Caribbean history degree from UWI [the University of the West Indies]. I brought ideas and project management. The team brought passion. But we did not have decades of experiences and institutional relationships in the literary arts. Elizabeth was the calling card. She was the endorsement. Elizabeth’s name opened more doors than I can count. Fewer doors were closed. More doors were opened to BCLF because of our close association with Elizabeth. Our relationship also motivated us to be excellent. She was the quintessential Caribbean American writer. I do not have the language to convey Elizabeth’s value and contributions and what she’s meant to us and what she’s done for us. She conferred upon us, because of her own excellence and her association with us, a stamp of approval before we had even begun.
AS: BCLF is part of an active literary festival ecosystem in the Caribbean. Today we have your annual festival along with the Bocas Lit Fest, the BVI [British Virgin Islands] Literary Arts Festival, the Calabash Literary Festival, the revamped Guyana Prize Literary Festival, the Jamaica Book Festival, the Nature Island Literary Festival, and the St. Martin Book Fair. Of course, there are active festivals outside the English-speaking Caribbean countries. Do you network with and work on building this Caribbean festival ecosystem?
MM: Yes. Richard Georges had this vision that he articulated at the BVI Literary Arts Festival, two years ago, for there to be an active working relationship with all of the literary festivals.3 We took him up on it and began in earnest to foster collaboration. At BCLF, we hosted cross-collaborations and co-organized events. We had shared events in BVI and USVI [the US Virgin Islands].
I think we all kind of just look up to Bocas Lit Fest as being the biggest fish in the pond. Bocas has also reached out to us for certain connections to writers in the US. Sometimes when an email is from someone who is closer in geography, there are fewer degrees of separation. There are more lines of communication that are open. Some are more open than others. Some needs are more pressing than others between the literary festivals.
We developed an online tribute to Patricia Powell, celebrating her works and achievements. She remains an important figure in Caribbean literature, especially in the US. The team at Calabash and Justine Henzell were very helpful in this initiative. So, yes, we are working together. It is a strange thing, to be honest. I am not being shy or coy. It is a strange thing when I am told we are part of this literary ecosystem. I am just trying to democratize the story. I am trying to give Caribbean people here a measure of self-esteem. I want to remind people about who they are and where they come from and empower people to stand on the shoulders of Caribbean giants. I can tell Caribbean people this story because they know where I come from, so they trust me. I am one of them.
amílcar peter sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator, and activist. He is from Trinidad and Tobago, currently working between East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, About Kingston (Peekash, 2025) and The Black Flâneur: Diary of Dizain Poems, Anthropology of Hurt (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2025).
[1] Martin Carter, “A Question of Self-Contempt,” in George Lamming, ed., On the Canvas of the World (Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West Indies, 1999), 22.
[2] Nicholas Laughlin, “What ‘Caribbean’ Can Mean,” personal blog, n.d., http://nicholaslaughlin.net/what-caribbean-can-mean.html (accessed 28 May 2025). First published in the Guyana Arts Journal 2, no. 2, March 2006.
[3] Richard Georges is the first poet laureate of the British Virgin Islands. He is the current president of the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College and recipient of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for his third poetry collection, Epiphaneia (Out-spoken, 2019).