Dear Young Caribbean People
A letter to the Caribbean Youth of today,
Hi, how alyuh doin? Cool? Pork a pork, no beef? Ay, that’s how it always is during that 18–26 age gap. Awkwardly rushing forward or being reluctantly shoved into adulthood, whether you like it or not. And yes, I am talking to that young adult age group in the Caribbean. So all you young-at-heart people, like myself, let this message breeze past you. Or soak it in, who knows, you might need it too.
But back to the audience I’m referring to. Why do we need to have a talk on this rainy day in 2025?
*takes a second because how quarter of a century fly by already?*
I swear it feels like it was just 2000 yesterday!
Trust me, this letter has nothing to do with your Gen Z sensibilities or work ethic. You’re fine. Especially Caribbean youth in the islands. You all need to take voting a lil more seriously, but overall, you all have sense. From a Xennial Aunty, keep on keeping on.
However… I do see you all making some of the same mistakes that us older generations also made when we were in that age range. I feel like Ras Shorty I, standing on a hill.
Anyway, so I was at the 2025 Bocas Lit Fest in May this year and struck up a conversation with an author from another Caribbean island. We were then joined by a volunteer in the festival, who was also from a totally different Caribbean island and had come to study here at UWI.
We started talking about the author’s book and reading in general, then moved onto the normal ‘what do you do?’ banter. When the UWI student-volunteer learned that my new author friend had travelled in from the UK, where the author currently works, and had previously studied a similar field to what they were in (e.g., they are both in STEM) the convo moved to why he migrated from his own Caribbean country to the UK and if he thought things were better over there.
And I understood her line of questioning. As a young person I also wondered, for a brief point in time, if my life efforts could be better served in another country. However, I have a very strong connection to my country and nationality and knew very early on that I could not fathom living permanently somewhere else. As my mother would say, my navel string bury here.
But listening to the young UWI student talk, I realised that she was very influenced by the ideas and ideals of certain larger economies. You know the ones I mean: specifically the USA, the UK, as well as Canada. Now, nothing is wrong with studying different schools of thought, from all around the world, and it’s so easy now. When I was that age, the internet was only getting started. It was nowhere near as vast, far reaching or accessible as it is now.
But for my young Caribbean people, let me save you some time, and teach you something I learned in the past 20 years.
Don’t trust or believe in everything that people say, especially online. Find out for yourself.
And I am absolutely sure, a lot of alyuh’s first response will be, ‘believe everything people say online? Who does that? My granny maybe, not me.’
Because from my experience, you all judge with the swiftness and are real quick to put your head on a block over things too, which isn’t a fault of your generation, it’s a fault of youth! Which essentially is my point.
Remember I said we three talked about reading? Well, the conversation went to how we choose books to read. This UWI student-volunteer, who I’m sure has good grades otherwise why is she here in another Caribbean island to study at UWI. Like why waste your time to come all this way if you don’t expect to pass, eh? And from talking to her, you know she is intelligent, but this is where experience does come into play a little bit.
So the two of them, both her and the author, don’t like e-books that much.
I explain that I use e-books to sus out a book first because I’ve been burned before with people telling me a book is great and then it turns out to not be my cup of tea, horrible actually. It then hurts my heart to have to watch said book on my shelf and regret the $$ I spent on it, knowing the only way I can get it out of my eyesight is to give it to someone else, and possibly ruin their day, which — the guilt! So, to avoid all of that, if someone recommends a book, especially if I’m quietly questioning their taste, if there’s a digital copy, I get that and see if I like it first, then once I do, I will go buy the physical copy to keep.
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Ah, my author friend nods in agreement. Sound tactics. He knows the pain.
However, the UWI student-volunteer quietly adds that she doesn’t trust e-books, especially from Amazon, because they can change things in it, and update it like that’s the way it always was. And they are banning books and deleting them off the platform.
I get her initial point but ‘Amazon banning and deleting books’? This misinformation sounds familiar and I pause because I think I know what Youtube videos she’s watching.
The other author seems surprised because he’s taking a chance, publishing his e-books on AMAZON, and is like, ‘Amazon are banning books?’
At this point I know I have to de-escalate the situation because this man just told me the day before about how he had no choice but to self-publish on Amazon and how hard it is to get his books out there without a traditional publisher. The last thing I want is for him to panic over this UWI student-volunteer being misinformed.
I know Amazon is many things, not all of them good, but people need to understand that for many indie authors, especially authors in small island states who have very, very few publishing options, it’s still one of the few platforms where we can list our books to the world for sale AND get paid. If you live here as an author you know that those two things don’t always go hand in hand.
So I ask her, ‘what books did they ban?’
‘1984,’ she goes, and I think, yup, I know EXACTLY what Youtube videos she’s watching.
I calmly explain to her that 1984 is not banned by Amazon, that she can go look it up herself and she’ll find that it’s available for sale on the site right now. The author with us also concurs that he hasn’t heard anything about that book being banned from other publishing circles either, and I agree.
[And for those of you screaming ‘but, but Cuba!’ we’re not talking about Cuba! Scroll to the end of the post for my note on that. Always trying to drag Cuba into everything… bombastic side eye]
She lists another book I can’t recall and reiterates that ‘they’, big publishing in general, are deleting things from books and changing history.
At this point in time I just sighed because — honestly, I ain able.
I understand that if she doesn’t mess with e-books or Amazon it’s unlikely she’ll ever be on there to verify if it’s true that a book was there or not, but why would you say it’s so if you didn’t see for yourself? You can speculate like, ‘ay, I heard dis and dat but I can’t say for sure’, but otherwise…?
And I know, I could have also explained about licensing and copyright as it pertains to what rights Amazon has to the books on their site, or the reasons Amazon might suspend or delete an account on there which would cause a book to become unavailable, not banned. There are so many misconceptions around Amazon with those things.
But — I think I’ve officially reached the point of ‘gotten too old for dis’. Dis being ‘insert frustrating misinformation’ here. I really don’t care to even explain anymore. I think going through Covid got a lot of us to that point a lot faster because Covid misinformation was a different beast. 0_o Literally the only way to manage it, was to not engage.
However, it was also the place but not the time to continue the conversation. So in addition to me being done with passionately preaching to people’s faces, she had to return to her volunteering, me to my festival work and he went off to another event in the programme.
At that point I was like, she’ll figure it out.
Now you’re probably thinking, well, what are you doing here talking about it then? Because I remembered that the countries I mentioned before, the ones she’s probably listening to, are very loud. Their opinions dominate online media. The smaller voices need to speak up in between in order to keep the balance, especially if there are people out there looking for another perspective.
Continue reading this article on the author’s site Critics May Lie.
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