"This is as free as this country gets": The Jamaican literary festival born out of jeopardy
For the festival that has nurtured the impressive contemporary Jamaican literary scene, this year was a celebration of regeneration after Hurricane Beryl.
When the hurricane hit the small Jamaican village of Treasure Beach, on Jamaica’s south coast, in July 2024, Joseph Alvesto Brown was trying to cook ackee and saltfish, with white rice and dumplings. He was up at his restaurant and bar Joseph’s Hideaway, having a peaceful moment to himself.
He wasn’t scared of weather warnings. As a teenager, Joseph once got blown out to sea on a fishing boat. Lost for 14 days and nights, he survived on tiny birds he would catch and salt-dry, until he was picked up by an American cruiseliner. But this was something different. The force of the wind and rain was immense. He was terrified and locked himself away in the pantry room, the only place in the building he felt he might be safe. All around Treasure Beach, his fellow villagers were doing the same.
“It sounded like a big truck. Something coming, massive. And you would just see a roof flying, or a black drum full of water, sailing away,” Joseph tells The Lead. “The day after the hurricane, it was like a war zone.”
By the time Hurricane Beryl was over, the area was completely changed. Roofs ripped from buildings, trees sucked out by their roots, people’s possessions, livelihoods, homes, destroyed in an area that already had an impoverished population. Joseph’s restaurant was partially destroyed, too. And, he joked, when he emerged from the pantry, the ackee and saltfish had disappeared.
Since that destruction, however, a lot has changed. Roofs have been replaced. Businesses rebuilt. And last month [May 2025], Treasure Beach’s renewal culminated in the sixteenth iteration of the Calabash Literary Festival, the area’s premier cultural event, which draws in crowds of thousands from across the country and even worldwide.
“A wide margin of people that benefit from it,” says Joseph. “It's good for the community, and people in the whole of Jamaica.” Even a hurricane couldn't stop them.
“Three days of cultural freedom”
On opening night, speaking on a stage framed by the waves, festival co-founder, poet and educator, Kwame Dawes, said the fact the festival has survived after so much jeopardy was remarkable.
“The question was, do we continue? Do we have the festival?” he expands later in an interview. “There was the feeling that we really, really have to try and make sure we have the festival, not just for Jake's, but for the community.”
Launched in 2001 on the grounds of Jakes Hotel – a rustic outfit with lush gardens, set right against the crashing sea – Calabash is a free festival which has nurtured an impressive Jamaican literary scene. Justine Henzell, whose family owns Jakes, and who runs the festival alongside Kwame, believes Calabash has been “integral” to its growth.
It was the first of its kind on the island, and almost every major Jamaican author has passed through its tent: Lambda Literary Award winner Nicole Dennis-Benn, Bocas Prize winner Kei Miller, Whiting Award winner Safiya Sinclair and Booker Prize winner Marlon James, to name a few.
James, who was in attendance at the festival this year, says that without the festival, he wouldn’t have a career at all. His first ever manuscript was honed at a Calabash writer’s workshop.
“It's three days of artistic expression. It's three days of cultural freedom. It’s three days of if you're a queer person, this is as free as this country gets,” he says.
He remembers the author Thomas Glave coming on stage in 2003, and being blown away. “He was reading about being a gay man, and when he finished, the audience was kind of stunned,” he says. There was silence. But then, two of the festival organisers, Kwame, and a writer named Colin Channer (another co-founder who has since stepped down), ran onto the stage. Each of them took one of Thomas’s hands and held them aloft.
“It was to me, still, the most iconic moment of Calabash ever. And it cemented that it's more than a literary festival for a lot of us here,” says James.
The sense of community, of homecoming for the diaspora, for Jamaican creatives, for Black queers, is embedded in the fabric of the festival. It is still a rare thing to have a literary festival where the majority of the audience is Black.
While the founders estimate that 90 per cent of the attendees are Jamaican, there was a solid Black British contingent who turned out to Calabash 2025 — including speakers such as Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams, who is of Jamaican heritage, and British Nigerian author and poet Caleb Femi.
“It's three days of artistic expression. It's three days of cultural freedom. It’s three days off if you're a queer person, this is as free as this country gets.”
“I don't know what it is about being in a place where there is sun and nature and Black people that has just allowed me to unclench, allowed me to drop my shoulders, allowed me to just have more of an audacity that doesn't feel as tight and coloured with the British landscape,” says Femi, who read from his poetry epic The Wickedest.
“Would I encourage more Black people to come out here as audience members? Yes, 100% I would. And writers. I would also encourage it, but I think not at the expense of native Jamaican writers.”
Most all of the authors I speak with mention the fact that the festival audience at Calabash is unique. “There's something particularly special about that audience. It's attentiveness, it's engagement, and its lack of no sense of inferiority,” says Dawes. “You're talking to equals in this conversation, and that's profoundly Jamaican.”
I hear refrains all weekend that echo this. People speak of the humour, the warmth of spirit, the blessings. Where most English literary audiences sit in respectful silence, here respect is shown through mirroring. The call and response — I speak, then you speak back. It’s a retention from African ancestry, brought across the oceans.
“You have to call them out”
“I'm happy that I'm in front of an audience where I don't have to explain what Babylon means,” exclaimed Safiya Sinclair on stage, a poet and author of the groundbreaking memoir How To Say Babylon, about her life growing up in a strict Rastafari community in Montego Bay, and her difficult relationship with her father. Sinclair first came to the festival as a wide-eyed 17-year-old. The final scene of the memoir is set at Calabash, when she read her poetry to her father, who was in the audience, for the first time.
“That moment at Calabash seven years ago really gave me an emotional release and resolution with my dad,” she explains. Her father listened to her from the audience of this Calabash, too. It was the first time she had read her memoir, which was published in 2024, to a ‘home’ crowd.
She ended her reading with a powerful call to arms — for Palestine, for Congo, for Sudan. The political undertone of her work was resonant. “We're Jamaicans. We are for freedom. For liberation, right?” she says. “Our statues are of people who led slave rebellions. We are for freedom and liberty here.”
A people who will not be silenced, who will stand up for what is right. Say it as it is.
When the Jamaican National Heritage Trust takes to the stage for a brief promotional message, for example, one of the festival contributors, the writer, newspaper columnist and educator Carolyn Cooper, has some words to get off her chest. On stage alongside them, Cooper loudly proclaimed that the trust hadn’t been doing a good enough job, that one of their sites in particular (the Rockfort Mineral Bath in Kingston), had remained closed for refurbishment for no good reason for five years.
“I heard that one of them was crying afterwards,” says Cooper, exasperated. “I don't care, and she's not supposed to be crying, because it's not her fault. It's the executive director to whom I've written several times. You have to call them out.”
Cooper is the formidable host of the festival’s open mic sessions. Imagine: A huge tent, more than 1,500 chairs turned in your direction. You step up, take a breath, and begin to read your life’s work. You’re two minutes in, it’s going well. But then a sharp voice cuts you off. Your three minutes is over. And an austere woman, Cooper, is making sure of it. Marlon James is just one example of a writer who began building his confidence in his craft by performing in these open mics.
“It was an American woman who was doing it at first, and she really couldn't manage these people,” Carolyn says. “These sensitive, creative writers, they are so selfish. All they want is their time.” She’s joking, just a little, I think. On a more serious note, she genuinely does believe in its purpose.
“Many times we think of literature as a private, individual, lonely craft, but when you come to a festival like this, you realise there's a whole audience for you to engage with. It gives you confidence that what you're saying has value,” she says.
A celebration of recovery
The theme of the festival in 2025 was “Bless Up”, directly linked to Hurricane Beryl. “It is a celebration of recovery. It is a celebration of the capacity for regeneration,” says Cooper. “That blessings come in many forms. And one of the ways in which blessings come is in the way nature regenerates itself. You know, a lot of plants and trees are destroyed in a hurricane, but new growth comes up out of that.”
For local business owners like Joseph, the restaurant owner once lost at sea, who survived the hurricane by hiding in his pantry, that has certainly been the case. Calabash, he says, has helped his business.
Treasure Beach, which is off the beaten track and known for trying to spearhead “low impact” community-oriented tourism, still has found that getting enough visitors to come to the area has been a struggle.
“I think part of the challenge of the aftermath of a hurricane is that people don't come,” says Henzell. “So this is a way for us to say we're celebrating, we're giving thanks, we're back. Don't be afraid to come.”
About the author: Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is an award-winning and Paul Foot Award shortlisted freelance journalist, book editor, columnist, host, and creative. She is a Managing Editor at Skin Deep, a former Senior Staff Editor at the New York Times and the former Editor-in-Chief at gal-dem magazine. Charlie has written and edited for a variety of publications, including the Guardian and Observer, Dazed, and the Financial Times.
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