The Jamaican literary landscape has been enriched by the steady outpouring of poetry, lyrics, and stories over many years that has made the island’s literature an international benchmark for students and lovers of the written word.

Jamaicans also love to write, if not to read, and the country has produced prolific and gifted writers whose works draw on Jamaican history, culture, folklore, language, and tradition to tell their stories. They have also turned out a distinguished panel of journalists and opinion writers who represent their profession at the highest standards.

Some have answered the call to ensure permanence to their work by publishing a collection of their articles or reflection on their experiences, as with those three outstanding volumes by
RJR’s Earl Moxam –
Vantage Point Jamaica: A Reporter’s Chronicle, the
Jamaica Observer’s founding editor – the eponymous
Desmond Allen’s Greatest Hits: Wondrous Tales of Extraordinary Jamaicans, and
The Gleaner’s Phyllis Thomas – I Dare You: A Climb To The Pinnacle of Journalism.

Sharing equal space on that booklist is the collation of short stories, newspaper columns, social narratives, and historical and political commentaries of the late journalist Hartley Neita who died 15 years ago on December 12, 2008.

Entitled My Story & Other Stories, the book captures the culture, characters and defining moments of the nation through the eyes of one of Jamaica’s most gifted storytellers. Edited by his son, Gary Neita, it spans an unprecedented 60 years of writing and comes with approbation from two poet laureates – Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison – and a personal memoir from a close friend and former Prime Minister P J Patterson.

What less to expect from a man who wrote the biographies of prime ministers Hugh Shearer and Donald Sangster, is published in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature, wrote reviews for the BBC and the West Indian Economist, and is included in an English literature textbook,
Strange Stories, in association with renowned authors Daphne du Maurier and Rod Serling.

Neita began writing for newspaper publications in 1946 at age 17. The collection recalls his insightful coverage of the big band music of the 1940s and 50s where he shone the spotlight on musicians of that era including Frankie Bonito, Roy Coburn, Eric Evans, Cecil Lloyd, Billy Cooke, Lenny Hibbert, Whylie Lopez, Baba Motta, Redvers Cooke, Sonny Bradshaw, Seymour “Foggy” Mullings, Harold McNair, Lloyd Adams, and Ernest Ranglin.

It was a good era for singers, he wrote, with Archie Lewis, Buddy Ilgner, Totlyn Jackson, Mercedes Kirkwood, and Sheila Rickards among the great song stylists of the era, all performing at the legendary nightclubs Bournemouth, Pepperpot, Glass Bucket, Silver Slipper, Club Havana, and on the stage as opening acts for movies at Carib and Palace theatres; not to speak of the belly dancers Madame Wasp, Madame Sugar Hips, Madam Temptation, and the infamous rhumba queen Margarita.

His spotting of a young Don Drummond at age 16 is an eye-opener. “In those early years, the boy occupied the trombone chair at the Colony Club,” according to Neita in a 1953 review, “and was sliding the trombone with total freedom, thinking about what he played, with his rhythms freed from the foreign phrases many of our copy-book artistes now adore. Should he leave Jamaica,” warned the columnist, “he would quickly make an international name for himself!”

My Story, however, spreads a wider canopy across the memories of an emerging nation. It follows the writer from his simple country-life vistas of days long gone, recounting his early upbringing in the tiny Clarendon village of Four Paths.

Readers would not want to miss that section of Part 11 where he brings to light from a personal vantage point the most poignant and soul-stirring stories and background to Jamaica’s history of anti-apartheid and colour prejudice battles.

Also in that section, he takes a seat to relate stories around the assemblies of nation-builders, a seat which he himself occupied as press secretary and special advisor to a premiere and four prime ministers from both sides of the political fence, and his ringside account of our Independence crossover from colonial government to dominion status.

At various times he was Jamaica’s liaison officer to the Commonwealth Secretariat, board member of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, the National Literacy Board, deputy director of the Jamaica Tourist Board, and managing director of Things Jamaican, and the Tourism Product Development Company.

In those positions he held an unparalleled front row and behind-the-scenes seat to many transformative events. In fact, as a senior civil servant, advisor, and confidante to key decision-makers, Neita had more than a casual hand in formulating policy and in national events of the past half-century.

Neita’s columns of the past were influenced as he disclosed by some of the great media persons and pioneers that he met as a young journalist, among them Theodore Sealy, Calvin Bowen, Hector Bernard, Vic Reid, Carey Robinson, Ken Allen, J C Proute, Aimee Webster, and L D “Strebor” Roberts.

These are the men and women who ‘covered the waterfront’, and like Neita gave Jamaica page after page of colourful, vintage impressions and legacies that provide context to our history and social behaviours.

An era brought to life with his stories of the street preachers, the women stone breakers, the railway train rides, travelling to England by boat, Times Store and the Santa Parades, the village cricket matches, Headquarters House, the road to Independence, and the ’51’ breeze blow’.

Olive Senior describes My Story as a “a big book of brief, sparkling stories by a man whose writings kept us enthralled for over sixty years”; while Lorna Goodison sees it as “a wonderful gift, a finely curated collection”.

“If you missed Jamaica recently, you will find her in the pages of
My Story & Other Stories”, boasts the editor. “It takes pride of place on your booklist for nostalgic, relaxing, and informative reading.” The book is available on Amazon and in print, ebook, and shortly audiobook.

— Lance Neita