Marsha Massiah

2026-03-22 - 00:25

Lead Editor – Newsgathering ryan.bachoo@cnc3.co.tt When Marsha Massiah was five years old, her mother had a challenge. She was reading so many Ladybird Books that her mother had to ask her to slow down, or she risked running out of money. That young lady with an extraordinary appetite for reading has become the leading figure behind the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) – a literary event based in New York every September that welcomes the top Caribbean writers of the year to the Big Apple. Massiah would hardly characterise her rise in the literary world as something extraordinary, but there were always those moments and people that shaped her. “My grandmother was a storyteller. We just grew up with stories. My head was always in books. I always loved writing stories. I was my grandmother’s hemline. I was always with her. I remember her distinctly saying to me before she passed away, when I was 11 years old, ‘You will tell your granny’s story, right? You will tell my story,’ and I don’t know if that was a form of nurture or if that was a premonition or presage,” she recalled to WE Magazine. Years later, Massiah would be the cornerstone of a purely Caribbean literature festival in the Caribbean-centred Brooklyn. This September will mark the eighth festival. Its mission was simple: to create an umbrella for literature lovers to gather under, Massiah explained, “It was to really create an awareness and an appreciation among readers, and bibliophiles in the United States who were already familiar with literature and Caribbean literature. It was also to draw new inductees into the fold, and then I thought of the children, the offspring of immigrants, first and second-generation Americans who did not have the same familiarity as someone who was born in the Caribbean had with those stories.” But Massiah was alarmed and concerned that there were no existing literary festivals exclusively dedicated to Caribbean literature at the time amid a new wave of Caribbean American writers that begun with Kincaid, Nunez and Ismith Khan, who for a time wrote from Brooklyn. She would provide that opportunity to an entire generation of Caribbean writers across and within the diaspora. However, for a relative unknown in the industry, Massiah would have to build from the ground up. She said, “I was just an unknown in the space without any of the traditional qualifications for entering a space like that. We were very fortunate to have the Center for Fiction and the Brooklyn Historical Society jump on very early on. We had Elizabeth Nunez as well. I think those names opened the doors of institutions, while many others were closed. There was this disbelief, distrust, mistrust that we could deliver on the audacious claim we were making. Funding was also an issue because where do we find the money from? One of the challenges that we continue to face is the size of our bandwidth, which is a good problem. We never have enough hands to do what we’re supposed to do.” Beyond the logistics, some naysayers questioned whether a Caribbean literature festival could be successful in a city like New York. She said, “Some people said ‘You’re only going to have non-persons of colour coming to the festival because Black and Brown people don’t like to read.’ And I was, ‘What do you mean? I come from a place of Black and Brown people, not only reading, but writing and changing, changing the globe, changing the face of the world with our pen.” Nevertheless, Massiah and her small team would rise above these challenges. The response from writers around the region would overwhelm her. The festival has become a place of dialogue on identity, migration, and the roots of Caribbean people. Massiah has meticulously built it into the premier Caribbean literature festival in the United States. Coming from Trinidad and Tobago, she has never lost touch of ensuring the flavour of this region is incorporated. “I think as a Caribbean woman, I’m polyvocal. I speak the many languages of the place I came from. Then, as someone who grew up in America, I became a woman in the United States. I learned that language as well. My work is to bring those two conversations together so that we can see where we’re similar.” One of her proudest accomplishments is giving a platform to Caribbean writers on stages of the highest quality, calibre, prestige, and position. She added, “Another one is that we’ve been able to truly take a stab at experimenting and exploring Caribbean story in all of its forms. And so, these collaborations that we continue to have with creatives and creators in the region, we had the Caribbean Film Festival at our last festival. Another high point is when we see the entire ecosystem light up — between somebody who wins a prize in our short story, then we get to publish their book.” Though it is heavy machinery for Massiah and her team to plan and execute the BCLF annually, such highlights spur her on. She has given Caribbean writers a stage in one of the major cities of the world, and Massiah said Caribbean writing is critically important in a time of geopolitical shifts and shocks. She stated, “Caribbean literature is the lamp, the map, and the crystal ball. We’ve never been afraid to confront themes and the experiences that we’ve endured – dispossession, empire, conquest, like all of the things we’ve lived through. We, the Caribbean, were the beginning of the new world, and in Caribbean literature, we can literally find a story for everything. Even our fiction allows us to problem solve our way out of these realities with imagination, with empathy, a respect for traditional ecological knowledge, for indigenous and ancestral knowledges and wisdoms. Caribbean literature contains all of that, and my hope is that we look less to leaders who are flawed for the shaping of policy, and we look towards the stories that really guide our internal compass so that we can then put pressure on the powers that be to make changes that will reflect the kind of world that we want to occupy.”