New Day (novel)
First edition
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| Author | V. S. Reid |
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| Country | Jamaica |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical novel |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
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Publication date
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1949 |
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New Day is a 1949 book by Jamaican author V. S. Reid. It was Reid's first novel. New Day deals with the political history of Jamaica as told by a character named Campbell, who is a boy at the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion (in 1865) and an old man during its final chapters. It may have been the first novel to use Jamaican vernacular as its language of narration.
Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. Reid was motivated to write New Day by his discontentment with how the leaders George William Gordon and Paul Bogle of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) were depicted in the foreign press; by reworking as characters in his novel those who had been negatively portrayed as rebels, he aimed to refute what he viewed as unfair misrepresentations of history. The Morant Bay uprising also provided the historical backdrop for a number of works written by Reid's literary counterparts, most notably fellow Jamaican writer Roger Mais. Mais's play George William Gordon also functioned to repair the historical figure Gordon, who had been portrayed as a villain in prevailing narratives of colonialism, as a martyr and hero for Jamaican nationalism.
On its release, Reid’s fictional and historical narrative was well received by the literary audience and “caught hold of people’s imagination in a kind of way that [Reid] couldn’t imagine would happen in Jamaica.”
New Day recounts the story of Jamaica's first outcry against the English Crown rule that cemented a socio-economic and political framework of oppression three decades post-emancipation. The novel is framed as the aged narrator John Campbell's account of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of uprisings and negotiations that finally culminates in the creation of the New Constitution in 1944.
Recognized for its particular approach to the historical novel, the narrative opens with the elderly narrator John Campbell reminiscing of his family and country's long-standing history over the course of 79 years, as he lies awake on the eve of Jamaica's Constitution Day and his memory refuses to elude him. The narrative quality of New Day is evident when the aged narrator transitions from past-tense into present voice as old Campbell struggles to recall the events of the past (“remember I remember”).
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