Caribbean Folklore and Jumbie Night 2021: Everyone is invited to celebrate

Today, many children and even adults are not aware of the wonderful and intriguing Caribbean folklore characters. They have never stayed up at night listening to these stories being told by an elder and stared at the darkness terrified, hoping nothing will come for them. They have never argued all day the next day about its truthfulness with siblings and cousins.

Caribbean Folklore is an entire childhood mood; a genre of imagery, spell-binding mystery, irrational fear and memories that last a lifetime. Caribbean Books Foundation’s goal is to keep it alive.

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Caribbean Folklore Month is celebrated in October

In the past decade we’ve noticed with pleasure Caribbean Folklore being featured more and more internationally. It’s an intriguing new form of “ghost story” that can and will captivate readers and listeners. Our oral traditions and stories should be encouraged, so the next generation can carry on the tradition of telling the tales of these characters.

Therefore, Caribbean Books has dedicated October, which is a traditional spooky month, to celebrating authors from the Caribbean whose works centre around our own mythology. We educate our followers on some of the folklore characters that can be found throughout the Caribbean with reimagined artwork and “did you know?” pieces on characters.

We would like to invite everyone to celebrate Caribbean Folklore Month with us by sharing their stories, artwork, memories, poems, spoken word, and performances on social media using the hashtags #CaribbeanFolkloreMonth #CaribbeanStories #CaribbeanHeritage #JumbieNight.

Jumbie Night hosted on October 20

Keeping with the tradition of jumbies favouring the full moon, we’ve dubbed this coming Wednesday, October 20 as Jumbie Night. We will be hosting it on social media as an official kickoff to the wider observed “spooky season” with book giveaways. We encourage persons to join us by telling a story or featuring a book based on Caribbean folklore.

We’ve been featuring folklore characters all month on Instagram and Facebook and will continue to do so for the rest of the month. You can get even more creative and share a drawing of your favourite folk character or dress up like one, what’s important is that you share our folk heritage.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caribbeanbooksfoundation

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caribbeanbooksfoundation/

Twitter: @BooksCaribbean

We will continue to feature Caribbean Folklore Month annually in October and Jumbie Night on the full moon.