On editing Caribbean writing without flattening it

There is a particular kind of editorial damage that gets done to Caribbean writing — and to writing from the Global South more broadly — when it passes through editors who treat standardisation as the highest editorial virtue.

It looks like this: a sentence written in nation language gets corrected into received pronunciation grammar. A rhythm built on oral tradition gets flattened into the cadence of a British broadsheet. A cultural reference, unexplained because it needs no explanation for the intended reader, gets a footnote it never asked for. The writing arrives at publication technically correct and spiritually gutted.

What gets called an error

Caribbean English is not broken English. Trinidadian syntax is not a failure to achieve Standard English. The rhetorical structures of calypso, the doubled negatives of vernacular speech, the untranslated French Creole — these are not mistakes awaiting correction. They are the form. Editing them out is not improvement. It is erasure.

This matters for both creative and academic writing. A Caribbean scholar writing about development, about gender, about coloniality, brings a situated knowledge to that work. The way they write — the references they reach for, the theoretical interlocutors they choose, the assumptions they do and do not explain — is part of the epistemological project. An editor who smooths all of that into generic academic prose has not helped the argument. They have weakened it.

What we do differently

At morningsky editorial, we start from the position that the writer knows their work and their reader. Our job is not to make Caribbean writing legible to audiences it was never written for. Our job is to make it as precise, as powerful, and as fully itself as it can be.

That means asking, before we change anything: is this a genuine error, or is this a choice? Is this unclear, or is it unfamiliar to me specifically? Is this syntax wrong, or is it right in a register I need to learn?

Those questions change everything about what editing looks like. And they are the reason we exist.