Summing up his writing career in an article on his 70th birthday, Barrett said: "I can remember a time in my early twenties when I lived in London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Tangier and, for a while in Tunisia and Libya, when I genuinely lived in a whirl of such oblivion that it appeared unlikely that I would ever witness my thirtieth birthday. For this reason I wrote at that time like one possessed and I still believe my work of that period represents the high points of my creative output. ... While the poetry and fiction that came later tends to be more cautious and formal than the fiction and poetry of my youth, in my journalistic output I seem to have become increasingly attached to formal reportage."
Novels Barrett's first novel,
Song for Mumu – "an allegorical novel of desire, love, and loss" The reviewer in
The Observer said: "Lindsay Barrett's prose has vitality; it's usually simple, often demotic, packed with images. He can convey sensuality that is innocent and tragedy that is no less frightening for being unsought."
A. R. Chisholm of the
Melbourne Age described the novel as "violently, lyrically, movingly original: A primitive masterpiece."
Song for Mumu was one of the first titles published in 1974 by executive editor
Charles Harris at
Howard University Press in the US, where it was received favourably by critics such as Martin Levin of
The New York Times, who commented that "What shines ... is its language." Reviewing the novel for
Caribbean Quarterly,
Edward Baugh wrote of "the way in which it moves in worlds of magic and madness, myth and primitive ritual, not so as to exploit their strangeness, but to make them familiar, to emphasise their immediate reality, no less real than the reality of the natural and everyday. In his own distinctive way, Barrett is doing something not dissimilar to what, in their separate ways,
Wilson Harris and the
Cuban Alejo Carpentier have done". More recently, Al Creighton writing in the
Stabroek News referred to
Song for Mumu as an "intriguingly poetic experimental novel", in the context of seeing Barrett as a disciple of Nigerian writer
Gabriel Okara, "the virtual father of modern African literature in English".
Song for Mumu featured among 308 titles on "the greatest list of Caribbean reads" that was produced in 2020 by the
Bocas Lit Fest. Barrett's second novel,
Lipskybound, was published in
Enugu, Nigeria, in 1977, and has influenced the work of many younger Nigerian writers who are interested in breaking the mould of traditional creative writing. As he himself described the work in 1972, having struggled for several years writing it: "It is an exposition of the heart of natural vengeance in the soul of the transplanted African and of the violent nature of the truth of his spirit out of necessity." Barrett's third published novel,
Veils of Vengeance Falling, appeared in 1985 and has been used as a set book in the Department of English at the
University of Port Harcourt. Barrett's play
Black Blast! – an exploration of Caribbean history through music, mime and dance – was performed in London, the first play by a Black writer at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts (with an all-Black cast, including
Yemi Ajibade,
Yulisa Amadu Maddy,
Leslie Palmer,
Eddie Tagoe, Karene Wallace, Basil Wanzira, and
Elvania Zirimu, directed by
Horace Ové) and filmed for a special edition of the
BBC 2's arts and entertainment programme
Full House (broadcast on Saturday, 3 February 1973) devoted to the work of West Indian writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers.
Black Blast! was described as "ritual theatre with music and dance" that "expresses in terms of raw bodily experience the history of the Black peoples of the world through colonization, slavery and the complexities of the neocolonialist era". In 1972, his theatrical collage of drama, dance and music,
Sighs of a Slave Dream, was the first major production to be staged at the
Keskidee Centre, in north London, performed by a Nigerian troupe under the direction of
Pat Amadu Maddy. It portrays the capture and enslavement of Africans, their transport across the Atlantic, and their suffering on American plantations. Various plays by Barrett have been performed at the Mbari Theatre of the University of Ibadan and on Nigerian National Radio. Barrett has occasionally written film scripts and commentaries, as for Horace Ové's 1973 BBC documentary
King Carnival.
Poetry Barrett is in addition a poet, whose early militant poems dealt with racial and emotional conflict and exile, as evidenced in his collection,
The Conflicting Eye, published under the pseudonym "Eseoghene" (an
Urhobo name meaning "God's gift") in 1973. That same year he produced a staged version of
Linton Kwesi Johnson's poem
Voices of the Living and the Dead at London's Keskidee Centre, with music by the reggae group Rasta Love. Barrett's subsequent volumes of poetry are
A Quality of Pain and Other Poems (1986) and
A Memory of Rivers; Poems Out of the Niger Delta (2006), both books published in Nigeria.
As editor and contributor Barrett's work has appeared in anthologies, including
Black Fire: an Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by LeRoi Jones (Imamu
Amiri Baraka) and
Larry Neal, and
Black Arts: an Anthology of Black Creations in 1969. He wrote the foreword to a new edition of Amiri Baraka's
Four Black Revolutionary Plays: Experimental Death Unit 1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life, and Madheart, published in 1997. Barrett has been an associate editor of several periodicals, including
Afriscope Negro Digest/Black World,
Revolution,
Two Cities,
New African,
Magnet,
The Black Scholar,
Black Lines,
West Africa magazine, and
The Africa Report.
Journalism and non-fiction As a journalist, Barrett has written on the conflicts and ongoing political circumstances in
Liberia and
Sierra Leone, and was the co-founder, with
Tom Kamara, of the Liberian newspaper
The New Democrat. Barrett was a correspondent throughout Africa for the London-based news magazine
West Africa for more than three decades, as well as working as a photo-journalist for a variety of publications. He maintained weekly columns in several Nigerian newspapers over the years, including his widely read "From the Other Side" in the Nigerian tabloid
The Sun. Barrett continues to work as a political analyst and commentator on Nigerian current events. According to Ozolua Uhakheme: "In all the civil wars in the West coast of Africa, he has played the role of an interpreter of the essence for peace." Having been a long-time friend of
Fela Kuti, he wrote a Prologue for the 2010
Cassava Republic Press edition of the biography
Fela: This Bitch of a Life by
Carlos Moore. Among Barrett's other book contributions are literary interviews, such as one with
Chinua Achebe conducted in London in June 1981, included in
Conversations with Chinua Achebe (ed. Bernth Lindfors, 1997). In 2016, Barrett published a collection entitled
Rainbow Reviews and Other Literary Adventures. Barrett has also written books of non-fiction and biographies. His articles appear regularly in Nigerian newspapers such as
Vanguard,
Daily Trust,
This Day, and
The Guardian, and he also does reports for television. Barrett is a contributor to the 2024 book
Encounters with James Baldwin: Celebrating 100 Years (Supernova Books/Aurora Metro), with other featured writers including
Anton Phillips,
Fred D'Aguiar,
Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr,
Ray Shell, and others. ==Visual art==