The first wave
Although there had been a long established pattern of African, Indian and Caribbean, intellectuals coming to Britain to study, agitate against colonialism and publish their works (CLR James, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, Marcus Garvey and George Padmore had lived in Britain in the 1930s), Jamaican poet James Berry was one of the first writers to come to Britain in 1948, to seize the same sort of economic opportunities that were attracting large numbers of other settlers. Earlier, Guyanese born ER Braithwaite, who had arrived to study just before World War II, joined up to fight the Germans and then stayed on in post-war Britain, attracted by the same possibilities that now enticed James Berry. As Berry said in an interview: 'I knew I was right for London and London was right for me. London had books and accessible libraries.'
Soon after Barbadians George Lamming and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Trinidadians Samuel Selvon, CLR James, and VS Naipaul, Jamaicans Andrew Salkey and Stuart Hall, and Guyanese Wilson Harris and Edgar Mettleholzer, were to join James Berry. Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Stuart Hall had arrived as students to attend Cambridge and Oxford respectively (as had their fellow African students Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe in the 1950s). the other writers came because London was at the centre of the English literary scene, and they were seeking to escape the local backwater of the colonies, to get published and win the respect and validation of their literary peers.
Like many of their fellow migrants they were arriving back to the 'mother country' as 'familiar strangers' - familiar with the English landscape, English manners and culture which had dominated the imagination of their countries through the works of writers and poets such as William Shakespeare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. But they were also familiar with a far more concrete and useful resource - the BBC radio programme, Caribbean Voices.
Caribbean Voices had been run since 1946 by Henry Swanzy, and was a weekly programme which focused 20 minutes (29 minutes after 1947) of valuable air time on the literary output (short stories, poems, plays and literary criticism) of the Caribbean region. the programme helped launch the careers of people like George Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, VS Naipaul, the late Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris, Jamaican John Figueroa and St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott. the programme also helped them get publishers and when they arrived in Britain provided them with work as readers. All the major writers of the region, whether they came to Britain (or stayed at home like Derek Walcott and Jamaican Vic Reid) acknowledge the importance of the programme.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite has said that Caribbean Voices 'was the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English.' The themes of the writing before the arrival in Britain had to do with re-creating the space of the Caribbean as a lived in space. Up until 1948, the people of the region had been written about but had not sufficiently described their own sense of self or their physical environment and landscape.
In the 1930's CLR James had written a novel Minty Alley (1936) as well as the Black Jacobins (1938), the historical account of the successful slave revolt in San Domingo (now Haiti), unleashing a new hunger for self definition in the region. People of the Caribbean could be heroic, they could be important actors and even masters of their own destiny. This was particularly critical, given the other huge event sweeping the region at the time - the cry for independence and self government. CLR James' Minty Alley had convinced them that self-hood and the region's black and Asian poor were sufficient material for heroism.
George Lamming's 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin was the region's first major fictional work in English following CLR James' Minty Alley. Published in London, Minty Alley tracked the life of a young boy, growing up in a colonial country, confronting history and the evolution of organised labour and other radical forces which challenged the old colonial order in the 1930s and 1940s. the following extract shows how it perfectly captured the social relations on the island, and its inheritance from slavery:
'An estate where fields of sugar cane had once crept like an open secret across the land had been converted into a village that absorbed three thousand people. An English landowner, Mr Creighton, had died, and the estate fell to his son through whom it passed to another son who in turn died, surrendering it to yet another.' George Lamming - In the Castle of My Skin
Before In the Castle of My Skin, Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun (1952), looked at the life of a young Indian boy in the Trinidad of the war years and later with VS Naipaul's Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr Biswas (1961) , independence was not now an echo, but was part of the growing confidence of the protagonists of these books. Lamming's later novels Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960) developed these themes of freedom and independence further. Other's like the Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris in Place of a Peacock (1960) and the late Andrew Salkey in A Quality of Violence (1959) looked to older Amerindian and African influences as a fecund source of ideas for locating the identities of these new countries. CLR James, shortly after published a seminal sports book Beyond a Boundary (1963), where cricket was used as a powerful metaphor to examine the struggle with the British inheritance and the necessity of forging new post-colonial identities.
Published: 1998-01-01
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