Caryl Phillips - The European Tribe

Had I been a bright student at school

Id have learnt more and turned out to be a fool.

West Indian Calypsonian

Youre a lost crowd, you educated Negroes, and you will only find yourself in the roots of your own people. You cant choose as your models the haughty-minded educated white youths of a society living solid on its Imperial conquests.

Claude McKay, Banjo, 1929

Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,

and snow had inducted me into white fellow ships,

while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire

that began with Caedmons raceless dew, and is ending

in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turners ships.

Derek Walcott, Midsummer, 1984

It was in the United States that I made the discovery that it was possible for a black person to become, and sustain a career as, a writer. My ignorance probably came about as a result of my education and my own lack of a coherent sense of identity in 1970s Britain. In British schools I was never offered a text that had been penned by a black person, or that concerned the lives of black people. References to black people were confined to the playground. As a ten-year-old boy I remember my best friend telling me a joke. There are, he said, a group of Pakis walking down the road singing We shall overcome. Obviously he had overheard his father, or one of his fathers friends, in conversation. This was 1968, the year of Martin Luther Kings assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, the year of Enoch Powells rivers of blood speech in Britain. These events were bound up in the joke, but all I can remember thinking was, I dont understand it. I doubt that my friend Terry did either. But unlike him I could not laugh, and my silence marked the end of our friendship.

About three years later one of the most painful episodes of my childhood took place. This time it was inside a classroom. Mr Thompson, an English literature teacher, decided to demonstrate his knowledge of all things by explaining the origins of our surnames. So Greenberg was Jewish, Morley originally came from the small Yorkshire town of the same name, and McKenzie was a Scot. I felt a hot flush of embarrassment long before he turned towards my desk. Phillips, he mused, you must be from Wales. The whole class laughed, while I stared back at him stony-faced, knowing full well that I was not from Wales. The truth was I had no idea where I was from as I had been told that I was born in the Caribbean but came from England. I could not participate in a joke which made my identity a source of humour. Even those I considered my friends were laughing. If the teaching of English literature can feed a sense of identity then I, like many of my black contemporaries in Britain, was starving.

Looking back at Britain in the 1970s, I am now convinced that it must have been the worst decade since the Second World War to grow up in. It lacked the buoyant optimism of the 1950s, the liberal freedoms of the 1960s, and seems to have been characterized by tasteless and ephemeral fashions, third-rate music (a kind of post-Beatles despair), and a long and tedious preparation for the industrial decline and depression of the 1980s. As a first-generation migrant, I came to Britain at the portable age of twelve weeks; I grew up riddled with the cultural confusions of being black and British. I was at the older end of a generation who eventually found their communal voice in the Notting Hill riots of 1976.