Großbritannien Consulate - Familiar stranger: a life between two islands

Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial. I was born in 1932 into a coloured middle-class family in Jamaica, still then a British colony. My first sense of the world derived from my location as a colonized subject and much of my life can be understood as unlearning the norms in which I had been born and brought up. This long, continuing process of disidentification has shaped my life. I lived in Kingston, Jamaica, as a child and youth for the first nineteen years of my life. I left for England in 1951 to study at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; and, having decided not to go home, I have lived and worked in Britain ever since.

The story I tell focuses on how I lived the last days of colonialism, in both Kingston and London. I have chosen to close the narrative in the early 1960s, when I was entering my thirties. By then I had stepped outside the immediate impress of colonial subjugation, discovering the means to become a different sort of person. I had met and married Catherine. My life of political activism in London was coming to an end. We moved to Birmingham, where a new future opened up for me at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These changes didnt magically resolve the unease which had been incubated as I grew up in a racially subordinate position in colonial Jamaica. It was not an ending like the fabled closures of a Victorian novel. They marked the moment when I came to understand that my life was my own to make, and that obeisance to either colonial Jamaica or to metropolitan Britain, or England, was not the only choice before me. Other spaces opened up. These were, I saw, spaces to be made.

In 2011 I celebrated if that is the right word sixty years of life in the black British diaspora. Indeed, I am the product of two diasporas. This may surprise readers who are more likely to regard the African diaspora as my primordial place of origin. But Jamaica too, as well as being a part of Africa in the New World, is a diaspora of sorts in its own right, a site of the scattering of traditions and people, of diffusion. None of the major groups which constitute Jamaican society originally belonged there. Every Jamaican is the product of a migration, forced or free. Everyone is originally from somewhere else.

My father, Herman, an amiable, stockily built brown man of lower-middle-class background, with kind eyes and a little paunch in his tropical light-brown suit, worked as an accountant. He was lucky enough, given his early prospects, to have landed a job in Port Antonio with the United Fruit Company, one of the US multinationals based in Boston which has dominated the banana trade in Central America and the Caribbean. United Fruit was known throughout the twentieth century for its expertise in summoning the dark arts in Central American politics. My father, who I imagine would have been oblivious to all this, worked his way up the ladder to be the first local that is, coloured man appointed chief accountant of the Jamaican branch of the company.

My mother, the formidable Miss Jessie, was a handsome, well-tailored brown woman of imposing bearing. Born to light-skinned but not well-off parents a teacher in the Agricultural School and a postmistress she was in effect adopted by her prosperous uncle, a prominent lawyer who owned a small estate on the edge of Port Antonio. She was taken to live there in a rather grand house called Norwich, which stood on a hill at the end of a palm-lined driveway looking out to the sea. In the final episode of the series Redemption Song, which I made for the BBC in 1991, I revisited the ruins of that house, which had been bought but left untouched by the singer Eartha Kitt. It was looked after by a gay man who had worked in the theatre and fashion. He lived in a single room with cupboards stuffed full of show costumes in an otherwise empty house. Like the way of life it represented, Norwich was falling into decay.

My mothers uncles were local professionals lawyers and doctors and all their children were educated in England. If my mother hadnt been a woman, she would probably have been sent to England to complete her education too. I think she felt cheated that she hadnt been. The family had originally been slave-owners. An antecedent by marriage, John Rock Grosset, embarrassingly turns out to have been a prominent pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist pamphleteer. Plantation life constituted the aspirational model of her hopes and fears, which she recast for her own family to adopt. This branch of the family tutored her in their ways and refashioned her into one of their own. She enjoyed her capacity to dominate, to take the leading role, to play the grande dame. She carried her fearless determination indeed, her willed stubbornness in the very set of her body and face. Her tragedy was that, although obviously a highly competent person, after her marriage she never worked outside the family home. The domestic scene and the family became her occupation, which she dominated and governed unlike many other Jamaican middle-class families where, at that time, the men ruled. But I think the lack of a more fulfilling public role was one of the many sources of her abiding sense of dissatisfaction.

Both my siblings my brother, George and my sister, Patricia were some years older than me. Pats working life as a personal secretary was interrupted by a serious breakdown. She spent much of the rest of her later life caring for George and for my parents. She is still alive, living in residential care in Jamaica, looked after by my cousin, Sister Maureen Clare.

Kingston, where we lived, was a typical, large, bustling, overcrowded, often ramshackle colonial city. It looked out on a circular harbour, one of the safest and most magnificent of its kind in the world, which was almost fully enclosed by a narrow snake of land, the Palisadoes, at the end of which stood what was left of the old town, Port Royal. This had been the main base of the British pirate fleet which, in the Elizabethan period, harried the galleons from the Spanish Main on their way from South America back to Europe with loot from the silver mines. In fact piracy, though a freelance illegal venture, had an ambiguous relationship to the Crown. One of the most notorious pirates, Sir Henry Morgan, actually became for a time a governor of the island. Most of Port Royal had been destroyed or submerged by an earthquake in 1692, which everyone believed was a just and fitting judgement on its wicked, licentious way of life, on its vice and illicit wealth. People said that if you listened hard you could still hear the bells of the cathedral tolling beneath the waves pleading for forgiveness, perhaps?

Jamaica itself, the tropical island, still resides deep in my being. Much of the south and parts of the north are relatively flat, ideal for planting sugar cane. Elsewhere the land is steeper, suited to bananas, citrus fruits and a range of local delicacies. The estates and cattle farms are on the flatter terrain. Coffee is a high mountain crop. A lot of the interior is thickly wooded, subtropical and promiscuously fertile. Behind Kingston rise the high peaks of the Blue Mountains, which form part of a longer mountainous spine running almost the full length of the island. Everywhere, the narrow roads climb their perilous way up the hillsides and plummet down again into the valleys.

Deeper in the interior was the terrain of the country people, especially the subsistence peasant families on half-acre smallholdings or scratching a livelihood in the hillside villages, as well as the day-rate labourers, cane-cutters and banana-growers and those who serviced village life. On their tiny family plots they grew anything that could be consumed, or taken down to the weekly market and sold alongside the flotsam and jetsam of local rural life: re-tread tires, clapped-out motor parts and multiply renovated electrical goods. The dwellings of the poor subsistence farmers often consisted of tin-roofed huts and rough, lean-to wooden houses perched precariously on the terraced hillsides, every inch of which was used productively.