The Windrush Generation: Can we erase our past?

In the last few years, since about 2013, Britain has been carrying out an immigration policy which is at odds with its colonial past.  British officials have been quietly deporting or denying benefits to long term residents referred to as the Windrush generation –Caribbean migrants who came to Britain in the mid 20^th century to help rebuild post war Britain, to study or to find employment.  They were called the Windrush generation because many arrived on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948.

The citizenship of these British residents until these last few years had never been questioned. They worked.  They bought homes. They raised families. They paid their taxes. They received their benefits and most importantly, they contributed much to British society. Then without warning, a new immigration policy required them to produce citizenship papers. 

The problem was that many of these people – most over 50- had never needed citizenship papers because they were British subjects when they arrived in Britain.

If we take, for example, the history of Jamaica, we see this clearly.   Jamaica was colonized by the British in 1655 and did not become an independent nation until 1962.   As such, any Jamaican who traveled to Britain in the 1940's, 50’s or 60’s was a colonial subject – not a foreigner, not an immigrant but someone who had a relationship with what used to be called the “mother country.”  What is more, they were invited by Britain to come.  They did not arrive on British soil illegally.

Well time evolves and relationships change, but we can not erase history.  Those people who came to Britain in this era never needed papers before yet were now being asked to produce them.  Sadly, a number of these men and women, many of whom are seniors, after doing their best to make their case to immigration officials, accepted their fates and returned to an island they did not know.   They suffered in silence until their circumstances became public.  It is only since reporters started asking questions that they have shared their story.  So many have said, “it’s  like having your world torn apart.”  They have faced deportation, family separations, loss of medical and housing benefits.

Thankfully, there is a silver lining to this story.   The Guardian  and the international press have made an important difference here. The British Home Secretary, as of this writing, apologized and  has now resigned over the matter.  Shortly before resigning, she committed to a complete turnaround.  In fact, she promised that her office would resolve all cases and also give compensation in the next two weeks.  I am very glad to hear about this commitment and hope that indeed all benefits of citizenship will be restored to every one of these British citizens without delay.

This story is of considerable interest to me as a dual citizen, native of Jamaica and a scholar/writer in the field of African Diaspora Studies. In fact, I was all prepared to weigh in on this controversy from a somewhat distant scholarly angle when my cousin, on my mother’s side, actress and teacher Abigail Ramsay, shared a post commemorating her mother’s birthday on facebook. In a moment, I was brought back to my almost forgotten reality that the Windrush generation included my own relatives—my aunt and uncle who settled in Britain and made it their home and made incalculable contributions to British society.  Here, Abigail says it best:

Celebrating my mother's birthday yesterday!

Yet another beautiful face of the Windrush generation.

She moved to London in the 1960s to study nursing then received additional qualifications at the Great Ormond Hospital for Sick Children and Queen Charlotte Hospital. It wasn’t until my godmother told me that in all her places of study, she was top of her class. She never shared her impressive academic successes and I only heard from my aunt that as a child that she was exceptionally brilliant. To say she is humble is an understatement.

She did share that she would wake up at 4am to study and work. She somewhat inculcated this discipline in us, although I have miles to go! But fortunately have opportunities to practice. My drive and indefatigable approach to the world comes from her.

This birthday, she gave me a present. Last year, the world could not be worse. Her lifetime of hard work not only enabled me to get my apartment, but helped me out of an absolutely miserable situation by supporting me during my unemployment. Now, as I am embracing extraordinary opportunities, (as a Fulbright Fellow in Jamaica) I give repeated thanks for having a brilliant mother with foresight, discipline, wisdom, and strength of sacrifice. I only hope to live up to her example.

So today I, too, salute Vinton Isoline Ramsay, my Aunt Joy, an extraordinary woman of African descent and a beautiful face of the Windrush generation.   She is an inspiration to me and to many.  She and so many others have given so much.  May the country to which they have given their labor and their love return the same.

Vinton Isoline Ramsay of the Windrush Generation and Great Ormond Hospital
Nigel Cox [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

For more stories of other members of the Windrush generation, see Hilary Robertson Hickling's That Time in Foreign. (Hansib Pres)

Anne C. Bailey

Frantz Fanon and Honoring the Land

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” 

The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon

Two weeks ago, I was honored to be a part of an international conference in Kingston Jamaica examining the legacy of Fanon with particular respect to postcolonial Caribbean and African societies.  The conference was mounted by CARIMENSA, in collaboration with McGill University, the University of West Indies and the Jamaica Psychiatric Association and the theme was “Mental Illness and Violence and the Delusion of Freedom: Exploring the Legacy of Frantz Fanon."

Fanon’s words particularly resonate with me because I have long been an avid lover of the land—the actual land of Jamaica and all that it means today and yesterday.

Yesterday, it was literally the bread of those who colonized Jamaica –first the Spanish, then the English.  The slave trade which brought Africans to Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, as Eric Williams said, helped to make Britain the industrialized nation that it is.  In the 18^th century, fully one third of Britain’s GNP came from profits from slavery.( See his book, Capitalism and Slavery)  So this land, not just its beautiful beaches, but its interior with all its rich fauna and flora, in the past made all the difference.

Perhaps that is why I have been so preoccupied with the land itself.  If, I have reasoned, it was good enough back then to be the bread and butter for others, why can it not be so again for independent Jamaica and other independent nations in the Caribbean?

Notwithstanding the benefits but also constraints of globalization, it seems as if there SHOULD be a way to make that land, as Fanon says, bring bread and also dignity.

For that reason and others, Green Team International last spring planted 250 mahogany suckers on St. Mary's Peace Farm and Park in Oracabessa, Jamaica.  The trees were donated by the Jamaica Forestry Department as a part of  their worthy effort at reforestation of the island.

Jamaica is well known for its beaches, but its countryside is equally resplendent with a huge variety of tropical flowers and trees.  Experts say that over 27% of the plants in Jamaica can be found nowhere else in the world.  That in my mind, is a national treasure, but like any treasure, it has be nurtured and it has be safeguarded for future generations.

Planting those trees was a way to honor the land and its legacy. Planting those trees was a way to give back – not just reap its benefits—but to replenish.

Planting those trees was a way to honor those dishonored ancestors who worked without compensation, who labored without credit. 

Planting those trees was a way to honor future generations who in twenty years will walk through Mahogany Walk, cut those trees and replenish them.

And so the cycle will begin again—but this time we will have planted in freedom not in slavery, in peace not in conflict.

The land will bring us bread from the profits of the lumber and bring us dignity in honoring our past and our future.

Future Mahogany Walk in Oracabessa, Jamaica

                  Courtesy of  Judgefloro [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Anne C. Bailey

Author of The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History.(Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Between Syria and Me Redux

This week, Syria is again in the news. It has been about a year since I wrote the piece,
"Between Syria and Me" and I thought it best to republish it in light of the fact that Syrian civil war is now eight years old. I also recently found a letter by a Jamaican citizen, Richard Browne, suggesting that Jamaica open its door to some of the many refugees.  Food for thought.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/letters/Open-the-gates-to-our-Jamaican-DNA----from-Syria_19226160

Tragically again this week nerve gas bombs rained down on the Syrian people. I also finished reading Ta Nehisi Coates’ brilliant book,  Between the World and Me.   At first glance, one might think that the latest horror of the six year old Syrian civil war  has nothing to do Coates’ ruminations on the challenges of navigating "race" in  America, but nothing could be further from the truth. 
  

Since this war began, Syria is never very far from my mind in a way I am only recently beginning to understand.  Before the civil war, my only connection was through Jamaica.  Growing up in Jamaica, the Syrian Diaspora there is well known and well regarded.   “Out of many, one people” is the national motto represented on the Coat of Arms and Syrians are an important part of that many.  They came to Jamaica in the 1860’s and became business owners, manufacturers, leaders and artists.  Up until six years ago, I did not associate Syria with bombs, with refugees, with nerve gas.  Yet this proud and beautiful people are now a byword for loss, displacement, plunder, and genocide.

Ta Nehisi Coates’ book is also about the legacy of loss and displacement. In his long love letter to his son, he shares with readers how he has navigated this loss between the tough world of his Baltimore ghetto and the world of the Dreamers, as he calls the whitewashed world he saw on his television set as a child.   The gulf between those worlds is the gulf his son will also have to navigate.  His book is like the testimony of a refugee  -- a refugee in his own country –who is  fortunate to live to tell the tale. Between the schools and the streets, he is one of the survivors. He was not killed in mysterious circumstances by police or by gangs in his neighborhood. He is not in jail like the one in six  black men destined to live out all or part of their days  in state and federal penal institutions.   He lives to tell the tale and his analysis helps not only his heir but others who are heirs to this legacy of slavery and colonialism  or other black bodies as he calls them - make sense of it all.  And more than make of sense of it, celebrate with those who celebrate, mourn with those who mourn.

Though I had not read his book at the time, these types of books and my own work about African loss and displacement, drew me into the Syrian story.  It drew me in a very personal way such that by mid January, I decided to mark my birthday by inviting a group of friends to come and hear me read from my latest book about the legacy of slavery and its memory.   The evening was to be a fundraiser for Aleppo and Syrian refugees.  Instead of a gift, I asked for a donation of $10 or more.  I had no idea how this would work as it was my first such effort but a couple of friends helped me pull it off. They brought food and much needed chairs so that there would be additional seats in my apartment.  In all, thirty or so people came including young people and their donations exceeded expectations.  The money was donated to a charity to directly assist their efforts on behalf of refugees.

Without fully realizing it, I was already making this connection with their experience, but at the same time, I hadn’t fully assessed the politics of it all.   It seemed like a simple proposition – this birthday fundraiser—but as I got into the planning I realized it was not so simple after all.  I had to take notice of the ongoing debate around me. There were so many different points of view floating around the country.  Some felt it was OK to give humanitarian aid but did not agree that America should take in Syrian refugees. Others felt certain that America should open its doors as it has to immigrants and refugees in the past and welcome many in.  Still others compared themselves to folks abroad. Hadn’t Germany promised to take almost 800,000?  Could America do any less?  And so the debate continued with some being convinced that if we welcomed refugees from places like Syria, terrorists may well enter in among them.  In trying to help, we would be hurting ourselves so the argument went.  I started to have some sense then, that this birthday fundraiser was not like fundraising for baseball equipment for the local Little League.  It was not neutral at all but yet made such sense to me.  For  years, I have been teaching and writing about displacement and loss of people of African descent. For years, I have been trying in my own mind to make sense of this loss and the memory of it and the forgetting of it.

So it was not till I was well into the planning of this little effort that the politics of it all dawned on me but I forged on.  Perhaps it was just as well because in the process and in the end, I think something beautiful was wrenched from tragedy: those who came together came together regardless of the politics  in a remarkable spirit.   Those who knew each other and those who met for the first time seemed to talk with ease and without effort.  With good food and good company, it could have been just another winter weekend but it wasn’t because this group had made a decision to mark my birthday by remembering those who were uncertain of birthdays to come. They had made a decision to consider those lives so far away —men and women  with cares, desires, dreams for their children– as they would consider their own.

I was glad then but am really glad now that we had that evening – an evening to remember and connect with the losses of others.

Anne Bailey

Author, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Sources and further reading: 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Rebecca Tortello, Pieces of the Past:  A Stroll down Jamaica’s Memory Lane

Why Aleppo Matters blogpost, October 5, 2016