African-Caribbean women interrogating diaspora/post-diaspora

From the post-emancipation period to the present-day, migration from and frequently return to the Caribbean has been a defining feature of the region and has shaped its economic and social structures, personal and domestic relations and the production and consumption of culture. As Mary Chamberlain argues, ‘Caribbean culture engages necessarily with migration and with a migratory imagination’ (Chamberlain 2002, 7–8); its cultures are creolized or ‘supersyncretic’, and characterized by plurality, complexity and instability (Benítez-Rojo 1992, 46). However, as Stuart Hall reminds us, this process of creolization and the production of hybrid peoples and cultures was born out of violence: ‘Far from being continuous with our pasts, our relation to that history is marked by the most horrendous, violent, abrupt ruptural breaks’ (Hall 2019a, 210). The distinctively globalized character of Caribbean culture is thus born out of a history of violent breakage and loss, reflected in the uneven and often messy meeting of diasporas within the territories of the Caribbean. The relationship of the Caribbean to its global diasporas is, therefore, a further, and more complexly layered iteration of diasporic peoples and cultures.

As several studies demonstrate, the experience of migration, settlement, community formation, re-migration and return, depends both on the socio-economic contexts to which migrants move and their status in the homeland (Foner 2002; Horst 2007; Gentles-Peart and Hall 2012), as well as on the gender identities of the migrating population. Foner’s work illustrates the importance of the ‘social and cultural context of incorporation’, arguing that it is ‘undoubtedly the most important factor accounting for differences in the Caribbean immigrant experience’ (56). She emphasises the value of a comparative approach across both nations and cities using, among others, the example of Haitian migrants’ contrasting diasporic experiences in New York and Miami, a contrast to which Amber Lascelles’ contribution to this Special Issue also alludes.

The character and quality of the migratory experience is also affected by historical entanglements and geographical relations. Britain’s leading role in the slave trade, in the formation of slave societies, in processes of indentureship and in the establishment of British colonial societies in the Caribbean inevitably led to the construction of Britain, in relation to its colonies, as the social, political and cultural centre or ‘home’. Several writers who arrived in Britain in the 1950s and ‘60s have described this centre-periphery entanglement as a kind of splitting, or as the experience, on arriving in Britain, of being a ‘familiar stranger’ (Morley 2019, 2). This familiarity is produced by the effect of having a greater understanding and knowledge of British history, its culture and institutions, than of the culture and history of the Caribbean. It is the experience of someone who knows British culture from an imagined inside but who can never be ‘English’: it is ‘exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always postponed “arrival”’. (Hall 2019b, 192). While this paradoxical sense of closeness and alienation is well documented by a generation of intellectuals such as George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R James and Stuart Hall, who arrived in Britain in the 1950s to occupy relatively privileged positions, their experience is one that has become familiar in less privileged contexts, and has been reimagined by contemporary black British women novelists such as Joan Riley, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy. Their work re-centres the experiences of women; it extends and expands the reach and effects of racism, and in so doing, blurs the boundaries between inner and outer worlds. In the novel Small Island (2004), Levy’s protagonist Hortense arrives in London in 1948. As she approaches the front door of what she assumes is her husband’s home, she is reminded of her friend Celia’s description of the English front door and front door-bell that will mark Celia’s arrival into English society: ‘Hortense, in England I will have a big house with a bell at the front door and I will ring the bell’ (11). The bell, both for the young girls, and for the young adult protagonist, signifies British orderliness and the domestic protocol of politely announced visits. The bell, they imagine, marks the separation of house and road, and offers some protection from passing visitors who cannot simply enter uninvited, or announce their presence with a shouted greeting and a bang on the gate. Hortense’s first experience of an English door bell, however, unmasks that memory, and the colonial narratives of order, gentility and security that have reproduced it:

But when I pressed this doorbell I did not hear a ring … The house, I could see was shabby … The glass stained with coloured pictures as a church would have. It was true that some were missing, replaced by cardboard and strips of white tape … I pushed the doorbell again when it was obvious no one was answering my call. I held my thumb against it and pushed my ear to the window. (12)

Levy’s description of her character’s experience of liminality, of being a familiar stranger, awkwardly positioned between a world ‘known’ through her experiences of a colonial education but revealed to be a fiction in her actual encounter with that world, repeats the feelings of alienation theorised by Hall as the archetypal diasporic experience. By repeatedly ringing the silent doorbell, however, Hortense resists the meanings of its silence, refusing both to be disabused of the image of England which she holds so dear and to accept her status as a stranger in her English ‘home’.

Although there had been waves of West Indian migration in the decades preceding the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, its arrival, in Tilbury docks, Essex, marked the beginning of the first period of mass migration to Britain from the Anglophone Caribbean, and the name of the ship has been used to signify this historical moment and to include all Caribbean migrants arriving by airplane or aboard other ships. Following this first ‘wave’, however, numbers of migrants declined dramatically in the years following the 1962 and 1966 Immigration Acts. Subsequent legislation governing visitors as well as those wishing to settle has become ever more draconian, with the result that ‘by 1974 the whole cycle of primary immigration was over’, and there was a ‘net decrease of nearly 100,000 in the Caribbean population of Britain between the censuses of 1966 and 1991’ (Peach 2002, 210).¹ During the 1990s the numbers of migrants arriving from the Caribbean ranged from between 242 and 334. In 1971, the Caribbean-born population residing in the UK stood at 304, 070, and Ceri Peach (2002) has estimated that the total Caribbean population in that year was 545,744. The 2011 Census estimates the population at 565,876. In 2011, the Caribbean population in the state of New York was estimated at 679, 245 (Gentles-Peart and Hall 2012).

Both the relatively short period of ‘mass’ migration and the abrupt fall in the numbers of those arriving since the mid-1970s have had a significant effect on the development of Caribbean institutions and cultures within the UK, and on the character and identity of a Caribbean-British diaspora. In contrast, Nancy Foner argues, using the example of Jamaica, the processes of ‘perpetual immigration’ from Jamaica to the United States brings with it a ‘continual infusion of people steeped in Jamaican ways and culture’ and thus a constant expansion and renewal of Jamaican culture (Foner 2002, 54). The result is often that Caribbean cultures have a more dynamic and contemporary presence in the work of US based theorists and visual artists such as Nicola Awai, whose work is the subject of Marsha Pearce’s contribution to this Special Issue, or in the fiction of a younger generation of US-based women novelists such as Nicole Dennis-Benn and Alexia Arthurs. Caribbean culture in Britain has, on the other hand, become more syncretic, though the routes and roots of its Caribbean formations have remained more static. Research has demonstrated that although some of the older generation of immigrants who have returned to the Caribbean have been able to ‘commute’ to and from the UK, many have seen the decision to return as permanent, a decision that has impacted more severely on older women returnees. One respondent in Heather Horst’s study had said that ‘travelling made her feel scattered and she longed to be in one place or another’ (Horst 2007, 74). Her interviewees repeatedly said that they were unable ‘to be in two places at once’ (75), with the result that many women who stayed, sacrificed regular contact with their children and grandchildren (Horst 2007, 2011; Reynolds 2011). Women who had more successfully settled in Jamaica were at the centre of community activity, whereas those who were unable either to settle or return to the UK felt lonely, alienated and stranded (Horst 2011).

A few studies have documented the significance of a younger generation, referred to as second-generation migrants, who are returning to the Caribbean. Potter and Phillips, focusing on the return migration of younger US and British-born Barbadians, have noted that the majority of this population is female, middle-class, professional and very small in number. In most cases, their parents are themselves returnees. This small population of younger, more affluent and mobile returnees notwithstanding, the distance between the UK and the Caribbean and the associated expense of travel has inhibited return migrants’ ability to live ‘in two places at once’, and has meant that Caribbean communities in Britain have had less opportunity to access and therefore fewer direct experiences of contemporary Caribbean culture. In Potter and Phillips’s study, however, second-generation returnees from the US are perceived by their UK counterparts to be more readily accepted by their Barbadian hosts, in part because of the proximity of the US and the increasing popularity of the option to commute rather than settle, and in part because of the ‘near universal impact’ of American culture on the Caribbean in the twenty-first century (Potter and Phillips 2006, 596).

In the context of the UK, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the so-called ‘Windrush migrants’ are less likely to define themselves as Caribbean than as black British (Hall 2019a). Black British popular culture is characterized by a distinct interweaving of African, ² African-American and Caribbean forms; black British institutions reflect the interconnection of African and Caribbean influences, as do many social and family groups. This articulation of a creolized, transnational blackness is represented in much recent writing by black British women writers such as the Nigerian-British author Bernardine Evaristo, whose Man-Booker prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other (2019) is an interleaving of stories of a diverse range of black British women who are African or Caribbean, British born and identified, of mixed cultural heritage, and African-American. African-American and Caribbean-American diasporic culture also plays a central role in culture and identity formation in black Britain, and this is evident in the work of several cultural theorists, artists and writers such as Zadie Smith, whose work is examined in Julia Siccardi’s contribution to this Special Issue.

Despite the challenges for the Caribbean diasporic community in the UK in maintaining regular physical contact with the Caribbean, many studies demonstrate both the continued strength of transnational ties within and between migrant families, and the important role played by women in maintaining those ties. Historically, Caribbean family structures have been flexible, and connected through ‘lateral’, rather than ‘lineal’ ties (Sellar 2005, 49), and it is precisely this flexibility that has enabled the African-Caribbean family to support sustained and ever more complex patterns of migration (Chamberlain 2017b). This flexible family structure, bound by relations to wider family networks, has been strengthened, rather than undermined, by a history of internal migration from the rural areas to the towns, and by overseas migration. The separation experienced by families, where children were often sent to live with relatives in towns and cities in order to better access educational opportunities, or left in a stable environment of grandparents, aunts and so on, when parents migrated, is also an act of love and ‘integral to relations of sharing and support’ (Sellar 2005, 53–4). The Caribbean household thus becomes marked by its transnational connections, maintained in part by those who have travelled and are absent. Mary Chamberlain’s work demonstrates that affective ties are often maintained by women, and she gives the example of Hyacinth, who flew to the US from Britain to support a sister-in-law, and was in turn provided with temporary employment during her three year stay in the United States. Her income was sent to maintain her children in Britain (Chamberlain 2017b). This expression of loyalty demonstrates the importance of affect in sustaining transnational family connections: ‘For African-Caribbean migrants the borders of the nation may, like the family, be emotional rather than geographic … citizenship contingent on a diasporic imperative’ (2017b, 112). In addition, a ‘global context’ is, she argues, central to the Caribbean diasporic everyday, and ‘the benefits resulting [are] there for the reaping – Canada, the United States, Europe or Japan, St. Vincent or Jamaica. National borders were no barrier to family connectedness’ (Chamberlain 2017b, 110).

The articles in this Special Issue originated as papers presented at a an AHRC (UK)- funded conference held in London, July 2018, entitled ‘Caribbean Women (Post) Diaspora: African-Caribbean Interconnections’ (Dunn and Scafe 2019). They interrogate concepts of diaspora and post-diaspora, investigating the potential of these theoretical terms for addressing and analysing the complexity of the diasporic experience. Concepts of post-diaspora have emerged in recent scholarship as a response to the challenges to traditional understandings of diaspora raised by the increase and speed of globalization, and by the rise of transnationalism, both as a focus of academic study, and as an everyday experience. Post-diaspora, like transnationalism, emphasises the fluidity of the migration process and ‘the impossibility of separating the actors either side of a migration divide’ (Chamberlain 2017a, viii); post-diasporic identities are, therefore, ‘provisional, uncertain and contradictory’ (Scafe 2019, 105). They emerge from ‘intra and international communities, that in their shifting formations and identifications, can be defined as post-diasporic’ (95).

Contributors to this volume cover a range of topics related to migration, diaspora and post- diaspora. Patricia Noxolo’s article, ‘I am becoming my mother: (post)diaspora, local entanglements and entangled locals’ draws on Lorna Goodison’s 1986 poem ‘I am becoming my mother’, on quantum theory and also uses family photographs from her childhood in Birmingham to argue for a more entangled conception of (post) diaspora in academic literature. In her article, ‘Picturing theory: Nicole Awai’s black ooze as post-diasporic expression’, Marsha Pearce constructs a dialogue between French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and the artworks of Trinidad-born, US-based visual artist Nicole Awai, specifically those works in which she attends to the notion of a black ooze. Using her work to advance a gendered understanding of post diaspora, Pearce argues that rather than dislocation and disjuncture, Awai’s black ooze is a visual symbol of diverse affiliations and nuanced mobilities. Carol Ann Dixon examines changing representations of women of colour within the realm of the visual arts. She considers the aesthetic qualities, historical significance and cultural impacts of a diverse body of image-making spanning several centuries. She analyses selected works on diverse diasporic identities and imagery from the portfolios of four, internationally acclaimed women artists of Caribbean heritage, whose work depicts black and brown womanhood in the twenty-first century. Her article examines the composition modalities and techniques of their work and contrasts this to fine art of an earlier era to analyse why the work of these four has been internationally successful. In ‘From migrant to settler and the making of a Black community: an autoethnographic account’, Beverley Bryan uses autoethnography to trace her diasporic experience and to examine the formation and evolution of a Black British community identity in the austerity phase of Britain in the 1970s. Her article provides an insider’s view of the period of intense social upheaval in the 1970s when Caribbean people in Britain were moving from migrants to settlers, and documents Black British women’s contribution to setting and directing a Black agenda for collective survival to meet the common needs of settler communities in response to racial discrimination in policing, immigration and education.

Julia Siccardi focuses on the different ways in which home is experienced by the female characters of the diaspora in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), On Beauty (2005) and NW (2012). Home may be tied not only to a place, but also to the intimacy of relationships. Siccardi examines characters in Zadie Smith's novels and her portrayal of women whose feelings of belonging to a place are threatened, due to their geographical displacements or to their complex transcultural identities. Siccardi uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of territorialisation and reterritorialization to explore how concepts of home and diaspora are reconfigured in this fiction. Gabriella Beckles-Raymond also explores the significance and meaning of home in relation to theoretical concepts of diaspora/(post) diaspora in her paper entitled ‘African-Caribbean Women, (Post)? Diaspora, and the Meaning of Home’. Home, Beckles-Raymond argues, is central to African-Caribbean women’s understanding of diaspora. Home is used by the author as a theoretical and ethical framework: home is a concept that implies a move from a state of dependency to an interdependent state, characterized by the loving and liberatory. Amber Lascelles interrogates the efficacy of the term ‘post-diaspora’ in her article ‘Locating Black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s short stories’. Lascelles explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatized. In a reflection of the conference’s diverse participants and presentations, this Special Issue includes the work of two poets, Jenny Mitchell, and Paris-based Jamaican novelist, short fiction writer and poet Alecia McKenzie, whose novel Sweetheart (2011) was the Caribbean Regional winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize. Their poetry reflects this issues’ themes of migration, diaspora, home, history and belonging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One of the effects of these draconian measures has been the ‘Windrush Scandal’, a term referring to the ongoing deportation of UK residents of Caribbean origin, many of whom have been resident in Britain for several decades but who have not taken out citizenship. A further manifestation of this discriminatory approach to immigration legislation has been the deportation of convicted criminals who, though having served their sentences, are being deported to the Caribbean. These are Caribbean born subjects who are British residents with the right to remain but who, for reasons that include to the high cost of the application, have not applied for British citizenship. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/10/windrush-deporting-people

Successive measures such as these have been effective in dramatically reducing immigration to Britain from the Caribbean.

2 The 2011 census estimated the British black African population at 989, 628.