Caribbean diaspora still faces last-century issues

A powerful film, Being Blacker, broadcast on BBC 2 in the UK this week, was a reminder that the difficulties of multiculturalism and racial integration are not a thing of the past, but very much a reality for black Caribbean people in Britain.

Film-maker Molly Dineen documented three years in the life of Jamaican reggae producer and record-shop owner, Blacker Dread. Arriving in London as a young boy in the 1960s, Blacker became a legend among the black community in Brixton. He was at the heart of the reggae soundsystems that reverberated around the streets, clubs and carnivals of the capital.

But this raw documentary, which ought to be screened at this year’s TT Film Festival, was not a nostalgic celebration of anglicised Rastafarianism. It was a moving contemporary account of a now middle-aged, proud stoic man whose life has been thrown into turmoil by the death of his mother and a jail sentence for money-laundering.

Although he remains remarkably positive, despite also losing his record shop, Blacker gives a dispiriting analysis of black people’s status in modern British society: they still face disproportionate imprisonment, disenfranchisement through gentrification and failure within the education system.

In a bold move, his partner takes their young son to live in Jamaica. Having been labelled by British teachers as a troublemaker with a deficient attention span, the boy immediately thrives at school in Jamaica, thanks to sterner discipline, a more relevant curriculum and the comfort of being around boys and teachers who look like him. The family must now decide where their long-term future lies.

Blacker’s story reminded me of my father, who left Pondside, Hanover parish, Jamaica, with his brother in 1967, to join their mother in London. Like many migrating families of the time, their parents – my grandparents – had gone ahead to take up jobs. Theirs were the archetypal professions – my grandmother a nurse, my grandfather a bus driver – of Caribbean people answering the British government recruitment drive to fill staffing gaps in the National Health Service and London Transport in the post-war years.

With dreadlocks, my father was a constant target for police in 1970s Britain. He was routinely arrested and locked up for no reason. His lasting resentment towards the British “establishment” is not unique to him – it’s typical of the experience of his generation. That distrust has been passed down to younger generations, producing a vicious cycle.

Perhaps black boys like Blacker’s son don’t feel British because their history lessons are about the Industrial Revolution, not the enslavement of Africans in the British West Indies that financed it.

As adults, black Brits are celebrated when they are famous athletes or singers, but this pigeonholes them into stereotyped professional categories. In the Caribbean, black people are represented in every field and corridor of power.

My grandmother managed to turn her 30-year British adventure into a success. After retiring she moved back home and built a lovely house in the hills above Montego Bay.

My father’s attempted return to Jamaica in his thirties was less successful and he came back to his council flat in London. On holidays to Jamaica now, he’s essentially considered a foreigner. The fate of the diaspora: caught between two places you want to call home but can’t.

“How does it feel to live in a black part of the world?” I was asked by someone back home in Britain, when I first arrived in Trinidad in 2013.

It was a question that I genuinely struggled to answer. As a mixed-race Brit I still felt, and sounded, culturally white – despite being half-Jamaican. If anything, I stood out more than in London. People look at you in Trinidad, particularly if you’re different.

I came to realise that it was a novel thing for me, and therefore exciting. I didn’t feel I was "exploring my black side" or seeking the comfort of black faces, as some might have assumed. But discovering and observing what the Caribbean really is, after years of seeing the diaspora version in London – often a hyper-exaggerated overly-masculine performance – has been unimaginably rewarding and uplifting.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the voyage of the Windrush, the ship that brought Caribbean people to England in 1948.

I was interviewed for a forthcoming BBC Radio Four programme about British-Caribbean people who have “returned home.” The producer asked me what benefits there are to moving to the Caribbean.

I enthused at length about the people, the physical surroundings, the arts, and postulated that the perceived downsizing in cultural capital is an unfair stigma. My cultural capital has in fact increased.

Trinidad has the kind of lifestyles that many Brits, struggling in that increasingly regressive, bleak pre-Brexit nation might envy.

I did not ignore climatic motivations. As Blacker Dread sings as he prepares to leave a snowy England for the arthritis-curing warmth of Jamaica, “England pretty, but it cold.”