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THIS IS MY ENGLAND / Andrea Levy
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"Andrea Levy (London, 1956) was born and educated in England. His parents are Jamaican, but what does this mean? Hardly justifies why many of his countrymen make it feel like an outsider in his own country. After all, if she was white and foreign, would anyone doubt it? "
Saturday, February 19, 2000
The Guardian. London, England .
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This is my England
Andrea Levy
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Recently, I was on a literary tour in New Zealand, sponsored by the British City. Reading a book, a young white man asked, "Where is it?", "England," I replied. "It seems the English" he said. "Well, sometimes the British have such a different appearance," I replied. The young man laughed unconvinced. So I asked, "How do you physically should be an Englishman?". The young man pointed to another white person, a blonde woman. Both were born and educated in New Zealand, but somehow, they were more English than me.
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This took place in a country where, later, talking to a Maori man aged about 70, told me that anyone with a drop of Maori blood in their veins, were Maori. No matter the conviction ideas, or what country you live, if you have Maori blood, are considered part of that culture.
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I identidad! Sometimes my head hurts, sometimes the heart. But what am I? How do I fit in Britain in 2000 and beyond?
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My father came to this country in 1948 on the ship "Empire Windrush". He was one of the pioneers.
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One of the 492 people who visited Jamaica, the former colony of the British Empire and saw that there were no jobs, no prospects and decided to risk going to the motherland. His identical twin brother had been in the RAF (Royal Air Force), not moving in England during the war and returned to provide a new round of service. My father accompanied him, leaving behind his girlfriend in Jamaica, my mother, who waited impatiently to meet él.No know what the aspirations of my father when he Britain, did not realize he was making history. But I know when embarked, was recognized as a British citizen. Traveled under a British passport. Britain was the country that all Jamaican children were at school. The children sang God Save the King and the poem by James Thomson, Rule Britannia.
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believed that Britain was a green and pleasant land - if not the center of the world, at least was the center of a large and important empire that spanned the globe, linking all countries in a big family. Far from the idea that he was traveling to a foreign place, was traveling to the center of his country and as such, would go unnoticed and be integrated immediately. Jamaica, he thought, was just Britain but the sun.
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There was a time when my mother had doubts about this immigration to hear stories about the treatment they had received early travelers. I wanted my father to come home. But it was too late by then, my father was in love with England. In the passenger list, the twins were annotated with different ages, what could have been a clue. My dad wanted to be your own boss and England was the place to get it.
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(I've gone from using Britain to use English. Britain is the state. It is Britain's only when you are outside the islands. When, for example, I'm in Europe or America, I'm British. It makes me feel a way bigger. But as soon as I put my feet on British land, I know I'm in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, undoubtedly separate countries.)
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My mother met my father in the rented room west of London, six months after the "Windrush" had docked. But I soon noticed that in England were foreigners, and this hit them. Things that were considered the quintessential English-manners, education, well-pronounced vowels well-spoken people - were conspicuous by their absence. Endured a terrible accommodation - by no means the situation of people of color in those days of post-war was easy: window signs reading "No blacks allowed, dogs or Irish". My father fought with incredible hostility when he was looking for a place to live because of the color of their skin. He got a job in the mail. My mother, a teacher in Jamaica, had to sew for a living. He worked in a factory where workers are exploited, along with other foreigners, Czechs, Poles, Greeks and all the losers of the war. Had an advantage: he spoke English. And one disadvantage: it was black (or color, as we called it).
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When my brother, my sisters and I were born, things started to get a little more complicated. We were good citizens (although the police did everything possible to thwart the plans of my brother). We never got into trouble. We were always kind. Never cheated the electricity meter. We lived in a council flat in Highbury, north London, next to the Arsenal football ground. In a world outside our apartment was a girl from north London. I went to school in the neighborhood. Spoke as a cockney (inhabitant of the neighborhoods of London.) I offered as a car park on match days.
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played with the ball and jumping rope. I liked the Mojos and godstopper (candy-colored layers) could inflate a large bubble gum. On TV we watched "Coronation Street", "Emergency Ward Ten," "Dr. Who", "Cathy Come Home" which made me fear homelessness. The "Sound of Music" Julie Andrews reminded me. (I even convinced car that seemed to her, but nobody else noticed it.)
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At school, they taught me to read, write and count (well, with the latter, God knows I tried!). I studied Shakespeare and the Metaphysical Poets. I learned to play the piano and I sing and play the "Green Sleeves." I learned history, focusing on Gladstone and Disraeli, two British historians of the nineteenth century - and knew everything about the abolition of the Laws of Cornwall and free trade. (None of this was unusual for my parents, who had studied at school in Jamaica.)
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I was educated as an Englishwoman. To me, learning, watching TV, eating and playing, had white kids. But these guys never have to grow up wondering whether or not they ashamed ingleses.Me the fact that my parents were not British. One reason was that no one around me was interested in the country of origin of my parents. For them, it was just a place full of blacks inferior. They asked me - oh! they always ask me. "Where are you? Was a constant noise like the ticking of the clock. If I answered" Jamaica ", lips or tongue fruncirían chasquearía me disapprovingly. They did not want to know anything about the sun, cane sugar, rum. They did not want to try our rice and peas. I remember an American girl coming to school. I would have thought that Doris Day itself was a child. Everyone wanted to be your friend. To view your toys, to hear the wonderful accent of their parents, to prove your meal with a "Oh, are not you rich?" America was an ideal place to be born.
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Everything came from Jamaica was strange to me. Every Christmas, we received a package: (Were we the only family who received packages from Jamaica and not vice versa?) A luscious Christmas cake "my mother's mother." A bow to my brother and handmade dresses for us girls. But we preferred the English Christmas cake with sugar glaze that crackled in the mouth. Some wool jerseys would have been better, said. My brother was upset that the bow you were kidding beyond what I could endure.
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We had a tin of sweetcorn in the cupboard that we had sent from Jamaica. I remember my mother opened it while we were running around excited. Not because we wanted to try it but because it was very rare. I tried a piece and spit on him, because he knew disgusting. (This was the beginning of the 60 - Understand Me! - The salad was exotic.) My father liked a thing called guava and put melancholy when he thought about it. I did not know what it was. But I knew the lyrics of a song that said something like "Rub the belly like guava jelly" and I was ashamed when my father mentioned. And my parents were put to dance like crazy when Miss Jamaica won the Miss World contest.
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just wanted to fit in and be part of everything around me while my parents were holding.
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So I grew up.
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More black people migrated to England from the 50's onwards Caribbean countries, Africa. People who came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda. People from the old empire back to the motherland. After all, does not belong to us? Along with this migration, the safety in numbers, I felt a new interest in the country they had left my parents. I began to feel proud to have a Jamaican heritage. Hesitant at first - Bob Marley discs saying the word "fighter", rehearsing in front of the bathroom mirror. So there arose in me the need to visit Jamaica.
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Recently, my mother had returned from Jamaica after 40 years away. He came home telling me that Jamaica had become a horrible place. Hot, violent and poor. It was not the place she remembered. He still had family there, but most had emigrated to America or Canada. My father did not return even to visit. I preferred his memories and said wistfully, that there was no one there, no family or friends. Had made England his home. She did not miss football. And without too much trouble, could get to his beloved guava.
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Jamaica is an island, apart from the aboriginal population, the Arawak, people were brought as slaves or hired laborers. The white population owned plantations and workers. Some worked as supervisors, the famously cruel Bakr. Jamaica was a place of hard work. The Jamaica I found was a brochure from a beautiful island. A place where the settlers had left, but as we used to say in north London, "had carried the ball home." Taking the wealth and leaving a tough economy with debt and trying to diversify to compete in a global market.
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But for me, the jewel of the island was my family. In Kingston, I was received like a prodigal daughter. I was told appeared to be a Jamaican, even embarrassed with my manners were English, my taste for sunbathing, my insistence on making tea in a teapot and shivering with my wool jersey, complaining about the Christmas breeze. When I left, I wanted to know more about the people that shaped me.
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is hard for anyone searching for their ancestors, but it is harder if possible (although not impossible) for someone with my past. Most files are incomplete or not available at the best, destroyed or non-existent at worst. I discovered it would cost me time and patience to develop my family tree. So I took the next step. I talked to my mother.
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was simple. I asked her to tell me everything he knew about any details I could remember. My mother told me that when I was little, he showed no interest in the past of his family. I told her that it asked all the time, but she would not tell me. I felt that my mother had come to this country to get a future, not to live in the past. Whatever the truth, it brought us together. I was interested and my mother was willing to tell me.
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learned about his grandfather, my great-grandfather, between many others, a Scottish man, his hair a deep red. A fisherman who could do anything and who liked to wash their money every Sunday. What were you doing in Jamaica, so far from home? Where was your family? My mother did not know, just know him. I had to look at Scottish history books to find that, as an inverse replica of the history of my father, many men left the plight of Scottish life for a future in the Caribbean. This red-haired Scot, whose hair has inherited my brother and he greatly annoyed that they were kidding beyond what I could stand, he left behind his country.
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my father's father fought in the First World War with the British Regiment of the West Indian. He was born Jewish. His family had been in Jamaica for generations, but probably originated in North Africa. My grandfather had married a woman of higher social class Indian descent, African and English and had converted to Christianity while he fought in the war. His Jewish family disowned him and all his descendants.
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And further in time, the mother of the mother of my mother's mother, born a slave. Had several children with her white master, who probably had other children with slave women and with his English wife. I do not know what would happen, but perhaps some of his descendants are reading now.
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The stories I learned from my father, met together in what I call the fictional family tree for my novel, Fruit of the Lemon. " I tried to put these stories in the context to which they belong, in the heart of a story to share Jamaica and Britain. There is an inclination to believe that the recent immigration in this country, started by my intrepid father and others, was where our relationship began. But nothing could be further from the truth.
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recently issued an excellent program on Channel 4 on the slave trade in Britain, which revealed the fact that many of the aristocratic families of England got their wealth through slavery. Cities like Bristol and Liverpool were built with money from this trade. What the program also revealed was that not only black people had white ancestors, but also some British whites have family ties with people of color in the Caribbean or the 20,000 people of color living in Britain as a result of this trade.
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Britain's history is inextricably linked with this trade and in this way, any place like Jamaica. In reality, the slave trade, Jamaica would not exist as we know it.
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When you look at the pedigrees (family tree of any person, individual stories, not the history of nations in which the winner takes all) the question of identity becomes very complicated. It would be nice and easy if we were all pure. If we were all where are our parents and grandparents, if only we assume the culture of our ancestors would not it be better if we could say that all Africans are black and that the English are white? Would not it be easier if, when some racist (as many did in my time) I yell at me to go home, a picture of Jamaica in my head instead of thinking I must go back to watch the cars in the field of Arsenal ? Do not facilitate arguments? Do not help the cause of the fans? Fit into separate boxes and in times of change such as we are experiencing now, we could retire them and clean our wounds. Not so. Any history book will show that England has never been an exclusive club but rather a hybrid nation. The effects of the British Empire were both personal and political. As the sun set on the empire, now we have to recognize these realities.
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The empire is over and as Britain delegated to its constituent parts, there is a loss of identity that has taken root in England. Darcus Howe, in his recent Channel 4 program, White Tribe, went on a journey to find the English culture which many believe lies only in the white population. Many lay the blame multi-cultural nature of England to the situation in the country. But this sense of loss was going to happen ever, the loss of something so powerful as an empire, always hurt. Would happen even if my father had not boarded the Windrush, was going to happen even if Idi Amin had not expelled the Asian population of Uganda. But perhaps the vitality of multi-culturalism is the catalyst that is accelerating a necessary period of search for the spirit.
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I'm English. Born and raised, as the saying goes. (As far as I can remember, was born and educated, not born and raised in a long line of white ancestors directly descended from the Anglo-Saxons). England is the only company to truly know and sometimes understand. I do not look like an Englishman would do in England in the 30's or before, but being English, it is my birthright. England is my home. A place where sometimes eccentric, I love being English.
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When I hear that there was an over-voltage after a TV show because everyone was making a cup of tea, make me smile. I was there with my cup of tea after the last episode of "Only Fools and Horses." I love that curry has become our national dish. And the view of London from Waterloo Bridge takes my breath away. Being English, I hate when I hear what happened to Stephen Lawrence. When every day seems a battle against racism and hatred and the silent and repressed hostility educated many black and Asian people to achieve their dreams.
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I want to belong somewhere but this place where I am, makes me feel like an unwelcome stranger, definitely not welcome at all.
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say I'm English, does not mean I want to be assimilated, adopting the majority white culture and exclude the others (I can not live without rice and peas. Now I'm dancing like crazy when Jamaica won something. And always make noise when I excited). Not raise a flag or ondearé to intimidate. And being English, I will not stop fighting to live in a country free of racism and social divisions.
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There are many white people who are horrified that someone like me to be English. And there are many people of color with a past like mine who do not want to be British. But national identity is not a personal matter. Is political. Can not be decided by individual whim. Being English should never be linked to ethnicity. Most English people are white, but some do not. To put it another way, is a tacit agreement with the idea of \u200b\u200bracial purity and we all know where this dangerous myth can lead us. Let England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland be nations excluyentes.El plural and in Scotland last year I was reading at the Edinburgh Festival. Was telling the audience the story of my grandfather redhead. After the reading, a Scottish woman approached me holding my arm and whispered, "You know, you could say that you are Scottish!".
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Andrea Levy has published three novels, "Fruit of the Lemon", "Never Far From Nowhere" and "Every light in the house burnin ' ". He won the prestigious award "Whitbread" of English letters in 2005 with his novel "Small Island".
Note: Permission of publication, Mary Dunn, Syndication Manager. Syndication Guardian and Observer, London, UK, and K. Gordon, David Grossman Literary Agency Ltd, London, UK. , Literary Agent Andrea Levy.
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Translation: Inmaculada Alonso, MadridMadrid, 3 / 2006 ..
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THIS IS MY ENGLAND / Andrea Levy
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Andrea Levy
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Biography
Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents. She is the author of four novels, each of which explore - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. Her second, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two very different sisters living on a London council estate. In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black Londoner, visits Jamaica after suffering a nervous breakdown and discovers a previously unknown personal history. Levy's most recent novel, Small Island (2004), set in 1948, explores the interaction between a black couple, Gilbert, a former RAF recruit, who has returned to Britain on the SS Windrush, and his Jamaican wife Hortense, and a white couple: Queenie, their landlady, and her recently demobbed husband, Bernard. It won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize.
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Andrea Levy has been a judge for the Saga Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives with her partner, a graphic designer, in north London.
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Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction
Bibliography
Every Light in the House Burnin' Headline Review, 1994
Never Far from Nowhere Headline Review, 1996
Fruit of the Lemon Headline Review, 1999
Small Island Review, 2004
Prizes and awards
1998 Arts Council Writers' Award Fruit of the Lemon
]2004 Orange Prize for Fiction Small Island
2004 Whitbread Novel Award Small Island
2004 Whitbread Book of the Year Small Island
2005 British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year (shortlist)
2005 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award (shortlist) Small Island
2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) Small Island
2005 Orange of Oranges Prize Small Island
2005 Romantic Novelists' Association Award (shortlist) Small IslandCritical Perspective
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Andrea Levy has achieved literary success in a relatively short space of time with her first three novels Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999). However, an understanding of Levy's work cannot simply be reduced to the 1990s. Born in London in 1956, Levy draws on a wealth of experience to create her critically acclaimed fictions.
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Andrea Levy's parents travelled from Jamaica to England on the now famous SS Empire Windrush in 1948. It is a journey Levy fictionalises in her first novel, Every light in the House Burnin'. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'An extremely powerful novel, a striking and promising debut', the book opens, not with the expected transatlantic journey from the West Indies, but with a family trip from London to Pontin's Holiday Camp. While the scene may be anecdotal in terms of the novel as a whole, it is by 'provincialising' the trope of travel, that Levy begins to draw attention to some of the discrepancies and differences (in terms of class, gender and generation) that cut across the received histories of Black Britain. The narrative of Every Light in the House Burnin' is told by Angela Jacob, a young Black woman, born and brought up on a council estate in London. The chapters shift between memories of the past and Angela's childhood in the city, and the present in which Angela's father is sick with cancer. The balance between the comic and the tragic created by this shift, as the narrator recollects her youth from her father's bedside, makes this an extremely moving debut.
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In her next novel, Never Far from Nowhere, Levy remains with the council estate setting. Here though it forms the backdrop to the story of two very different sisters, Olive and Vivien. Like Angela Jacob, these two characters have Jamaican parents, but are born and bred in London. Where the first novel documents Angela's first encounter with unfamiliar cuisine (pizza, avocado), so the second novel has the family watching Coronation Street or sampling spaghetti bolognese for the first time 'It's very nice, Peter, very nice, but I don't like foreign food' says Olive's mum. Levy is doing something very different to the more self-consciously 'worldly' narratives of, say, a V. S. Naipaul here, as she elaborates on a 'local', estate-based Black English culture. (Levy has commented on the Englishness of her own childhood in an essay entitled 'This is My England' (2000), a childhood where she recollects playing rounders and skipping, or watching soap operas and Dr Who.)
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These issues of local identity and ethnicity emerge as a tension in Never Far from Nowhere, Olive identifies herself as authentically 'black' and longs to 'return' to Jamaica, while Vivien, who has a lighter complexion than Olive, 'passes' as white.In her latest novel, Fruit of the Lemon, the horizons of Levy's fiction extend well beyond the inner-city council estate to include Panama, Cuba and Harlem, not to mention Scotland. It tells the story of Faith Jackson, whose world is turned upside down when she discovers that her parents have decided to return to Jamaica to retire. On travelling to the Caribbean herself, however, Faith finds herself entranced by the narratives of her Aunt Coral and the family history she unravels within them. As Fruit of the Lemon reveals the genealogy of Faith's family, a tale of roots, becomes one of routes in a novel that crosses seas and continents. This is a novelist as much at home fictionalising the 'internal' histories of Black Britons as she is telling the transatlantic tale of the Caribbean Diaspora. Levy is an English novelist who remains defiantly outside the limits of Englishness 'Saying that I'm English doesn't mean I want to be assimilated; to take on the white culture to the exclusion of all others ...I cannot live without rice and peas. I now dance when Jamaica wins anything...'
© Dr James Procter
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This Is My England-Andrea Levy
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"Identity! Sometimes it makes my head hurt -sometimes my heart. So what am I? Where do I fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond?" Andrea Levy, a writer, is English born and bred. But her parents are Jamaican, and the colour of her skin not white. As a consequence, she is not always made to feel at home in the country she thinks of as home. In this article by her from The Guardian Weekend, February 19, 2000, she explores the question of identity, and its significance in a multi-cultural society like the United Kingdom.
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I was recently in New Zealand on a literary visit sponsored by the British Council. At a book reading, a young white man asked me, "Where are you from?" England, I replied. 'You don't look English," he said. "Well, this is what English looks like sometimes," I answered. He laughed in an unconvinced sort of way. So I asked him, "What do you think an English person should look like. He pointed to another white person, a woman with fair hair, then to himself. Both of them were born and bred New Zealanders, but somehow they were more English than me.This was in a country where, later, while speaking to a Maori man in his seventies, I was told that anyone with even the smallest fingerful of Maori blood is a Maori. No matter how tenuous the connection, no matter what country they live in, if they have Maori blood, then they are considered to be part of that culture.
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Identity! Sometimes it makes my head hurt -sometimes my heart. So what am I? Where do I fit into Britain, 2000 and beyond?
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My dad came to this country in 1948, on the Empire Windrush ship. He was one of the pioneers. One of the 492 people who looked around the old British Empire colony of Jamaica, saw that there were no jobs, no prospects, and decided to chance his arm in the Mother Country. His identical twin brother had been in the RAF, stationed in England, during the war; and was returning to do a further round of service. My dad accompanied him, leaving behind in Jamaica his new bride, my mum, who waited impatiently for the call to join him.
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I don't know what my dad's aspirations were when he arrived in Britain - he certainly didn't realise that he was making history at the time. But I do know that, when he boarded the ship, he knew himself to be a British citizen. He travelled on a British passport. Britain was the country that all Jamaican children learned about at school. They sang God Save The King and Rule Britannia. They believed Britain was a green and pleasant land - if not the centre of the world, then certainly the centre of a great and important Empire that spanned the globe, linking all sorts of countries into a family of nations. Far from the idea that he was travelling to a foreign place, he was travelling to the centre of his country, and as such he would slip-in and fit-in immediately. Jamaica, he thought, was just Britain in the sun.
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There was a point when my mum had doubts about this emigration, on hearing stories of the treatment the first travellers had received. She wanted my dad to return. But it was too late; he already loved England by then. On the passenger list, the twin brothers are put down as having different ages, which might have been a clue. My dad wanted to be his own man, and England was the place to do it. (I've switched from saying Britain to saying England. Britain is the state.
You're only British when you're outside the islands. When, for example, I'm in Europe or America, I'm British. It makes me feel somehow bigger. But as soon as I set my feet down on the land of Britain, I know I'm either in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland - separate countries without any doubt.)
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My mum joined my dad in his one room in west London six months after the Windrush had docked. But they soon found that they were foreigners in England, and this shocked them. The things they thought of as quintessentially English - manners, politeness, rounded vowels from well-spoken people - were not in evidence. They suffered bad housing - by no means the plight of black people alone in those post-war days: the signs in windows read "no niggers, no dogs, no Irish". My dad faced incredible hostility when looking for somewhere to live because of the colour of his skin. He had a job with the post office. My mum, a trained teacher in Jamaica, had to sew to make a living here. She worked in sweat-shops with other foreigners, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, all fall-out from the war. She had one advantage: she spoke English. And one disadvantage: she was black (or coloured, as we were termed then).It was when my brother, sisters and I were born that things began to get a little more complex. We were good citizens of this country (although the police did their best to thwart my brother in this). Never in trouble.
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Always polite. Never diddled the electricity meter. We lived in a council flat in Highbury, north London, next to the Arsenal football ground. In the world outside our flat, I was a north London girl. I went to the local school. Spoke like a cockney. Offered to mind people's parked cars on match days. Played rounders, skipping and two balls. I liked Mojos and gobstoppers; could blow a great bubblegum bubble. On TV I watched Coronation Street, Emergency Ward Ten, Dr Who.
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Cathy Come Home made me fear homelessness. The Sound Of Music made me long to be Julie Andrews. (I even convinced myself I looked like her - but no one else could see it).
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At school, they taught me to read, write and do arithmetic (well, with the last one, heaven knows they tried). I studied Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets. I learned to play the piano, and could sing and accompany myself to Greensleeves. I learned history - focusing on Gladstone and Disraeli - where at one time I truly did know all about the repeal of the Corn Laws and free trade. (None of this was unusual to my parents: it was what they had learned in their schools in Jamaica.) I was educated to be English. Alongside me - learning, watching, eating and playing - were white children. But those white children would never have to grow up to question whether they were English or not.
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I was embarrassed that my parents were not English. One of the reasons was that no one around me was interested in the country my parents came from. To them, it was just a place full of inferior black people. They asked - oh, they asked all the time. "Where are you from?" was as constant a noise as a ticking clock. But if I answered "Jamaica", lips would curl or tongues would tut. They didn't want to know about the sun, the sugar cane, the rum punch. They didn't want to try our rice and peas. I remember a white American girl coming to school. You'd have thought that Doris Day herself was now a pupil. Everyone wanted to be her friend. To see her toys, to hear her parents' wonderful accent, to try their food with an "Ooohh isn't it lovely". America was a great place to come from.
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Everything from Jamaica was odd to me. We got a parcel sent every Christmas. (Were we the only family who received parcels from Jamaica and not the other way around?) A gooey Christmas cake from someone called "my mother's mother". A bow tie for my brother and hand-stitched dresses for us girls. But we kids preferred English Christmas cake with white icing that cracked your teeth. Woolly jumpers would have been better; we said. And my brother sulked that the bow tie was guaranteed to get him teased beyond endurance.
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We had a tin of sweetcorn in the cupboard that had come from a Jamaican parcel. I remember my mum opening it and us kids running around excited. Not because we were keen to try it, but because it was so weird. I tasted a niblet and spat it out, saying it was disgusting. (This was the early 60s -bear with me - salad was exotic.) My dad liked a thing called guava and got all sentimental when he thought of it. I didn't know what it was. But I did know the lyrics of a song that went something like, "Rub it on my belly like guava jelly", and got very embarrassed when he mentioned it again. And both my parents danced about like lunatics when Miss Jamaica won Miss World.
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I wanted just to fit in and be part of everything that was around me, and these strange parents were holding me back. Then I grew up. More black people emigrated to England from the 50s onwards - from the Caribbean, from Africa. People came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda. People from across the old Empire coming home to the Mother Country. After all, didn't she owe us? Along with this immigration - this safety in numbers - came a new interest for me in the country my parents had left. I was gaining a fledgling sense of pride in having a Jamaican heritage. Tentative at first - Bob Marley records, saying the word "feisty", practising sucking my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. Until it grew into a need to visit Jamaica.
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My mum had recently been back after 40 years away. She came home telling me what a bloody awful place it had become. Hot, violent, poor. It was not the place she remembered. She still had family there, but most had now emigrated to America or Canada. My dad didn't want to go back, even to visit He preferred his memories and told me wistfully that he had no one there now - no family, no friends. He had made his home England He didn't want to miss the football. And without much problem he could now get his beloved guavas here.
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Jamaica is an island where - apart from the aboriginal population, the Arawak - people were brought as slaves or indentured labourers. The white people there owned plantations and their workers. Some worked as overseers, the famously cruel bakra. Jamaica was a place of hard labour. The Jamaica I found was a brochure-beautiful island. A place where the colonists had left but, as we used to say in north London, "they'd taken their ball home with them". Taken the wealth, leaving an economy struggling with debt and trying to diversify so as to compete in a global marketHowever, the jewel in this island for me was my family. In Kingston, they welcomed me like a prodigal daughter. They told me that I looked like a Jamaican, even when I embarrassed them with my English ways - my liking for sitting in the sun, my insistence on making tea in a teapot and shivering in my woolly jumper, complaining about the "Christmas breeze". When I left, I wanted to know more about the people who formed me.
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It is hard for anyone to research their genealogy; but it is even harder (though not impossible) for someone with my background. Most of the records are incomplete or unavailable at best; destroyed or non-existent at worst. I discovered it would take a great deal of time, patience and expensive travelling for me to put together my definitive family tree. So I did the next best thing. I talked to my mum.
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It was simple. I asked her to tell me everything she knew about everyone she could remember. My mum claims that when I was little I wasn't interested in her family background. I claim that I asked her all the time, but that she wouldn't tell me. I got the impression that she had come to this country to gain a future, not to dwell on a past. Whatever the truth of it, at some point, thankfully, we merged. I was interested and she was willing to tell.
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I learned about her grandfather - my great-grandfather - among many others. A man from Scotland who had flame-red hair. A fisherman who could turn his hand to anything and who liked to wash his money every Sunday. What was he doing so far from home in Jamaica? Where was his family? My mum didn't know - she only knew of him. I had to look in the Scottish history books to find that, like a reverse image of my dad's story, many men left the hardships of the Highland life to chance their arm in the Caribbean. This Scottish great-grandfather of mine left behind him the flaming hair, which my brother inherited and which got him teased beyond endurance.
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My father's father fought in the first world war with the British West Indies Regiment.
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He was born Jewish. His family had been in Jamaica for generations, but originated from North Africa. My grandfather had "married out", to a woman of Indian/African/English descent and had taken the Christian faith while fighting in the war. His Jewish family disowned him and all his issue.
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And, further back, my "mother's, mother's, mother's, mother" was born a slave. She had children by her white English master, who probably had several other children by his slave women and by his white English wife. I don't know what happened to him, but maybe some of his other descendants are reading this now.The stories that I learned from my mum I pieced together into what I call a fictional family tree for my novel Fruit Of The Lemon. I tried to place those stories in context -where they belong - at the heart of a history that Jamaica and Britain share. There is a tendency to believe that the recent immigration into this country started by my intrepid dad and others, was where our relationship began. But nothing could be further from the truth. There was an excellent programme on Channel 4 recently about Britain's slave trade, which showed the extent to which many of England's aristocratic families gained their wealth through slavery. Cities such as Bristol and Liverpool were built with the money from the slave trade. What the programme also showed was that not only do black people have ancestors who are white, but also some ordinary British white people are connected by family ties to the black people of the Caribbean or to the estimated 20,000 black people who settled in Britain as a result of the trade.
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The history of Britain is inextricably linked with that trade, and therefore with somewhere like Jamaica. Indeed, without the trade in slaves Jamaica as we know it would not exist.When you look at family trees - anybody's family tree, people's individual histories, not the winner-takes-all history of nations - the question of identity becomes very complicated. It would be nice and simple if we were all pure. If we all came from where our parents, grandparents and beyond came from. If we all just took on our forefathers' culture. Wouldn't it be nice if we could say that all Africans are black and all English are white? Wouldn't it be simple if, when some racist (as many have done in my time) shouts at me to go back to where I came from, that I got an image of Jamaica in my head instead of thinking that I must go back to minding cars outside the Arsenal? It would make for easy argument - it would help the bigots' cause. We would all fit into our separate boxes, and in times of change, such as those that we are now living through, we could retreat into them and lick our wounds. But it is not like that.
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Any history book will show that England has never been an exclusive club, but rather a hybrid nation. The effects of the British Empire were personal as well as political. And as the sun has finally set on the Empire, we are now having to face up to all of these realities.
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Empire is over and, as Britain is being devolved down into its component parts, there is a loss of identity that has settled upon England. Darcus Howe, in his recent Channel 4 programme, White Tribe, went on a journey to find English culture, which so many believe resides only in the white population. Many blamed the multi-cultural nature of England for the country's plight. But this sense of loss was always going to happen - losing something as powerful as an empire will always hurt. It was going to happen even if my dad had not set sail on the Windrush; it was going to happen even if Idi Amin had not expelled the Asian population from Uganda. But perhaps the vitality of multi-culturalism is now the catalyst that is speeding up a necessary period of soul-searching.
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I am English. Born and bred, as the saying goes. (As far as I can remember, it is born and bred and not born-and-bred-with-avery-long-life-of-white-ancestors-directly-descended-from-Anglo-Saxons.) England is the only society I truly know and sometimes understand. I don't look as the English did in the England of the 30s or before, but being English is my birthright.
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England is my home. An eccentric place where sometimes I love being English.When I hear that the surge of energy needed after a good television programme is because everyone is getting up to make a cup of tea, it makes me smile. I, too, was there with my teapot after the last episode of Only Fools And Horses. I love that our national dish has become curry. And the view from London's Waterloo Bridge just takes my breath away. I hate being English when I hear what happened to Stephen Lawrence. When every day seems like a battle against racism, and hatred, and the quiet, polite hostility that holds many black and Asian people back from fulfilling their potential. I want to belong to anywhere but this place where I am made to feel like an outsider - not welcome, definitely not welcome at all.
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Saying that I'm English doesn't mean I want to be assimilated; to take on the majority white culture to the exclusion of all other. (I cannot live without rice and peas. I now dance like a lunatic when Jamaica win anything. And I will always make a noise when moved by emotion.) I will not take up a flag and wave it to intimidate. And being English will not stop me from fighting to live in a country free from racism and social divisiveness.
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There are many white people here who are appalled that someone like me could be English. And there are many black people with similar backgrounds to mine who do not wish to be called English. But national identity is not a personal issue. It is political. It cannot be decided at the whim of the individual. Englishness must never be allowed to attach itself to ethnicity.
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The majority of English people are white, but some are not. If we say otherwise, it is in tacit agreement with the idea of racial purity, and we all know where that dangerous myth can lead. Let England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland be nations that are plural and inclusive.
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Last year, I was in Scotland reading at the Edinburgh Festival. I was telling the audience about my great-grandfather with the flame-red hair. After the reading, a Scottish woman came up to me, held my arm and whispered, "You know, I could just tell you were Scottish."
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