Preface. Forced and Free Caribbean Migration: An Understanding of Modern Diasporas

• Author: Harry Goulbourne
• Pages: 11-24

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FORCED AND FREE CARIBBEAN MIGRATION

Forced and Free Caribbean Migration:

An Understanding of Modern Diasporas

HARRY GOULBOURNE

PREFACEPREFACE

PREFACEPREFACE

PREFACE

IntroductionIntroduction

IntroductionIntroduction

Introduction

The theme of this volume and the conference from which the papers

are drawn — Caribbean migration: forced and free — appropriately

describes a central aspect of the Caribbean region’s history in the post-

Columbian age. It also points to some major characteristics of the region’s

present condition, as the several themes suggest. The task here is to pose a

few hypotheses or questions, which, to one degree or another, may touch

on some of the themes addressed in this timely volume.

I had the privilege to be taught at the University of the West Indies

(UWI) how better to understand my Jamaican and Caribbean heritage,

and to draw upon the knowledge and wisdom that come from the little

things we convey to each other in the course of our daily lives. The songs

of Bob Marley and the poems of Louise Bennett (Miss Lou) sensitively

captured some of these things and sent them across the world as part of

the migration process. It is also part of my own biography as part of the

narrative of post-World War II migration. I arrived in a cold, grey London

of the late 1950s from the warm, green hills of Clarendon, Jamaica, where

I had learnt the disciplines and rigours of early to bed and early to rise,

barefoot to school after collecting water, feeding the animals, and

remembering what I was taught the previous day (English grammar,

spelling, times table, etc.); and in the evening, repeating the cycle of rural

life, such as story-telling in an age when we had little exposure to radio

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