Small Islands and the Space In Between: Exploring the Liminal World of Andrea Levy

• Author: Kim Robinson-Walcott
• Pages: 99-112

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SMALL ISLANDS AND THE SPACE IN BETWEEN

Small Islands and the Space In Between:

Exploring the Liminal World of Andrea Levy

KIM ROBINSON-WALCOTT

77

77

7

Inglan is a bitch

dere’s no escaping it

Inglan is a bitch

dere’s no runin whe fram it

— Lynton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ (2002)

Jamaican-British dub poet Lynton Kwesi Johnson was emerging as an

exciting new countercultural voice when I was at university in London

in the early 1980s. During that time I had my first encounters with ‘black

Brits’ — the descendants of those first pioneering West Indians who bravely

boarded ships such as the SS Empire Windrush1 seeking to better themselves

in the ‘mother country’. Two of my friends at college were such descendants

— second-generation Jamaicans, first-generation Britons, still at that time

an anomaly in the university setting: none of their classmates in each of

their programmes was a black person born and/or raised in Britain — and

in fact my friends may well have been the only two black Britons at the

college altogether. At that time, black Britons were uncommon in elite

tertiary institutions, but common in the Underground, on the buses,

working as drivers, conductors; common on the street corners of Brixton.

wen mi jus come to Landan town

mi use to work pan di andahgroun