Caribbean Kinship from Within and Without

      An Granny seh don't walk so boasy, mind ah buk up mi toe        an fall down an tear up de dress pon rockstone because she      going to fold it up an wrap it up back in de crepe paper widtwo camphor ball an put it back in de suitcase, dis very evening,    as soon as ah tek it aff, put it back in de suitcase dat ah going                                                                                                to carry to Englan.    Crass de sea, girl, yuh going crass de sea, an a likkle water fall    from Granny eye which mek er cross an she shake me han aff        er dress where ah was holding on to make sure dat ah don't     fall down for de shoes hard to walk in on rockstone, an she                                                                      wipe er eye wid er kerchiefAn ah looking up in Granny face, ah know Granny face good.    She say is me mi madda an grampa put all de lines in it, an                                                          ah wondering which lines is mine                    From Jean Binta Breeze 'The Arrival of Brighteye'.¹

Brighteye's mother works for wages abroad while the girl's grandmother raises Brighteye back home on the island; goods, money and children circulate between the sites of their productive and reproductive labour. The poem offers a child's-eye view of social and economic practices deep-rooted and widespread in the Caribbean world. Overseas migration was integral to the household economies within which Caribbean freed-people negotiated the precarious opportunities post-slavery societies presented. From Kingston and Bridgetown, St Lucia and Savanna-la-Mar they embarked: at first for the few British islands where exports still prospered; then to the Central American rim-lands where new American investment funded railroads, canals and bananas; later to Cuba and Harlem as the North American economy roared in the 1920s. Only after a world economic crisis and a second devastating European war did British Caribbean colonial subjects redirect their migratory circuits toward their own metropole. The Edwardian and interwar years had already seen London emerge as a nodal point for Caribbean scholars, professionals, exiles and activists. But it was the decade from 1955 to 1965 that saw Caribbean working men and women stream into the gritty cities of southeast England in sizable numbers for the first time: some 250,000 strong.

'The Arrival of Brighteye' captures the hopes and pain of that era. Fathers and sons; daughters, grannies and aunties crossed the Atlantic in chain migrations endlessly repeated, while the family members still on the islands opened barrels of goods, longed for letters with news. With speed that looks remarkable in hindsight, sending communities reoriented. They adjusted to the new distance to be travelled and the new technologies that spanned it, reworked cultural templates of familial authority and obligation to create kin networks that functioned on a transatlantic scale. Poet Jean 'Binta' Breeze explores this historical moment by immersing us in Brighteye's experience. We feel the pinch of the unfamiliar imported shoes, recognize each wrinkle in Granny's face. The poem carries us from the easy familiarity of the village square to the rainy English dock where we feel Brighteye's terror – even her desperate need to 'weee' – when a woman glimpsed dockside is revealed not as mamma but a 'white white woman' who 'is nat mi madda at tall tall tall.' The poem ends with Brighteye in England, now grown with children of her own, mourning her widowed mother's departure for Jamaica and asking 'an where ah going to put my head now, when all de others resting theirs on me, where ah going to rest mine'.²

These are the themes of Family Love in the Diaspora, Mary Chamberlain's wide-ranging exploration of diasporic Caribbean families and their meaning for those who create them. Chamberlain too walks us from the village squares where once, fond memories record, every adult had the right and duty to demand proper manners from...