In 1986, cultural theorist Stuart Hall delivered a series of seminars on English culture in Naples. “If you live in England for long enough,” he said, “you might come to think that if the English are not re-educated about themselves, they will murder us all in our beds.” The sentiment reflects the experience of many colonial migrants. Hall arrived in England from Jamaica in 1951, a journey recounted in his memoir Familiar Stranger and referred to in Colin Grant’s What We Leave We Carry: Voices of Migration to Britain. Grant’s parents undertook the same journey across the Atlantic as part of the Windrush generation. Leaving their homeland, they carried “an ambivalence towards Britain with them… compounded by the hostility they met here”.
The author, raised in multiracial Luton, feels his country’s current mood has come to resemble the “toxic” 1960s and 1970s, “when migrants and their families were viewed with great suspicion”. Reminiscent of Powellite bluster and National Front aggression, “ugly anti-migrant protests” have “ripped through Britain in recent years”. As the word migrant, Grant notes, is “weaponised by right-wingers”, his new book seeks to redress the balance by presenting a “truer picture of England and the UK”.
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