“INotes for the poem ‘Island in the Sun’

I was inspired to write this poem by the themes examined in the After the End project, namely who has the right to say when a crisis has ended. This resonated with me in particular because of my long-term creative determination to examine the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement.  

It is my strong belief that the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and slavery in 1838, did not lead to any sort of meaningful emancipation for Black people in the Caribbean. On the contrary, the majority of them continued to live in a form of state-sanctioned non-freedom without money, land, the right to vote or a chance to decide the laws of the land they were forced to work.

However, the former enslavers were given great fortunes in compensation for the loss of ‘their’ slaves, and also allowed to keep their land.

Black people in the Caribbean were further controlled and dominated by vagrancy laws soon after so-called emancipation which stopped them from being able to leave the plantations – their former prisons and places of extreme torture. This led to the further impoverishment of the majority of Black people in the Caribbean.

It was this poverty and mass unemployment, as well as Britain’s need for an influx of cheap labour after the Second World War, that led to the so-called Windrush generation.

However, Black people had lived, worked and been abused in Britain for hundreds of years before the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury dock in 1948.

The impact of that long-term abuse, both in the Caribbean and Britain, has undoubtedly had repercussions in terms of the financial (in)stability of the mass of Black people the UK. Its impact can also be seen in terms of health, well-being, family dynamics, the criminal justice system and countless other ways.

My poem attempts to look in particular at the continuing impact of enslavement on mother-daughter relationships. These trans-generational influences are suggested by the voice that can only be heard after death, and the duppies or ghosts of the enslaved that reach out to harm others in order to live.

I hope these ideas suggest that even death does not signal the end, especially in relation to the legacies of enslavement.

Jenny Mitchell, October 2024

https://indigodreamspublishing.com/jenny-mitchell

Centre for the Studies of the Legacies of British Slavery

Olusoga, D. (2016). Black and British. London: Macmillan.