Abstract
Second-generation Anglo-Caribbean writers, who have often grown up in the metropolis, often show less ambivalence to the English and Welsh countryside environments in their accounts and instead write them from a viewpoint that is less colonially refracted than that of their predecessors. This chapter looks at contemporary accounts by Andrea Levy, Caryl Phillips, and Charlotte Williams. Levy and Phillips’s characters negotiate a difficult relationship with the countryside because of their urban backgrounds, for example by using urban or city terminology to describe rural or country scenes. Both Levy’s and Phillips’s protagonists remain at the margins, continuing to struggle to fit into English countryside village life. However, Williams’s experiences growing up in rural North Wales coupled with her deep connections to both the Caribbean and to her mother’s “Welshness” have allowed her to see and reimagine Wales in vivid and colourful ways.
Black People and Countryside Don’t Go Together in White People’s Thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Other second generation authors such as Zadie Smith (Jamaican mother and British father) and Courttia Newland (Jamaican and Bajan parents) are both successful British writers, Smith especially so having been nominated for the Man Booker prize for her novel On Beauty, as well as winning the Orange prize for the same work in 2006. However, both writers’ works deal almost exclusively with urban experiences rather than rural. Comprehensive anthologies Write Black, Write British (2005), and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000) yield little in the way of explicitly rural writing, and that which they do contain has often been anthologized or published elsewhere. Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (2012), which organizes itself according to a geographical framework of the British Isles—Scotland , North, Wales , Midlands, South—has a much greater volume of writing about the rural landscape ; I examine some of the poetry contained therein about rural areas in this study’s earlier chapters (Walcott and Nichols).
- 2.
In interviews, journalists have expressed their surprise at Zephaniah’s choice to live in Spalding, Lincolnshire. Lynn Barber writes the following: “Benjamin Zephaniah has lived in Birmingham , Jamaica , Newham, Egypt, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and now, at 50, divides his time between Beijing and a village near Spalding, Lincolnshire. It’s the Spalding bit that I find incongruous. You just do not expect to find dreadlocked Rastafarian dub poets in Spalding, Lincs”. The Observer. 17 January 2009.
On another occasion, Hannah Pool asks: “I’m always confused by black people who choose to live in the English countryside . Why do it to yourself?” Zephaniah replies, “Because it’s great, and we’re British and we can live anywhere we want to. This is our country, and if we keep living in inner cities people will stereotype us as inner-city people”. “Question Time: Benjamin Zephaniah ”. The Guardian. 21 May 2009.
- 3.
Walcott’s English undergraduate professor had said Bog Walk was like a kind of England located somewhere in Jamaica . This incident is further detailed in Chapter 4.
- 4.
In 2003, Zephaniah made headlines by famously refusing the honorific Order of the British Empire, telling then Prime Minister Tony Blair to “stick it” and the Queen to “stop going on about the empire” (Zephaniah “Me?”).
- 5.
“Pastoral Interlude”. Ingrid Pollard , 1984.
- 6.
For further discussion on Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes series of photographs, particularly in relation to tourism, see James Procter’s Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing, Manchester UP, 2003, pp. 181–185, and P. Kinsman . “Landscape , Race and National Identity: The Photography of Ingrid Pollard .” Area, vol. 27 no. 4, 1995, pp. 300–310.
- 7.
This “illusion” of the countryside and the buildings is reminiscent of Rochester’s exchange with Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea about the reality of houses and buildings, in contrast to the mountains and waterfalls (46). This is examined in detail in Chapter 2.
- 8.
“Welsh and West Indian, ‘like nothing … seen before’: Unfolding Diasporic Lives In Charlotte Williams’s Sugar and Slate ”. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2008, vol. 6, iss. 2, art. 2.
- 9.
See also Duncan and Lambert . “Landscapes of Home,” in: A Companion to Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, 382–403.
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Johnson, J. (2019). Redefinitions: Race and Rurality. In: Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04134-2_6
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