Home Again: Stories of Migration and Return

by Celia Sorhaindo (Editor), Polly Pattullo (Editor)

Overview

The migrants' journey is a well-told story but much less is known about those who return. Why do they go back? What is it like to be back home? Home Again is a collection of contemporary real-life stories by men and women who have returned to Dominica.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780953222452
Publisher:	Papillote Press
Publication date:	07/30/2009
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Celia Sorhaindo is the co-compiler of Home Again. She was born in Dominica and left with her family for England in 1976. She returned to Dominica in 2005 and is currently a freelance photographer and poet. Her first collection of poetry will be published in 2020.

Polly Pattullo is the publisher of Papillote Press, a former journalist and author.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

JEAN POPEAU

Just before I left Dominica in 1957, the headmaster of my school in Belvedere made me stand up with everyone sitting there, and said: "Who is the one going to England?" And I said, "Me". And he said, "Boy, you're going to be a big shot." I was 11 at the time and the assumption was that one of the reasons you were going to England was to get a better education.

That school, near where I'm now building my home, was basically one large crumbling wooden building – there were no room dividers, just a series of benches and each bench was a class and you had teachers shouting at each class to get your attention. There was a sign that said, "Cleanliness is next to godliness", but there were outside toilets and no facilities for washing your hands. We would get free powdered milk which they would mix every morning to provide something to drink. We learned about England at school, and I probably knew more about English heroes than the fellas I met when I went to school in London. We learned about Rodney and Nelson and their exploits in the Caribbean but not much about the rest of our history. Education was limited to colonial matters.

My father went to England in 1955 to seek some better sort of economic situation. My parents were essentially peasant farmers from La Roche, but it was so dire on the island that it was impossible to get on and look after your family. We would go to our garden which was in the mountains with our mother at the weekend and during school holidays. We would all carry a basket of food and have to cross the White river on foot to get home and if the river was high we would be in trouble. We had to walk everywhere; we only had shoes for going to church, we had few clothes. It was a precarious form of life. Flour and rice and codfish were luxuries but perhaps because all families had poverty in common, as children it didn't hit you hard. The only thing you knew was that children in town were probably better off.

Even so, there was time for enjoyment – dances on a Saturday, cricket matches, celebrations for first communion (photograph previous page), and at Christmas people would celebrate for a whole week; then you would have carnival – and there would be bands going from village to village. There was a great sense of communal activity and caring. Things started to change, however, in the 1950s, when people, especially the men, started going to England. And then you began to get an atmosphere of people saying, "Well if you're getting money from your man and if you want me to do something for you, you'll have to pay for it." Then money started to figure in transactions.

When my father had been in England a couple of years, he decided to send for the rest of us. For my sister and I it seemed that we were going to be plucked away from the island because our father wanted his family with him, and there was no alternative but to adjust to a new way of life. I had mixed feelings about leaving Dominica. On one hand you wanted to get away from the poverty and you were told you would get a better education, on the other hand the natural setting and beauty of the place was still something that struck you. My father would write when he was away but he did not say much – he would write about practical matters like "I have been able to send you a little bit of money, look after it" and so on. We knew that it was cold in England though and that there was prejudice – those stories filtered back. And there was an awareness that there was poverty there because a lot of them were sharing a room, and, wages being limited, they had to really scrimp and save to send any money back home. I didn't have a concept of England as a mother country, but as an alien place that I would have to get used to.

My mother, sister and I left on a Greek ship crowded with emigrants in September 1957. It was an atmosphere of chaos on the ship, children running around and spilling things on people's clothes, belongings spread all over the place. It docked in Genoa and then we went on a train to England where my father met us. We ended up living in the most run-down part of east London you could imagine, among the gasometers of Millwall, on the Isle of Dogs. We lived in a terraced house, in a couple of rooms with my uncle. It was very cramped and crowded. You were basically in very meagre conditions, and you looked out at a dank and rather depressing street. You were suddenly in a very enclosed atmosphere from what you were used to. But then London was still in a state of post-war poverty – terraced houses with no bathrooms and outside toilets, coal fires for heating the rooms.

We had a radio but there was no TV to talk about – and anyway we couldn't afford a television. I enjoyed the radio because it helped me to improve my English – I started to listen avidly and I remember listening to a programme called The Clitheroe Kid – the comedy helped you to get used to the language and the working-class culture. There was also a programme called In Town Tonight about the West End of London, and Vic Oliver's dance music show.

We met people from other Caribbean islands – a lot of men on their own, who had left wife and children behind, living in one room as in Samuel Selvon's Lonely Londoners. But there were not many children coming from the Caribbean at that time – it was very bleak. People would ignore you when you went to the shops and serve others.

When I arrived there was no time to take the eleven plus exam and there was no real assessment of me so I just fell into an all-white, working-class, secondary modern Catholic school in Poplar. A certain way to ensure that you become an atheist is to go to a Catholic school. It was very run down, there was a lot of disruption, poor behaviour, poor standards. There were the usual racist remarks from the children and also from the teachers, who were really quite ignorant about the Caribbean. I was shocked. The school provided a very crude education and it was assumed that you were factory fodder.

I was a school failure really and came out with only one O Level. But I was interested in science and got a job in a science laboratory doing control work for a factory. I had to educate myself after work with evening classes and part-time study. Eventually, I got qualifications to do a degree, and went to North London Polytechnic as it was then, in 1970, to do a degree in philosophy of all things.

My parents never discussed coming back – it was too early on in that period. But they enjoyed talking amongst themselves about people they knew and funny experiences they'd had back home. There was very little discussion about what was going on in England. Neither of them went back to Dominica. Mother was killed in a car accident in 1966, and father had no interest in going back – which was strange because he didn't really belong in England; he might have enjoyed life better in the Caribbean but he'd cut himself off. By then I was trying to educate myself, and my sister and I were established in England. England was becoming much more a part of your life.

But I'd kept up my interest in the Caribbean. There was something called the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington – with exhibits about Commonwealth countries – and I'd go there and just look at these pictures of the Caribbean, and I'd get into a nostalgic haze about the flora and the fauna. It was basically nostalgia, because I knew there was no work in the Caribbean, and people wanting to emigrate.

My first visit back to Dominica was for about six weeks in 1974. We had a relatively rich aunt who lived in Roseau and I stayed with her, and then with my uncle in La Roche. I was happy – I like fishing and walking, and I went back to that. My needs were not great, but I could see there was a general air of depression. I made inquiries about getting a job in teaching but I couldn't continue my own education here so I decided to go back. It was very vague but I thought at that point that I would want a home here to keep my acquaintance with the island.

I got married in England in 1975 to a Trinidadian, and had two children. I must say I didn't tell them much about Dominica and the kids weren't that interested. We came here as a family in 1992 – my daughter was about 12 and my son was a couple of years older, but they never really took to Dominica, even to visit. I've come to terms with the assumption that my children will identify with British culture – let's face it is a dynamic culture, and there's a new generation of kids who are creating a new culture in which all sorts of inter-cultural interchanges are taking place. It's now a world in which my children can fit. It's a completely different world to the one I emigrated to.

In London, I ran a youth club in Fulham, but didn't like it much so decided to go into teaching. I taught English in secondary schools in east London, then decided to go into multi-cultural education, teaching children who needed a boost to develop their academic work. I also taught privately and met other cultures on a very intimate level. I've taught Muslim children and a Sikh child who was physically handicapped – I had cultural relationships with very different cultures. I also taught in Bedford and then in Dudley, in the Midlands. My best time in England was getting involved in the education system – it expands your horizons in the way that nothing else does.

I stayed in teaching for 30 years – but my primary interest was not in terms of a career but of self-development – I did my Masters degree in the sociology of literature and then for my doctorate I tried to chart the philosophical background of the Negritude movement and the literary way it expressed itself. The movement, led by Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Leopold Senghor from Senegal in the 1930s, was basically a literary attempt to place the black man in the European world of the time and to reject the French policy of assimilation. My thesis was published in 2003 as Dialogues of Negritude by Carolina Academic Press in the States.

My work was, I suppose, my way of coming to terms with my personal relationship with European culture. I felt it helped me to root myself in the black world and to try to maintain my contact with this island; I also thought it helped to have some kind of relationship with the black world which is more authentic than just staying in England and losing myself in an English culture. I was constantly aware that I was not born into that culture, and that the first 11 years in that other culture did mark me, and had a profound effect on my thinking about and relationship with European culture.

There are things I'm highly critical of about European culture – its materialism leads to rootlessness, and that affects one's own children; the lack of an authentic relationship with nature and the spiritual drift, and, of course, its attitude to the black world and third world countries in general. And I am heavily critical of certain attitudes of white males – that they see black women as sexual objects – and for that reason I can't get on with some of them. A lot of other things you'd recognise as crudely racist. Therefore that has all shaped the way I see Europe and the way I see my life in Europe.

All this was a reason to maintain contact with a place like this which is rooted in a cultural background with which I am much more sympathetic than the European culture I happened to live in over the years. I felt that my soul never belonged in Europe.

I kept in touch with Dominica through the Chronicle newspaper which I received by post – and, later on, the internet. My sister was also living here – she moved back before I did. At one point, I did join a group who met in Earls Court who were going to do something about the school system in Dominica but I wasn't comfortable there, and then I moved to Bedford. So I really didn't get involved in groups, although I went to DUKA meetings, used to go to their celebrations and I gave a talk for them once.

The actual mental decision about coming back to live started I would say about a decade ago in 1998 when I came on holiday by myself and I made inquiries about getting a piece of land. It starts as a vague wish and then you have to keep questioning yourself and think how am I going to do this. I bought a piece of land in 2002 in Belvedere and I had at the back of my mind that I might build a small place which I can come to as a holiday home. Then in 2004, when my new wife and I visited, we bought an extra piece, and we discussed building about a year or so later. And it took off from there. I came back in January 2008 and started building.

My experiences coming back here have been pretty good. I think I prepared the way: I'm living and working in a place where I am known. I know for other Dominicans who are living in a different community to the one they were brought up in that might be a problem. If you say Ruthina's my sister, then straight away they know you are part of this community. It helps you to fit back in. Then you also need Creole to communicate authentically, especially to the older people. If I came back with a Yankee accent and no Creole, it would have been much more difficult. I learnt Creole as a boy even though they tried to cane it out of you.

When people call you English, it may be on a friendly or an unfriendly basis, because you have an English accent. It may be a way of suggesting you're alien – you're English in your attitude, you're stiff, you're formal, and you don't understand the goings on here. It's shorthand for saying you don't belong. They seem to recognise you're English from your walk, your appearance. I've been called English in town without even opening my mouth. I wonder how they can work it out. Perhaps you're brisker in your walk, more purposeful – it could be all sorts of things. But there's an attitude towards the people who they call the English. In its most benign form it simply means that you've lived in England for a long time.

What I've experienced is the idea that you're better off. I remember talking to one guy and I said the pension I'm getting from England is not that much. He said that it's much higher than a top civil servant's salary here. It's a widely held view that you're much better off – and that somehow you should be paying more. You can afford it, so you ought to be making a bigger contribution. Then the civil servants think that you hassle more. They will want to deny you your rights. They sometimes say to returnees, why don't you go back to England – they see you as complaining too much. But as everyone knows, this island wouldn't be able to continue without those informal contributions that people abroad send back.

Migration is a common historical fact within the whole Caribbean – it's been a very big factor of life. So many of these people have relatives who have been to other islands to better themselves. They've all made the attempt. They're all economic migrants. We've just gone further – it's difficult to understand this resentment for the people who've gone to England. I got the impression that Yankees are more admired because US culture is more admired than British culture. America is somehow seen as a more friendly nation to the Caribbean, whereas England is the colonial culture and so on. The assumption is that you will have picked up some of those embedded colonial attitudes, through osmosis as it were, from having lived in the culture for so long, and you are indirectly bringing them back. I suspect that has a lot to do with it.

The government needs to step in and set a tone. The prime minister needs to set a tone nationally and say we need to recognise that these people have come back, and are making a positive contribution, and we should stop calling them English and say they are Dominicans like the rest of us. If they did that and there was a discussion in the media it would help to change attitudes because so much of this is based, of course, on ignorance.

The situation around returnees creates dynamics which we're obviously experiencing at the moment, and the government would need to get involved more actively if it is to be a successful social development. It just can't be allowed to develop ad hoc without the involvement of the government – it needs a training of the population.

But I see a great complacency here which needs to be tackled if the island is going to progress; there needs to be a certain kind of refusal to accept this complacency. The island won't survive among other Caricom countries unless this complacency, this poor attitude to business and service, is tackled. There needs to be self-criticism – this attitude of "it's our way" and "this is our life style" is ultimately going to cost a hell of a lot. It's much better if this criticism comes from inside – but if it means the returnees doing it, so be it, because we bring some kind of financial clout and, because we're engaged in business, we can make that kind of critical approach. Also there is the question of how does a small state like this survive? At the moment it begs to every Tom, Dick and Harry. That's a big worry for people returning. How can Dominica maintain services, infra-structure, with very few means to produce the finance to service those needs? The survival of the island is a big question mark.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Home Again"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Papillote Press and Dominica UK Association.
Excerpted by permission of Papillote Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Vincent John,
Map,
Introduction by Celia Sorhaindo,
Jean Popeau,
Alexandra Sorhaindo,
Clayton Shillingford,
Helena Durand,
Janet Heath,
Franklyn Georges,
Eustace Maxim,
Bernadette and Leonard Alexander,
Nursie Frederick,
Michael Baron,
Sylvester Joseph,
Francis Edwards,
Christopher Valerie,
Kenneth Bruney,
Heskeith Clarke,
Patricia Bobb,
Joan Etienne,
Billy Lawrence,
Stanley Paul,
Philbert Aaron,
Robert John,