Yet, despite everything that these people brought with them,
frequently they were met with hostility and racism from ignorant and prejudiced
members of the British population, fearing the imminent arrival of a new
community and determined to claim ‘ownership’ over their home towns and cities.
Often, their view was that migrants do not belong in Britain as they, and their
families, were not born in Britain.
The hypocrisy of this
is almost unbelievable, as very few people can truly say that they entirely
descend from Britain. There will always be one point in history or another where the
people that we have descended from can all be labelled ‘migrants’. My grandma’s
father and his family fled Moscow in the 1917 Russian revolution when he was a
little boy; my grandfather’s parents were both German. So who am I? I am
related to people who weren’t born here, so, according to the more small minded
among us, am I ‘truly British’? Probably not.
If we go way back into the past, then very few of us are
‘truly British’. The Romans first arrived in Britannia in 55BC and invaded in
43AD; they were followed by Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans. Each of these
migrants colonised various bits of Britain and significantly influenced British
culture in terms of the English language, religion, food, art, music and ways
of living. We are all, particularly in England, related to these people;
therefore our roots lie across other parts of the world and not just Britain. So really, the concept of only being allowed to live in a country because your family
descend from said country is redundant.
Out of upheaval often comes fantastic poetry. I wonder what literature, music and art migrants coming into Britain now will produce. Will they express joy and relief at having reached Britain? Or fear of
hostility in their new home? Perhaps both, although I hope for less of the
latter.
Island Man
Morning
And island man wakes up
To the sound of blue surf
In his head
The steady breaking and wombing
Wild seabirds
And fishermen pushing out to sea
The sun surfacing defiantly from the East
Of his small emerald island
He always comes back
Groggily groggily
Comes back to the sands
Of a grey metallic soar
to surge of wheels
To dull North circular roar
Muffling muffling
His crumpled pillow waves
Island man heaves himself
Another London day.
A poem by Grace
Nichols. She migrated from Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, to
the UK in 1977 and her poem Island Man tells
a few truths about what it is like to be a migrant living in Britain.
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