Family Love in the Diaspora

Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience

Mary Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765803078
• eBook ISBN: 9781351520355
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Colonial social policy in the British West Indies from the nineteenth century onward assumed that black families lacked morals, structure, and men, a void that explained poverty and lack of citizenship. African-Caribbean families appeared as the mirror opposite of the "ideal" family advocated by the white, colonial authorities. Yet contrary to this image, what provided continuity in the period and contributed to survival was in fact the strength of family connections, their inclusivity and support. This study is based on 150 life story narratives across three generations of forty-five families who originated in the former British West Indies. The author focuses on the particular axes of Caribbean peoples from the former British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, and Great Britain. Divided into four parts, the chapters within each present an oral history of migrant African-Caribbean families, demonstrating the varieties, organization, and dynamics of family through their memories and narratives. It traces the evolution of Caribbean life; argues how the family can be seen as the tool that helps transmit and transform historical mentalities; examines the dynamics of family life; and makes comparisons with Indo-Caribbean families. Above all, this is a story of families that evolved, against the odds of slavery and poverty, to form a distinct Creole form, through which much of the social history of the English-speaking Caribbean is refracted. "Family Love in the Diaspora" offers an important new perspective on African-Caribbean families, their history, and the problems they face, for now and the future. It offers a long overdue historical dimension to the debates on Caribbean families.

Part 1

Introduction and Perspectives

1
Families and Oral History

“Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences. Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and the wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown.”¹

Shaped by slavery, dispersed through migration, African-Caribbean families have long confused church and civil authorities and figured as the scapegoat for social ills in the Caribbean and its diaspora. DuBois’ haunting words introduce these essays on African-Caribbean families that attempt to rethink the meanings and forms that such families have assumed for family members in the Caribbean and Britain.

The book is based on life story interviews across three generations of forty-five families who originated in the former British West Indies,² centering on the axes of Caribbean peoples to Britain from the former British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. The mechanisms and success of the incorporation of African-Caribbean peoples into their “host” societies has depended on the reception climate and environment,³ and has played out differently in Europe and North America. In terms of family life, however, the experience of Anglophone African-Caribbean families in Britain echoes that of Canada and the United States, and shares similarities with other African-Caribbean families in the Franco-phone and Dutch Caribbean and in their diasporas in France and the Netherlands.⁴ The focus of this book, on the Anglophone Caribbean, may be narrow and British, but the resonances, like the families themselves, are broad and global.

***

The predominant belief that guided colonial social policy in the British West Indies throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century assumed that black families lacked morals, structure, and men, a void that could explain poverty and lack of citizenship. African-Caribbean families appeared as the mirror opposite of the “ideal” family advocated by the white, colonial authorities.⁵ Varieties of conjugal unions, high illegitimacy rates, female-headed households, female employment, child fostering, and an inclusive embrace of all kin (and fictive kin) as family members stood in marked contrast to the (apparently) stable unions of Christian marriages, predicated on the autonomy and exclusiveness of family life, on the subservience of women and children to the authority of the male, and on the prominence given to the male line in inheritance and family identification. African-Caribbean families, and Caribbean family life, were marked out as abnormal and, as R. T. Smith observed, “elaborate theories have been developed to explain why the nuclear family [in the Caribbean] should exist and what forces have inhibited its proper development. Most of these theories assumed that the lower classes have ‘deviant’ families and then attempt to explain why.”⁶

As we shall see in chapter two the notion of deviancy has a long pedigree, inextricably caught up in the prejudices of slave society, the prescriptions of colonial rule, and the presumptions of an academic community that long attributed cultural absence and social negativity to observations and analyses of African-Caribbean families. Migration to Britain provided it with a new twist by catapulting the “traditional” Caribbean family into the divisive and disruptive modern, Western world in which—unlike other “traditional” communities—there were no customs or cultures on which to draw and from which to derive strength and sustenance. Despite some sensitive work by Driver and Barrow⁷

that indicated the vitality of families and the strength of culture on family life through migration, it was widely (and authoritatively) assumed that African-Caribbean families were deficient. “It is no cause for surprise,” observed Lord Scarman, in his report on the Brixton riots of 1981, “that the impact of British social conditions on the matriarchal extended family structure of the West Indian immigrants has proved to be severe. Mothers, who in the West Indies formed the focus of family, became in many cases wage earners who were absent from the family home.”⁸

The 1991 U.K. census data highlighted what appeared to be this deviation by the African-Caribbean community from the “British” norm, revealing in particular high levels of single-parent mother-headed households. It was assumed that this was evidence of a breakdown in the transmission of family values and authority between the generations, aggravated (in one view) by undue influences from the more libertarian sectors of the white community toward single parenthood and state dependency.⁹ Far from West Indians becoming “like us,” as the early race relations ethic wished and assumed, African-Caribbean peoples in Britain had refused to conform to the categories set by politicians or academics. African-Caribbean families had “broken down” in the course of their sojourn in Britain. “The shocking truth about the breakdown of black family life in Britain can be revealed today.” So ran a lead story by the journalist Jon Salmon in the Sunday Express in 1995:

Research shows that among the West Indian community the sanctity of the family is in “meltdown.” Latest unpublished Government Statistics obtained by the Sunday Express reveal that almost six in ten black mothers are bringing up children on their own, urged on by our benefits system. ...In the black community the traditional family is collapsing at a faster rate than among any other group, costing the State at least £130 million a year.¹⁰

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These essays take a different perspective. They are an oral history of migrant African-Caribbean families, presenting the varieties, organization and dynamics of family life through the memories and narratives of three or more generations of family members in the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. They tell a very different story, and one rarely recorded through the words of the participants. It is a story of survival and resistance, of solidarity and reciprocity. It is a story of emotional attachments and family support that extends vertically through lineages, horizontally through kinship networks, and transnationally across the oceans. Above all, it is a story of families that evolved, against the odds of slavery and poverty, to form a distinct creole form,¹¹ through which much of the social history of the English-speaking Caribbean is refracted.

Contemporary patterns of marriage and family life emerged during slavery, as Barry Higman¹² has shown and, developing in opposition to slavery, evolved into a recognizable creole marriage system, drawing on both African and European values and practices. Far from representing an inchoate social system, the extensiveness and inclusiveness of African-Caribbean families is one of the major drivers of Caribbean social organization. The complex structures that characterize Caribbean creole families are based on a communitarian philosophy of society, in which lineage and kinship are foregrounded as structuring practices, through and in which the individual and his/her sense of self is inextricably bound. Social organization was premised on metaphors of family and models of family life in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and contributed toward defining a sense of identity and nationhood.

Overt acknowledgment of the importance of families in the structuring of West Indian society and nationhood has, for the most part, been slow and reluctant. Its first articulation can be traced to the aftermath of the 1937 riots in the West Indies. While those riots drew official attention to the poverty of the region, and to the families who lived within it, they also crystallized demands for change, converting the postemancipation quest for freedom into recognition that emancipation could not be achieved without political self determination and independence. In the process, they heralded a new confidence not only in the idea and development of nation, but in Caribbean culture and society.

Until then, West Indians had lived within a dual perspective: a sanitized sanctioned perception of colonies blessed to be under the benign rule of Britain, and her superior governance, culture, and social organization, and an unofficial, unsanctioned perception that British rule in practice meant poverty, hardship, and discrimination, and a denigration of the culture, social organization and family life of the region. The 1937 riots provided permission—in the Halbwachian sense¹³—to think and articulate this duality, and to begin to acknowledge, and later valorize, in literature and poetry, the families, village life, communitarian values, culture, and popular culture of the vast majority of black West Indians. As the Barbadian novelist and writer, George Lamming, whose novel In the Castle of My Skin was one of the first to celebrate families as the mainstay of Barbadian life, explained:

It is not often recognized that the major thrust of Caribbean literature in English rose from the soil of labor resistance in the 1930s. The expansion of social justice initiated by the labor struggle had a direct effect on liberating the imagination and restoring the confidence of men and women in the essential humanity of their simple lives. In the cultural history of the region, there is a direct connection between labor and literature.¹⁴

The sense of pride with which West Indians recalled their childhoods and the family and neighborhoods that structured them, and the sense of achievement with which West Indians described their extensive family networks, often dispersed through migration, may be seen as bedrocks of social pride, and a confident assertion of social relations. That many of these recollections were located and filtered through the struggles for independence from the 1920s to the 1960s is important, for their articulation was an affirmation and celebration of difference, an alternative and, sometimes, subversive worldview. They thus became a contributory element in the creation of West Indian nationhood and remain key to contemporary identities in the diaspora.

The centrality of families to the social history of the Caribbean is argued in the following chapters. The paucity of conventional sources on family history means that life stories and oral histories have become an important source, as well as offering the possibility of observing families from the inside. What people say about their lives and life choices provides rich empirical data into the hidden and sometimes secret histories of those disenfranchised from the historical record by class, race or gender. In addition, it can provide not only what Clifford Geertz described as “thick description”¹⁵ but also insights into the structures, realities and mentalities that shape the past and the present.¹⁶ As a first port of call, therefore, life stories can offer the everyday detail of material life and the social relationships that underpin and weave through it. They offer insights into the imaginative structures that provide it with coherence and relevance¹⁷ and into the sensibilities and subjectivities of the narrator.

The emphasis on structuralism and positivism, at least in the second half of the twentieth century, has tended to demote the personal account as statistically irrelevant and objectively unverifiable even though, paradoxically, such demotion goes against the grain of what should constitute sociology: an interest in the subject and his/her relation to society and its history, the “varieties of individuality” and “the modes of epochal change.”¹⁸ More recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in the personal account, as Ken Plummer suggests in his powerful plea for the value of life stories as the means of:

getting close to living human beings, accurately yet imaginatively picking up the way they express their understandings of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Part 1 Introduction and Perspectives
• Part 2 Narratives of the Family
• Part 3 Families through the Narratives of...
• Part 4 Comparison and Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index