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Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, by de tousan
From country and from town,
By de ship-load, by de plane-load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a pour out a Jamaica
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
What a islan! What a people!
Man an woman, old an young
Jus a pack dem bag an baggage
An tun history upside dung!
Some people doan like travel
But fe show dem loyalty
Dem all a open up cheap-fare-
To-Englan agency.
An week by week dem shippin off
Dem countryman like fire,
Fe immigrate an populate
De seat a de Empire.
Oonoo see how life is funny,
Oonoo see de tunabout?
Jamaica live fe box bread
Out a English people mout’.
For wen dem ketch a Englan,
An start play dem different role,
Some will settle down to work
An some will settle fe de dole.
Jane say de dole is not too bad
Because dey payin she
Two pounds a week fe seek a job
Dat suit her dignity.
Me say Jane will never fine work
At de rate how she dah look,
For all day she stay pon Aunt Fan couch
An read love-story book.
Wat a devilment a Englan!
Dem face war an brave de worse,
But me wonderin how dem gwine stan
Colonizin in reverse.
Louise Bennett, ‘Colonisation in Reverse’ (1966)Introduction
This chapter examines the ways in which migrant Caribbean diasporas inscribe critical paradoxes of migrancy and citizenship in contemporary Europe, concentrating on displaced inhabitants of French Caribbean overseas departments who were made citizens of France in 1946. The resulting diasporic intersections give rise to critical transformations of Frenchness and Caribbeanness engendered by the pressing presence in the metropoles of communities spawned by these migration-based demographic shifts. This French Caribbean-derived metropolitan community has become virtually 1 percent of the French hexagonal population, and their cultural and identitarian hybridities increasingly destabilize our current notions of nationality and belonging.
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