These poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry - from Jamaica - was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. This late collection by Berry explores the different reasons he and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication was linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living: 'Mi one milkin cow just die! / Gone, gone - and leave me / Like hurricane disaster!' Windrush Songs ranges from from lyrical pictures of Caribbean country life to poems in the voices of travellers with desires, fears, anxieties, hopes and ambitions. James Berry came to Britain on the next ship after the Windrush and shared many of the experiences that prompted this migration in search of change and a better life. Many of the poems from Windrush were included in James Berry's A Story I Am In: New & Selected Poems, but renewed interest in Windrush Songs has prompted its reissue.
These poems gives voice to the people who came on the first ships from the Caribbean, whose journeys held strange echoes of earlier sea voyages which had brought ancestors from Africa to the slave plantations. James Berry - from Jamaica - was one of these emigrants, settling in Britain in 1948. This late collection by Berry explores the different reasons he and his fellow travellers had for leaving the Caribbean when they rushed to get on the boat. This publication was linked with events marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The poems also look back on slavery and individual experiences of hardship and trying to make a living: 'Mi one milkin cow just die! / Gone, gone - and leave me / Like hurricane disaster!' Windrush Songs ranges from from lyrical pictures of Caribbean country life to poems in the voices of travellers with desires, fears, anxieties, hopes and ambitions. James Berry came to Britain on the next ship after the Windrush and shared many of the experiences that prompted this migration in search of change and a better life. Many of the poems from Windrush were included in James Berry's A Story I Am In: New & Selected Poems, but renewed interest in Windrush Songs has prompted its reissue.
9 Introduction
PART 1: HATING A PLACE YOU LOVE
14 Wind-rush
15 Learning Beauty
16 Wash of Sunlight
17 Sitting up Past Midnight
18 Desertion
19 I African They Say
20 Villagers Talk Frustrations
22 Old Slave Villages
23 Poverty Life
24 Poverty Ketch Yu an Hol Yu
25 Devouring
26 Sea-Song One
PART 2: LET THE SEA BE MY ROAD
Reasons for Leaving
30 Sea-Song Two
31 Reasons for Leaving Jamaica
32 Running on Empty
33 To Travel This Ship
34 A Dream of Leavin
35 Breaking Free
36 Away from me Little Ova-bodda Piece of Lan
37 Land-Cultivator-Man at Sea
38 A Woman’s Dread of Layered Snow
39 Work Control Mi Fadda like a Mule
40 Sea-Song Three
Reminiscence Voices
43 Reminiscence Voice
44 The Rock
45 Thinkin of Joysie
46 Mi Woman Hol Everyting Back
47 Fish Talk
48 Sun-Hot Drink
49 Empire Day
50 Childhood Mysteries
52 Old Slave Plantation Village Owner
54 Comparing Now with Ancestors’ Travel from Africa
55 A Talk to the Machete
56 A Story I Am In
58 Mi Fight with Jack-Jack
60 Sea-Song Four
When I Get to Englan
63 Mother Country
64 Wanting to Hear Big Ben
65 Sociable and Unsociable Ways of Money
66 How the Weak Manufactured Power for the Strong
67 Song of Man and Man
68 Whitehall Goin Turn We Back
69 Eatin for Two Man
70 Englan Voice
71 White Suit and White Shoes
73 A Greater Oneness
74 Sea-Song Five
PART 3: NEW DAYS ARRIVING
76 New Space
77 In the Land and Sea Culture-crossed
78 Beginning in a City 1948
80 Hymn to New Day Arriving
James Berry (1924-2017) was born and brought up in a tiny seaside village in Jamaica. He learnt to read before he was four years old, mostly from the Bible, which he often read aloud to his mother's friends. When he was 17, he went to work in America, but hated the way black people were treated there, and returned to Jamaica after four years. In 1948, he made his way to Britain, and took a job working for British Telecom. One of the first black writers in Britain to achieve wider recognition, Berry rose to prominence in 1981 when he won the National Poetry Competition. His numerous books include two seminal anthologies of Caribbean poetry, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (Chatto, 1984). His retrospective, A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), draws on five collections of poetry, including Fractured Circles (1979) and Lucy's Letters and Loving (1982) from New Beacon Books, Chain of Days (Oxford University Press, 1985), and Hot Earth Cold Earth (1995) and Windrush Songs (2007) from Bloodaxe. Windrush Songs was published to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He also published several books of poetry and short stories for children (from Hamish Hamilton, Puffin and Walker Books), and won many literary prizes, including the Smarties Prize (1987), the Signal Poetry Award (1989) and a Cholmondeley Award (1991). He was awarded the OBE in 1990.
Berry came to Britain from Jamaica in 1948. In the introduction to
this collection of poems, he explains why he came to Britain and
left a country he loved. 'Beginning in a City, 1948' in particular
gives a strong impression of what Caribbean arrivals experienced in
their first hours and days. The emigrant experience is often
littered with contradictions… and Berry’s poems illustrate this
perfectly.
*Louise Hare*
When I think of James Berry’s poetry I think of celebration…
celebration with an echo of despair, but his urge to find worth and
joy in both the remembered life of his rural Jamaican childhood and
in his sojourn as a "bluefoot traveller" in Britain through the
last forty years, is the real motive force of his work… Berry has
been at the forefront of the struggle to validate and honour the
language people of West Indian origin in Britain actually
speak.
*Stewart Brown*
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