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James Berry - Celebration Songs

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posted on 2024-11-12, 19:13 authored by Stewart Brown
It is possible to represent or understand the experience forever evoked by that famous image of the S.S. Empire Windrush docking in 1948 in various ways, positive or negative, creative or destructive. One could read it as representing a voyage of discovery offering real opportunities for personal and material enrichment to those West Indians who opted, in Louise Bennett's words, to 'go a foreign/ seek yu fortune', or one could see it as just an extension of the 'Middle Passage' with the migrants still merely economic cogs in the Imperial machine. In truth, of course, the actual experience of just about everyone who came, literally or metaphorically, on that Windrush voyage from the Caribbean to Britain has been a mixture of the positive and the negative. There has certainly been much disappointment, reflected in the pervading sense of having been betrayed - in various ways - by the supposed colonial Mother country that so many of those migrants report.

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