Publication

Abstract : From 1948 to the late 1970’s, more than half a million people came to the UK from the Caribbean to become a part of the first wave of the Commonwealth Immigration. They were invited over by the British Government to work in public services and rebuild the country after the second World War. When the Empire Windrush arrived at the shores of Tilbury in 1948, Britain was a country direly in need of human resources to cover the loss faced over the war years. This Windrush Generation consisted of men, women and children who came to rebuild their ‘Mother Country’ with the hopes of a new beginning brimming with possibilities. Many studies have analysed the racism, alienation and discrimination among the other oppressive phases that the immigrants were forced to deal with. Most of the retellings and re-visits are male oriented, and completely leave the female perspective and the immigrant women’s role in their revolution. This paper attempts to focus on the female narrative of the Black immigrant’s history. The brief study tries to subvert the common rendering of the Windrush generation by reading it through the filters of feminism, marginalisation and alienation, thereby emphasizing the themes that were not considered discussion-worthy in the patriarchal setting. The research question is to find if the counter narrative presented through the poems of women immigrants call for a different perspective in the present account of history. This paper is centred around the poetry and ideology of Una Marson (1905-1965) and Grace Nichols (1950-), two black women immigrants who played a pivotal role in the history of every immigrant woman and man.