Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

"Yes indeed. It is a moving as well as interesting book, because it’s a combination of life-writing and historical and political analysis. These two don’t always go together, but this book really manages to combine them effectively. Family histories can be quite soft, but this one revisits a background that was full of stress, disappointment and difficulty as well as dreams and aspirations. Carby’s approach is quite steely in places, but her book is also a story of discovery, which combines judgement with sympathetic testimony as it explores the two large worlds squeezed into her small childhood home in South London. Hazel Carby has, as you say, taught at Yale for many years, but she grew up in the Croydon area and also worked as a schoolteacher in East London. Her father was mixed race Jamaican and her mother was the daughter of white working-class parents from Wales and the West country (Carby’s maternal grandfather was an agricultural labourer, her grandmother died of tuberculosis). These two people were brought together by the Second World War. “The reason we think these books are worth the effort is because they are deliberately engaged with issues that are…living and present in the world” Hazel Carby’s father, Carl, came to Britain after he was recruited in Jamaica to serve with British forces in the Second World War. He was trained as a wireless operator and airman, and flew for the RAF in Britain. He flew in Coastal Command, defending shipping, and also in Bomber Command, destroying German cities, including Essen, with the saturation tactics of the time. Her mother, meanwhile, comes out of this very poor and difficult life in the West country and, during the war, she qualifies as a civil servant so her life, too, is totally transformed. These two people meet at a dance, and they get together. I think the two run together. Hazel Carby grew up with the knowledge that her parents were frustrated and unhappy: a difficult live that was certainly made worse by the racism that confronted her as well. During the last years of their lives, she starts digging, and also travelling, in an attempt to understand who they were, both before they met and after. One of the things she reveals—which is quite shocking given the way the British like to remember the Second World War as a moment of national pride—is the extent to which, having used Jamaican and other imperial subjects in the war effort, the British state developed this hostile policy towards them, attempting to discourage mixed-race marriages, to prevent mixed-race couples having children, sweeping many of the children into adoption and emigration, and trying to whiten them up in various ways. Going further back, she also explores how the plantation culture in Jamaica affected her family history. She investigates, say, the experience of humble and far from wealthy men from places like rural Lincolnshire who, because of the opportunities of the Empire, were able, like her own ancestor Lilly Carby, to become slaveholders and run plantations in Jamaica. Two islands then, but one connected history which helps to explain both the conditions under which her parents lived and the attitudes they formed from the experience. That’s exactly right. This is the sort of childhood experience she had. There are people hissing and spitting and shouting in the streets. She had a childhood full of that—abuse in every sense. But what I also thought reading it is that even though this was a rough and violent and hate-filled world for a lot of the time, it is also in predominantly working class places like Mitcham and Croydon that the important encounters take place. It’s easy for Liberal-minded people in more prosperous and still largely unmixed places to sit there and say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be racist.’ Of course you shouldn’t, but when you’re in areas like the one Carby grew up in, you know that the interaction is often expressed in really horrible terms. Yet you may sometimes also see the possibility within that of people learning to coexist. Even in the negative and painful moments of the book—and there are those—you do try to glimpse other possibilities, so it can be encouraging too."