ESCAPE

Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet begins one of his poems from the book, The Castaway, with the words, “The starved eye devours the seascape/ For the morsel of a sail…”. My first work in this series of linocuts about escape, about diaspora, was inspired by these two lines. They resonated with my own need to escape the small confines of the Caribbean with its claustrophobic limitations; with my own hunger (note the words, “starved eye…morsel”) to get out for a wider world where the horizons stretched further than the inhibiting circle of beaches and the incarcerating sea.

My personal journey was just another of the millions of not dissimilar, but much more perilous journeys… The Caribbean peoples, duped by the belief that England was some sort of warm-hearted maternal mother country, came to England seeking the embrace of a better life. This, “Windrush generation”, found only racism and the wet cold reality of the perennial outsider’s hard life. That was seventy years ago. Nothing has changed. The hostility of the White British has been tempered tremendously – intimacy has bred an ever-increasingly brown generation. But government policy remains implacably hostile, increasingly walled; hostile to all incoming, ravaged escapees, fleeing on boats no bigger than crumbs on the ocean.

Flight is all. To most of the Third World, the so-called, “developing worlds” (developing my arse), life is defined by diaspora, by exile...as climate collapse, and corrupt, murderous governments, and joblessness and intolerance and crime and drugs and starvation drive a whole generation away from what should be the hospitality of home to an inhospitable North. The immigrant is not the refugee, though both end up as exiles.

Virginia Adair, the American poet writes:

“Exiles still seek, through the indifferent nations,

A halt, a habitation, and a smile”

But these indifferent nations, this First World, first among planet destroyers, and country destroyers and slave sellers and arms sellers and drug buyers and establishment money launderers and government corruptors. This is that amnesiac North whose memories cannot open their closing gates or recall their own past flights from famine and racism and religious hostility and war ravaged lives and the countries that welcomed them, those “tired and poor and huddled masses” with open arms.