colin grant

2 weeks ago | msn.com | colin grant

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | colin grant

Reflecting on his childhood in the autobiographical novel In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming wrote that it was “my mother who really fathered me”. Damningly, the Barbadian novelist asserted that his father “had only fathered the idea of me”. That notion of children being left mainly, if not solely, the liability of mothers still widely resonates in Caribbean households.

2 weeks ago | msn.com | colin grant

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | colin grant

“It’s so hard to create something when there has been nothing before,” the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate VS Naipaul once complained to me, referring to his work for the BBC World Service programme Caribbean Voices (1943-58). That sentiment, that each generation of black Britons believes themselves to be bold pioneers working in a vacuum, has persisted since the beginning of mass migration to this country.

2 months ago | nybooks.com | colin grant

The front room was the prime signifier of achievement for the pioneering West Indian migrants to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, now known as the Windrush generation. A version of the Victorian parlor, the pristine front room was emblematic of the quest for respectability, with a settee whose protective transparent plastic covering was never shed, crocheted doilies adorning every item of furniture, and a glass, gold-trimmed drinks cabinet in the shape of a ship’s bow.