Jamaican British — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Jamaican British
The poems
What you need to know
Jamaican British by Raymond Antrobus (2018): a mixed-race speaker is told he cannot be both Jamaican and British and claims both halves of his identity.
Antrobus's Jamaican British family, the couplets that end on the refrain like a ghazal, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Some people would deny that I'm Jamaican British', 'Anglo nose. Hair straight.', 'the English boys at school made me choose: Jamaican, British?', 'Half-caste, half mule, house slave', 'Light skin, straight male, privileged', 'British don't know how to serve our dishes; they enslaved us', 'I hate dem, all dem Jamaicans', 'you cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness', 'how do I serve / Jamaican British?', 'When knowing how to war is Jamaican British'.
Form: couplets whose lines end on 'Jamaican British' or one half of it, like the repeated refrain (radif) of a ghazal; written 'after Aaron Samuels', in answer to another poet; caesuras and dashes that split the identity in two, and the speaker's own words to his father in Jamaican dialect.
Structure: what other people deny, what school forced him to choose, his father's answer and the trip to Jamaica, and a closing question and answer that hold both halves together.
Context: Antrobus was born in Hackney in 1986 to an English mother and a Jamaican father who came to England in the 1960s to work; the poem is from The Perseverance (2018), which won the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award; the history of slavery and empire behind 'Plantation lineage' and 'World War service'.
Compares well with Us (mixed heritage and belonging), Kumukanda (a father's country and language) and In Wales, wanting to be Italian (choosing an identity).
