Colonial intellectual dislocation made a generation of Caribbean writers physically flee their birthplace.

Evidence

Up to the point where I left Jamaica in 1951, I did not understand what the source of that dislocation was. I thought it was a largely personal one. It was not until much later that I discovered that this was a feeling of dislocation experienced by a whole generation of intellectual Caribbean people at the end of empire. When I went to London, there they all were, hiding out: all of them making some kind of escape attempt from colonial society. All of them in search of a way to become modern subjects, but with the bizarre thought that in order to do so, you had to leave the place of your birth—to go somewhere else—to become, borrowing the title of one of George Lamming’s novels, “a native of my person.” … And I thought, “This is a recipe for disaster.” The thing to do, I felt, is get out of there. There is a wonderful passage in Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile—a book which I strongly recommend to you if you are interested in this period of Caribbean intellectual history, and especially if you can appreciate and enjoy the ironies of the word “pleasures”—in which Lamming, speaking of the West Indian writers who all found themselves living in London between 1948 and 1958, says, “They simply wanted to get out of the place where they were born.” This is the decade which, as he says, “witnessed the ‘emergence’ of the novel as an imaginative interpretation of West Indian society by West Indians. And every one of them: Mittelholzer, Reid, Mais, Selvon, Hearne, Carew, Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Neville Dawes, everyone has felt the need to get out.” … However, what I soon discovered was that I had not and could never really “get out” or be fully part of this “elsewhere” that had simultaneously made and unmade me. To make the return journey: not literally, because for many, “you can’t go home again,” but symbolically, in my head. I had no alternative but to come to terms with and try to understand the very culture from which I had felt distanced and, unsuccessfully, engineered an impossible escape. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1192

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of colonial dislocation as a generational, structural condition rather than a personal pathology.