The internal legacy of the windrush

The story of the Windrush is important for many reasons, and the story is beginning to be told more often. With the focus being on the Windrush generation being sold an opportunity by England, to come and help their mother country, and in return they’ll receive a better quality of life.

Over the years we’ve seen how the opportunity was miss-sold. From racism to deportation, the Windrush generation have endured more than they had bargained for.

With this being the case, when asked to contribute to The Place For Me: Stories about the Windrush generation, I chose to focus on the fantasy of the opportunity and the hope it gave, to open children up to the inner worlds of the people.

Whilst listening to the audio documentaries by those of the Windrush generation, I thought about the sacrifices made. People left their home, their parents, their children and their familiarities to come to England. What impact would this have had on their families?

I began to reflect on the conversations I’ve heard at social events, from the Windrush generation and families like mine, that have moved to England from the Carribean, since the Windrush.
I found that the experiences within the families were similar.

Dynamic family dynamics

This is not how all families came over but this is a process I know that many have been through.

1) Parents leave, with parents and children not knowing when they will see each other again.

2) Children growing up with their parents, then move in with their grand parents once their parents leave for England, then the children move to England to live with their parents again.

3) Parents making value judgements on which child to “sen’ (send) for”, as each child travels to England, one by one.

4) Children integrating into new families. The children were hoping to enter into the same family dynamic they had back home (or fantasied about), but with a new step parent and new siblings there’s now a different system in place. Whilst adjusting to a new country and it’s culture, the child has to adjust to a new family and new levels of emotional attunement (duration, type & intensity).

Emotional legacy

Till this day, families are affected by the process of how the moves to England were managed.

Emotional pain: Neglect and abandonment are the core elements of the emotional pain children went through. They are the seeds to the trauma tree within this scenario, born from parents leaving the country, favouring the English children etc.

Stigma: I would summarise the stigma around mental health in the black (Caribbean) community as “don’t chat my business”. People do precisely that, they do not talk about theirs or other people’s “business”. So what happens to the emotions associated with what they’ve been through?

Repression: Not talking about pain, problems and adversity can be a good short term coping strategy, but not a long term one. When repression is used as a solution, the pain of the past becomes the pain of the future in many ways.

Outcomes: The seeds of the trauma tree sprout into a host of problems later in life. Manifesting in the form of family dysfunction, chronic stress/anxiety/low self-esteem, depression and a negative impact of the body’s nervous system (high blood pressure, dementia & somatic illness).

What families can do

Talk. Talk with the right people, talk with skill and focus, and talk mindfully. Here are three things to help you when you have the conversation.

Therapy: Therapy is good if you’d like personal support. Therapy is also an alternative if people you would like to speak to are no longer alive or you feel you cannot have the conversation with them.

Specificity: Be specific about what you want to talk about, this will provide clarity for all parties involved and help you to progress towards wherever you would like to progress to.

Emotion may pull the conversation in different directions. When you find the conversation being pulled into another direction, rein it in. If somebody else, took the conversation in another direction, it’s because that direction is important to them. Remind them what the focus of the conversation is and that once the conversation is finished, you can start another conversation about the topic they veered into.

Pateince: It’s likely that this topic will be a surprise to those you broach it with and will require deep reflection. Reflection of a past that could be deeply emotive, a place where the other people may have buried things they felt unable to deal with. Spending decades avoiding conversations and people, and created a host of coping strategies that they’re unconscious of. This conversation breaches the security of their coping mechanisms, so naturally they may be defensive at first. Have in mind that you may get a hostile response, not because of what you say or how you say it, but because where the conversation is asking other people to revisit. Give them time to dim their defensive response, the more they have the conversation, the more it becomes familiar and the body thinks “I know this place, it’s not dangerous”. This paragraph also applies to you, going back in the past may evoke feelings that surprise you.

Be patient, it will take conversations over a period of time to unlock decades of your story.