‘Foreign Bodies’: George Lamming's The Emigrants

By the time Sheila Patterson had completed and published Dark Strangers, her 1963 report on West Indians in London, Notting Hill had become famous for riots rather than rom-coms. A considerable change in perceptions had occurred in the ten years separating the newspaper headlines of ‘Welcome Home’ that greeted the SS Empire Windrush in 19482 and the violence of 1958, when ‘race’ riots spread across British cities. This rapid descent from welcome to violent conflict is perhaps all the more marked since the reference to ‘home’ here was quite literal. West Indian islanders shared a common citizenship with the British population and enjoyed a right of residence. However, as John McLeod points out, such emigrants ‘would be subjected to a series of attitudes which frequently objectified and demonized them, often in terms of race, while questioning their rights of citizenship and tenure’.3 Under such circumstances, ‘home’ for black migrants was always elsewhere: the sons of Empire had evolved quickly into an unwanted, foreign intrusion. For Patterson, this foreignness is registered by the British at the level of appearance, but two factors would seem to mitigate against this. Firstly, while black seamen and slaves did represent a foreign element in British ports and major cities, they had been doing so as a consistent presence since the seventeenth century. They may not have been a common sight, but they were not entirely strange. Secondly, the appearance of black migrants, their outward image, could not have altered in the period