82 pp / 260 x 210mm
Softcover
Fedrigoni papers:
350gsm Satin cover
170gsm Satin text
First edition of 150
APP053
ISBN 978-1-7391212-2-8
Also available as a Special Edition, limited to 30 copies - each with an A4 limited edition inkjet print signed and numbered by Andrew (see image) - £52.00
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“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.”
Beryl Markham
My parents, like so many others of their generation, would leave one home to go in search of another. Traveling across the seas from Jamaica, to find a new life in the motherland, a space broken by war.
From A Small Island is the first in a trilogy of works examining the legacies of this journey to the UK, with a focus on the post-war period to Brexit.
While From a Small Island gives an introduction and overview of the trilogy, it is also a self-reflection and meditation on my personal attempts, as a man born in Britain to Jamaican parents, to connect with the land of their birth.
Immigrants, as current times so clearly show, often sail treacherous waters, drawn by the ebb and flow of political whims which call them to do the jobs others don’t want and then demonise and banish them when economies falter.
Through all of this, whilst my parents arrived as British citizens, they were always seen as Jamaican even though Jamaica was a place to which they would never return.
The second chapter, The Last Days of Summer, will explore the journey into adulthood of a group of young Millennial men (the grandchildren of my parents' generation), all born in Handsworth, Birmingham. The work follows them from the stock market crash of 2008 to the post-Brexit end of their youths, as Britain, in a profound time of change, reframes itself as a monoculture once more.
To conclude, the third and final chapter, From Whence We Came, explores what ultimately awaits at the end of the migrant journey for those who swapped life on one small island for another, never to return.
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