Louise Bennett's "Colonisation in Reverse": Satire of Post-War Migration

Analysis of Louise Bennett's "Colonisation in Reverse"

A general view held by Caribbean immigrants regarding emigration to England can be seen through Louise Bennett’s eyes in her poem, “Colonisation in Reverse.”

The Immigrant Mindset and False Hope

Bennett’s poem reveals that people seeking to emigrate to England held the mindset that there was a kinship between them and England, viewing it as their Motherland. She states that all the Jamaicans shared the same future plan: to find “a big time job.”

This anticipation was not just for any kind of job, but for work with status and prestige. This false hope held by the immigrants led to a feeling of alienation and abandonment once they arrived in England. Their kinship bond quickly unraveled, as the inhabitants of the Motherland rejected them.

Satire and the Reversal of Colonial Exploitation

“Colonisation in Reverse” emphasizes the idea of leaving one's home country to start a new life elsewhere. Moving to Britain was expected to provide Jamaicans with opportunities that they would not be afforded in Jamaica. However, the speaker argues that if many Jamaicans leave the island and move to Britain—their supposed Motherland—the experience would be similar to the British colonizing Jamaica, hence the title's irony.

The poem satirizes the essentialism and ahistoricism of the British racial imaginary. In doing so, it offers a remarkably prescient look at the specific forms of xenophobia that developed in Britain during the half-century after the arrival of the Empire Windrush.

Challenging British Racial Imaginary

To start with, Miss Lou, Bennett's humorous speaker, delivers a swift and cheeky jab to the common charge that migrants from the Caribbean were stealing white people's patrimony in one way or another (lines 25–44). Miss Lou argues implicitly that if Caribbean people become parasites on the British welfare state, they are simply engaging in an inversion of the long colonial history of expropriation and exploitation.

In the metropolis, former colonial subjects can refuse work that does not suit their dignity—a luxury that was obviously seldom a possibility for the vast majority of the colonized.

Imperial Legacy and Xenophobia

The empire thus helped to create a culture of imperial solidarity that united working and upper classes within Britain. After 1945, this imperial legacy was invoked to portray colonial and postcolonial immigrants as aliens whose presence threatened fundamental British traditions.

Miss Lou's caustic exclamation over the difficulty the British have in adjusting to migration from the colonies satirizes precisely the kind of rhetoric deployed by ideologues of both mainstream and fringe political parties after 1945.