In The Discussion That Follows, The Poetry Of Linton Kwesi Johnson And Grace

In the discussion that follows, the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols will be explored, together with David Dabydeen's novel The Intended and Ayub Khan-Din's play and film East is East. Not every work will necessarily be discussed in each chapter, as the different literary works exemplify the experience of migration in differing ways. However, the thematic concerns of all of these works will, it is hoped, be seen to be so closely intertwined that each chapter will represent a facet of the whole.

(2) Past and Present
The contrasting experiences of the past and present of the migrant's experience is a common theme within much of the literature of migration. As has been previously discussed, the colonial past was a brutalising political system. David Dabydeen has taken up the theme of migration in Caribbean literature in terms of the shattering of illusions, 'trauma and alienation', 'personal disintegration' and 'shared vulnerability and dependence'. His novel The Intended is intensely concerned with the colonial past and he uses Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as its inspiration and organising theme. Dabydeen's view of Conrad's novel can be summarised by his comments from his A Reader's Guide to West Indian and Black British Writing:
Conrad's Heart of Darkness offers a powerful denunciation of the horrors of Imperialism in its depiction of the cruelty of Europeans and the decimation of native Africans. In the greed for ivory and quick profit, life is smashed up and squandered.
Dabydeen comments on the confusion, grotesqueness and absurdity depicted in the novel as the hallmarks of imperialism and he contrasts the brutal reality with the dreams and aspirations which had originally impelled it. The figure of Kurtz degenerates from noble idealism to a squalid end:
At the beginning, he is a classical missionary figure, full of noble ideals about torch-bearing, about setting the bush alight with the concepts of European civilization. Instead of the fulfilment of these burning ideals, Kurtz degenerates into an emaciated figure crawling on all fours and the only burning that takes place in the novel is fire which destroys the grass shed and which exposes the Europeans as ineffectual buffoons in their attempts to control it.
Conrad's theme is the turning of a dream into a sort of confused nightmare and Dabydeen has used this idea as the theme of his own novel. For Dabydeen's migrants, the journey from Europe to Africa is reversed, but their migration from their homelands to London, the heart of Empire, has a similarly brutalising and corrupting effect.