We Run Things, Things Don’t Run Us

Jamaica Road, Lisa Smith’s first novel, is both a love story and a testament to the struggles of immigrant families in 1980s London. Daphne, the lone Black girl in her class, has determined that assimilating and keeping herself small is the easiest way to survive her classmates’ racist taunts. But when Connie Small, a new immigrant from Jamaica, arrives at her school, he’s the opposite of what Daphne is trying to be. 

With a shared heritage, Daphne and Connie are pushed together. What begins as a tentative friendship blossoms when Daphne’s family welcomes Connie and his family into their circle. Unlike Daphne, Connie and his mother are undocumented immigrants living with the constant threat of deportation—a threat that rises daily in a racially charged city where police officers randomly search and arrest Black boys and raid businesses to root out undocumented immigrants, and Black students march for their rights and basic protections. Amid the social upheaval, Daphne and Connie learn how to love despite the forces that threaten to keep them apart. 

I spoke with Smith about the social conditions that influence events in the novel, the parallels between her novel and present-day America, and the impact of racism on immigrants trying to build new lives in a new country. 

---

Donna Hemans: Your novel is set in 1981, but there are a lot of parallels to our current times. What was the original inspiration for the novel and how do you see your novel in conversation with the present time?

Lisa Smith: I never set out to actually write a novel about the 80s, per se. The idea for the novel came during a creative writing class. The course instructor asked us to think of an outsider and write a short description of this outsider. And I’m usually rubbish at those kinds of exercises. My mind just goes blank and I’m still gazing out the window, and everyone else is writing. But this time, as if by magic, the image of a boy who arrived at my primary school just fell into my mind. 

I went to a school which, at the time, was in a very white, very working class part of South London. I was the only Black child in my class. And this boy arrived, and he was very tall, and his uniform was kind of shabby and he had a really strong Jamaican accent. It was the first time I’d ever heard a child my age speaking with a Jamaican accent. All the Jamaicans I knew—my mum, my grandma, my aunties and uncles and all of their friends—were older people who spoke with a Jamaican accent. 

I was intrigued, but also a little bit alarmed, because he was just himself. I was busy trying to assimilate and not be too Black, and he was just himself. This image fell into my mind, and I started writing this description. At the same time I heard the voice of Daphne in my head. But I didn’t necessarily think I was going to do anything with it. But for some reason, these characters wouldn’t leave me alone. When I came back to the novel, I started thinking about my childhood, growing up in the late 70s, early 80s, and that’s kind of when I started thinking about how, to some extent, things have moved on, but in some ways, they really haven’t.

I was busy trying to assimilate and not be too Black, and he was just himself.

DH: In a way what came to mind as I was reading your novel is the idea that we’re always struggling for acceptance. 

LS: My background is documentaries, so I’m used to researching, and my primary source is newspapers, particularly local newspapers, because they’re quite easy to come by in our local archives. I was astonished by the prevalence of racism and anti-immigrant feeling there was in the 1980s and how politicians then, like now, kind of leaned into that to suit their aims. 

Margaret Thatcher, in 1979 actually gave an interview on a TV program, where she said that British communities felt they were being swamped by foreigners. And you know, it’s extraordinary when you look back because she was referring to people like my mum and my uncles and my grandparents, who came in the 1950s and 60s. When I say came, they were invited by the British government to come and rebuild the nation, the motherland, and they came willingly. And they weren’t foreigners. They were British subjects. But by the 80s, all of that had been kind of forgotten about. 

DH: You mentioned Margaret Thatcher’s speech in 1979. Was that something that you heard yourself, or did you find it in the research?  

LS: I was eight, I think when she made that speech so I was not really aware, but I remember particularly my grandma, my maternal grandma, being really pissed off about it. But then I also came to it through the research, through newspaper articles. In the 1980s they wanted to make amendments to the Immigration Act to make it even harder for people who were from the former colonies to come to the U.K., and also that their children wouldn’t necessarily be British, even if they were born here. I remember hearing my parents talk and it came up in the newspapers when I was doing the research. It just felt so similar to what’s happening now in the U.S. 

DH: There’s a sense throughout the novel that England is an inhospitable home. What does the novel say about home and belonging?

LS: The interesting thing about Daphne and Connie is that Connie is the immigrant.  Daphne is British Jamaican, but she is the one looking for belonging throughout the novel. She’s the one who basically is like, ‘Well, where do I belong? Do I belong here, or do I belong in Jamaica?’ It is something that I struggled with when I was that age, when I was a teenager, because there was no concept then of being Black and British. We have moved on a lot since then. I think young Black people who are born here will call themselves British, or they’ll call themselves British Jamaican, or British Nigerian, or British Ghanaian, or whatever. But then it was just a strange thing. 

In fact, something else that astonished me when I was doing the research and looking at the newspapers was the fact that they would constantly refer to young Black British people as West Indians. The 13 young people who died in the New Cross fire in 1981, they referred to them as young West Indians. They were British of West Indian heritage, but at the time, they just felt they couldn’t write that they were British people.

DH: It feels very circular to me. We have gone through all of these things—immigration raids, protests, police randomly searching Black boys. And if you go back to 2020, we had the Black Lives Matter protests, and now we have all these raids. It all feels circular. 

LS: Racism is power and people with power are not going to give it up without a fight. And they will resort to things like just basically telling lies and othering people to maintain that power. And that’s certainly what is happening here. Unfortunately, we have various right leaning politicians who will say things like the reason why the NHS waiting list is so long, or the reason why there’s no housing, or the reason why your council hasn’t filled in the potholes in your street is because of all these diversity initiatives that are happening, and all the immigrants that we’re letting in, all the asylum seekers that are sucking up the NHS resources. Anything that is kind of morally decent is seen as woke. Now, in the 80s, they called it loony lefty, but it’s the same thing. It’s just a way of denigrating what is the morally decent thing to do to maintain power. 

A lot of the Windrush generation sucked up all this stuff and taught their children to be good citizens.

DH: And one of the things you did in the book, too, was create a generation of young people who were just not going to sit down and take it. 

LS: The Windrush generation came to this country to help rebuild the U.K. And when they came here, they found out that they weren’t universally accepted, but they endured and they remained. A lot of the Windrush generation sucked up all this stuff and taught their children to be good citizens.

But then you scroll forward to the 1970s and the 80s—a time of high unemployment and we now know more about the reasons for the poor educational outcomes of Black children: institutional racism in education. Despite being a good citizen, we weren’t really getting anything. The second generation were in some ways worse than the Windrush generation, and whilst there was a mood amongst some of the Windrush generations, certainly, my paternal grandmother was like, ‘Oh, just buck up and just behave. If you’re getting in trouble with the police, it’s your fault because you’ve done something wrong.’ There was also the second generation just saying, this is not the case, and we deserve more. 

The New Cross fire, the Black People’s Day of Action and the first Princeton uprising were a kind of testament to the fact that there was blackivism for the first time, that people were going to be collectively trying to make change, because they weren’t having it anymore. 

DH: You used teenage romance to explore racism. What does it mean for Daphne to become involved with a boy from a white racist family?

LS: I thought long and hard about the kind of people I knew growing up in urban centers where there are working-class Black people, working-class white people. So more often than not, we live on the same sort of streets and certainly, if it’s a housing estate, we’d all live on the same kind of council estate. Often our parents would do the same sorts of jobs. So we were mixing on all different levels in all different places. 

There was a girl who once wanted to be my best friend at secondary school, and we were best friends for a little while. She invited me to her house for tea one Saturday afternoon. I went to her house, and she introduced me to her mum, and her mum said, “Well, is it true that you lot eat goats and cows’ feet and pigs’ noses? And I was like, “Well, we do eat goat in curry. It’s very nice. And we have cow feet sometimes in soup. I’ve never had pigs noses, personally. But we also eat English food.” And she said, “Okay, so you’ll be alright with fish fingers then?” 

But then later on, I was sitting eating my fish fingers, and this girl’s big sister arrives. And the big sister turns up in her Fred Perry shirt, her Dr. Martin boots, her shaved head, and she just glowers at me the whole time, all through this meal, until I leave. And my friend just walked me back to the bus stop. She was saying that was really, really nice, you must come again, completely ignoring her mum’s rudeness and her sister’s hostility. It was a difficult friendship to have, and I suppose that’s kind of what happens with Daphne and Mark. It’s just too difficult a relationship for her to have. And when we meet Mark later on he has had a child with a Black woman. But they aren’t together either, because he’s not quite there yet. He is a work in progress.

DH: At its core, it feels to me that the novel is about community. How do you see this theme intersecting with the immigrant story?

It was really common for people to live in shared houses and shared accommodation.

LS: At the start of the novel, Daphne lives with her grandmother and her auntie and her uncle and their five children in one house. That was so common. People look back now and say, ‘Oh, my God, it’s overcrowded.’ But that was normal, because when Caribbean migrants first came to the U.K. there was basically nowhere for them to live. The people on the Windrush ship were housed in the tunnels underneath Clapham Common. It was really common for people to live in shared houses and shared accommodation. And not only because it was better in terms of them not being homeless. It meant that you were kind of safe, and you were around people who understood you, who you could lean on and who supported you. 

DH: And there’s also this idea of control. Over and over the characters say, “We run tings, tings nuh run we.” Connie explains it as having the ability to control how things turn out. How does this also intersect with the immigrant story?

Why David Cameron Should Read “Empireland”

Sathnam Sanghera’s book unravels the nostalgic myth of the British empire

Feb 27 – Marlon James

culture

LS: It starts off as just a useful mantra, just something to keep yourself going. But I think it is really important for immigrants to not lose sight of themselves. It’s really easy to come to a country like Britain in the 1960s and just think, oh my God, I just need to assimilate and keep my head down, and then things will be all right. But there’s no amount of assimilation that is going to suit certain people. When I was young, even though I was British born I never felt British enough. And that’s the thing about assimilation. You always feel as though you’re not quite there yet. And I think you have to just assert yourself and say, This is who I am. This is who I want to be, and this is what I will be. That comes from ‘we run things; tings, no run we.’ We’re in charge of who we are. We’re in charge of our destiny. 

The post We Run Things, Things Don’t Run Us appeared first on Electric Literature.