From A Small Island

First edition of From A Small Island by Andrew Jackson (2023)

First impression 

Medium format paperback in new condition 

In an edition of 150 copies

Published by Another Place Press

About 

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.

- Andrew Jackson