Poet Jenny Mitchell: mumâs the words
Jenny Mitchell explains how she came to write the poem When My Mother Says Jamaica, which won the first Folklore Prize set up by Hampstead poet Martin Connolly
11 March, 2021 â By Jenny Mitchell
Jenny Mitchell. Photo: Billy Grant
I WROTE the poem
When My Mother Says Jamaica in order to describe the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement on one family. In my latest collection, Map of a Plantation, I suggest that this emotive history does not simply belong to black people but is shared by everyone in the UK. After all, black people did not enslave themselves in the Caribbean.