Colonization in Reverse — Louise Bennett
Colonization in Reverse — Louise Bennett
Louise Bennett’s Colonization in Reverse imagines the Windrush generation’s arrival in Britain as history turned on its head. The poem is spoken by Bennett’s comic persona, Miss Lou, who addresses her friend “Miss Mattie” with excited news: the old empire is being reversed, and it is the Caribbean now arriving on Britain’s doorstep.
The Poet: Louise Bennett
Bennett (1919–2006) was a hugely influential Jamaican poet and performer who insisted on writing in Jamaican Creole — what is now called Nation Language — at a time when this was dismissed as inferior to standard English. She began performing as a teenager, later lectured in Drama and Folklore at the University of the West Indies, and became known to Jamaican and international audiences alike through her stage persona, “Miss Lou”.
In an interview with Dennis Scott, Bennett explained her comic style: “I have found a medium through which I pretend to be laughing. Most of the time when we laugh it is so that we may not weep… the nature of the Jamaican dialogue is the nature of comedy.” This helps explain why Colonization in Reverse uses humour to approach a serious subject — empire and migration.
The Poem in Context: The Windrush Generation
The poem responds to real history. From 1948, people from Caribbean countries such as Jamaica travelled to Britain in large numbers, encouraged by a British government facing a post-war shortage of workers. Because these countries were then part of the British Empire, migrants of what became known as the Windrush generation already held British citizenship and had a legal right to live and work in the UK.
Bennett turns this migration into a joke on history itself. For centuries, Britain and other powers had claimed Caribbean islands and shipped enslaved Africans there to work the plantations — that was colonization. Now, Miss Lou tells “Miss Mattie”, the traffic is running the other way: Jamaicans are arriving in England “bag an baggage”, and Britain, not the Caribbean, is being settled and changed.
Bennett calls England “de motherlan” — the “motherlan” that once colonised Jamaica. The irony is double: Caribbean citizens are entitled to call the coloniser’s country their “motherlan” because empire made them British, yet the phrase also exposes how strange and one-sided that relationship always was.
Themes: Empire, Loyalty and Irony
The poem does not ignore the weight of imperial history. The allusion to arriving “bag an baggage” hints at the long legacy of empire — the migrants carry more than luggage; they carry the whole tangled relationship between coloniser and colonised. Later, Bennett’s reference to “loyalty” becomes pointed: the very idea that colonised subjects owed loyalty to an empire that exploited them is exposed as absurd once the joke of reversal is in full swing.
This is irony used as a weapon: rather than writing an angry protest poem, Bennett lets the comedy of reversed history do the criticism for her. The tone stays upbeat and joyful, matching the calypso culture of the 1950s Caribbean community she is celebrating — but the final lines carry a hint of concern about what this new, reversed history will actually mean for the future.
Bennett blends traditional and popular elements. The poem uses patterned rhyme and a recognisable stanza shape — traditional, ballad-like features — but delivers them entirely in Jamaican Creole, giving the verse the rhythm and comic timing of the calypso culture and of live performance rather than the printed page. The rhetorical pairing of ideas in the second stanza builds the comic logic of reversal, setting up opposites so the joke lands cleanly.
By the fourth stanza, exclamations increase the pace and excitement, mimicking Miss Lou’s breathless retelling of the news to “Miss Mattie”. The poem builds to its punchline: the migrants have “tun history upside dung” — turned history upside down. That inversion is the structural heart of the poem: everything before it sets up the reversal, and everything after registers its consequences, including the quieter, more serious final note.
Strong comparisons name a precise shared method or idea, not just a shared topic. Five useful partners for this poem are:
- Flag by John Agard — both poems question where loyalty truly lies, but Agard’s flag demands blind loyalty while Bennett’s persona mocks the loyalty once demanded by empire.
- Papa-T by Fred D’Aguiar — both explore the West Indian relationship with the idea of a distant homeland, though D’Aguiar’s grandfather recites imperial poetry while Bennett’s persona laughs at empire from the other direction.
- Partition by Sujata Bhatt — both address the guilt and confusion left behind by colonial decision-making, though Bhatt’s tone is quietly guilty while Bennett’s is loudly comic.
- Songs for the People by Frances E. W. Harper — both use rhythmic, musical popular forms to carry a political message about a fairer, more diverse future.
- We Lived Happily during the War by Ilya Kaminsky — both use irony as their central tool, though Kaminsky’s irony indicts comfortable inaction while Bennett’s irony celebrates active change.
Using This Poem in the Exam
If Colonization in Reverse is the printed poem in the comparison task, look for an unseen poem that also explores migration, reversed expectations, or a comic tone masking a serious point — then compare ideas and attitudes, tone, and the effects of language and structure across both. If you choose this poem for the second, single-poem task, you are relying on memory, so the short quotable phrases matter most.
Learn “de motherlan”, “bag an baggage”, “loyalty”, and “tun history upside dung” exactly as they appear. Each one carries an idea — irony, imperial legacy, questioned duty, and reversed history — that you can build a whole paragraph around, even without the full poem in front of you.