“Hurricane Hits England” centers on the speaker's conflicting concepts of home, between a faraway homeland and her current residence in England. Nichols herself immigrated from Guyana to the United Kingdom at age 27 in 1977. Much of her work shows the influence of Guyana and its Caribbean culture and oral folklore traditions. By describing a split identity between the speaker's country of origin and her country of residence, “Hurricane Hits England” is fundamentally a poem about immigration.
After the Second World War, the British Nationality Act of 1948 permitted citizens of Commonwealth nations to live and work in the United Kingdom. Resultantly, hundreds of thousands of migrants from places in the former British empire, including South Asian, Caribbean, and African countries, came to the United Kingdom. Racist and natalist anxieties fueled anti-immigration rhetoric and restrictions from politicians. The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act restricted the rights of Commonwealth citizens to migrate to the UK. In 1978, future prime minister Margaret Thatcher claimed that British people feared being “swamped by people of a different culture” and called for an “end to immigration.” In 1981, her government passed the British Nationality Act to redefine and restrict citizenship to only those who were British-born or their descendants, so that members of Commonwealth nations were no longer able to claim citizenship.
British poets of Afro-Caribbean origin addressed issues of immigration, identity, and racial tensions in their work, responding to natalist public policy and racist anti-immigrant hostility. In addition to Grace Nichols, these influential poets included Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Raymond Antrobus. Linton Kwesi Johnson is a poet who addresses immigration, racial politics, and other political issues with a clear argument in his work, which is often written in Jamaican dialect. “Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon,” he said in 2008. John Agard, a poet of Guyanese descent and Grace Nichols’ husband, has penned many poems criticizing existing power structures, including “Half-Caste,” which wryly unpacks the racist term in verse. Benjamin Zephaniah has never shied away from political topics, and his diverse collection of works is associated with protest and postcolonial literature. Raymond Antrobus’s poem “Jamaican British” is a famous example of an identity poem exploring the often-discordant experience of being of mixed racial identity.
