"Island Man" is a poem by esteemed Guyanese-British author Grace Nichols, who was recently awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. “Island Man” was published in her 1984 book The Fat Black Woman’s Poems.
The poem describes a man who awakes thinking he can hear the sound of the ocean, which conjures memories of an island homeland. The sound is actually that of traffic outside his window, and he must heave himself up for “another London day.” Through this, the poem encapsulates the experiences of an immigrant who feels caught between worlds.
In an interview, Nichols explained her inspiration for the poem: “The poem 'Island Man' comes out of my own experience because when I first came to England, we lived […] right beside the North Circular Road. One of the things that I’ll hear in the mornings is this great swooshing of the traffic[…]They were very much in my mind, so the idea for the poem came out of that laying in bed one morning and almost thinking that the sound of the traffic was the sound of the sea, the sound of the surf, and that’s how that poem came out.”
