Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, where we dive deep into the rich and diverse history of the Caribbean and its diaspora. Today's episode focuses on something that's often overlooked but incredibly powerful our own family histories. Our conversation takes us on a unique journey, one of personal history, migration and the power of storytelling. The act of recording our personal histories is a very important way to preserve the legacy of our ancestors and understand the historical and cultural forces that shape our lives.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Today's guest has embarked on a journey documenting his own family's history, tracing the path from Jamaica to the UK. In this conversation, we'll explore why he chose to create such an audio project, to tell this history, the challenges that he may have encountered and why it's crucial for each of us to take ownership of our family's narratives. So joining us today to delve into the ways in which personal histories intersect with broader historical context is creative consultant and creator of the experimental audio project Daylight Come Calvin Walker. Calvin, thank you so much for joining us today. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about you? What inspired your interest in creating audio projects and other creative projects and, of course, your roots in the Caribbean?

Speaker 2: 1:47

Great. Thank you, alexandra. Thanks for inviting me. So my roots I was born in Jamaica, st Thomas.

Speaker 2: 1:55

I stayed in Jamaica until I was five years old and I was brought to England and so it was quite dramatic at the time, like a traumatic break from, you know, a child growing up in the West Indies, arriving in the UK in winter and just seeing white people for the first time. So that was just my sort of, you know, complete sort of change of environment. And so I grew up and I had my roots in London because there was a big West Indian community at the time which has kind of changed a little bit. Now it's broader, it's more African. It's at the time when I grew up it was really purely West Indian, so Jamaicans, barbadians, trinidadians, and it wasn't much more than that, and so over time it's much more mixed today. So my roots sort of stayed from that point of view and people were coming over in the 60s to join their relatives who had started coming over from the 50s. So there was like a really kind of lively community and you know. So that's how it started off in England.

Speaker 1: 3:06

We don't touch about this much you as we continue in the episode, but do you want to maybe share with us what sort of piqued your interest in sort of doing the creative consultancy work that you do around? You know, daylight Cummins, we'll talk a little bit more, but just in general perhaps sure so well, basically at school I was studying, I was really interested in art.

Speaker 2: 3:28

So at the end when I left school I was working as a kind of intern to learn the trade, and so it touched on art, photography, and then sort of I gradually found my way, worked for quite a while as a professional photographer and then through that there was a kind of natural kind of connection to multimedia at the time and then from multimedia to filmmaking.

Speaker 2: 3:53

So it's kind of a natural progression. And then I worked for almost 20 years at the French National Film Commission. So I left the, came to live in France, did various jobs in multimedia and ended up for a long time. The longest period I ever worked was at the Film Commission, and so when I left the Film Commission I carried on working as a consultant, basically doing the same kind of work, but independently, working with film commissions not necessarily French, related, uk, wherever. And so that's where I am today, working as a consultant, and also I'm sometimes called in to work as the kind of critic for a design school, parsons, which is Parsons, new York, but they have a French section which is Paris, parsons, paris. So I get called in sometimes to critique and that's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 4:48

And I'm sure I think that sort of lends us into Daylight Come. Right, you've been doing multimedia work sort of externally right, as you outlined for us, and what better way to sort of bring your own passion for multimedia work with your own family's history? And so I really enjoyed listening to Daylight Come and sort of bridging audio, which of course I love as a fellow podcaster, right With Caribbean history, caribbean family stories. I've always, you know, sort of put it out there for listeners that if they do want to join us for an episode and talk about their family stories, that's certainly something that I welcome. So I was really intrigued to come across your project and you know sort of the ways that it blends all of these things right. Tell our listeners a little bit about Daylight Come in your own words and what inspired the idea to even, you know, start this project and document your family's history in this way.

Speaker 2: 5:43

Sure. So basically what happened was my mother passed away in 2011. I had an older sister who had disappeared a long time before. Sort of voluntarily complicated and that's what happens with the community where people come from, the Caribbean is kind of not very sort of settled the standard family units where the father, mother, whatever and so I'd lost touch with a sister and then I decided I'd try and find her when my mother passed away. And that was a long search process and actually it could be interesting for other listeners who sort of embark on this journey of trying to trace someone or write a family story I actually called on the help of the Salvation Army, who have a family search section.

Speaker 2: 6:37

So when it turned out that they had found out my sister had passed away, I kind of felt it was my duty to leave some kind of trace of her memory and the fact that there was kind of disconnect. And so once I decided to do that that was kind of the hard part came following that sort of how do I do it? Do I write it? I'm not very good as a writer. I thought of doing like a short film. I did many attempts, it didn't work. I was never really satisfied. And also the thing is, how much do you say? I had very little information about my sister. I knew I wanted to say something and so basically it grew organically from wanting to say something about they're leaving a trace and bringing in the rest of the family for it to make sense of the context. And then the context of the family made sense to bring in the context of immigration, colonization, going back all the way to slavery, so it kind of suddenly grew like in waves. Um. So once I had that kind of in my head, I was kind of lost on how I would put it down, because I always liked sound and I couldn't work out exactly how I wanted to do it. I did several attempts of friends recording. It didn't work, it didn't kind of speak to me. And I'll just give you this little anecdote of how this kind of eureka moment arrived.

Speaker 2: 8:02

So I cycle a lot near where I live in Paris and I listen often to podcasts as I'm cycling, with a little speaker attached to my handlebars. And so one day, as I'm listening to a podcast, I suddenly hear my emails being read out, my personal emails, and I'm thinking what's going on. And so I realized that somehow, as I'm riding, I jolt and some kind of setting triggers off automatic reading of my emails, what sounds kind of weird, but what actually made me realize that, hearing these voices, the quality didn't improve a lot. And so I started exploring automated voices, generated voices, and suddenly I realized that was what I needed. I needed to be able to find something that would speak the voices as I'm writing the text.

Speaker 2: 8:51

But I could completely keep reworking, whereas I couldn't with a human being, you know, I couldn't have an actor, voice actor, so I could just keep on practicing reworking. So I'd given up until that point. I'd given up on, you know, writing it as a written story or as a short film or whatever, and so that suddenly made it possible. So that's how putting it together, sort of the source for the story, the method I use for making it and how that sort of gelled together.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Well, I first want to say condolence for the losses of your mom and your sister.

Speaker 2: 9:25

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 9:26

But you definitely did in a sense, touch on a question that I also had of you, because I'm always interested as somebody who also loves audio, but, you know, listening to it, I said, well, this could have been a book like this, could have been a short story, as you said, even film iterations of this project, as somebody who also loves audio, what were you particularly challenged by? You know, you've, you've walked us through why you chose not to pursue the other ventures in that way. But what were the challenges of pursuing an audio project as opposed to? You know different elements well the.

Speaker 2: 9:59

The challenge is, first of all, which? So I didn't want to use my voice because it's too close to me, and that's what was really good with using the audio generated voices so I could get some distance, and the fact that I ended up using like a female voice which is you know, but simply because, first of all, it was the best one that could kind of get across the emotion I needed. And then I liked it. So I just thought, you know, why not keep it? So I ended up using that and that gave me the distance I need to be able to relate the story.

Speaker 2: 10:32

And I'd always grown up with radio when I was a child, because we couldn't afford TV, and so I grew up reading it with BBC Book at Bedtime, all these kind of things. So that was really my kind of medium. So you know, when I found I could actually just write phrases and have it spoken, it was actually not very easy. In fact it was really hard, because getting the intonations that you want and the expression means a lot of work, but it meant it was actually doable, which was the key thing for me. So I reworked it, rewrote it until I actually got to a point where I had something that worked.

Speaker 1: 11:10

Certainly, I do want to sort of set the scene for our listeners. We touched on a little bit about Daylight Come primarily, as you mentioned for us, right, it walks us primarily from you and your family's migration from St Thomas to the UK, but, as you mentioned earlier, there obviously marks the surrounding moments around this time period, right. So you do walk us a bit from Jamaica's colonial history. Windrush is a part of this story. Of course, you can't talk about Jamaicans in the UK and West Indians in the UK at large without talking about Windrush, um World War I and II, a lot of elements that I, you know, don't want to give away for our listeners by chance.

Speaker 1: 11:50

But what were, maybe, um? Did you encounter any difficulties, I think, in gathering sort of these family histories? I think oftentimes we come from a culture that you know isn't always so open to share in these ways, right, and so what was it like for maybe you to, on the side of, actually like writing and producing this, this project beyond the, you know, finding the voices, et cetera, but collecting the stories to document?

Speaker 2: 12:14

As you're saying that. The funny thing is, yes, there's that secretive side that sort of especially Jamaican women have. They're secretive for no reason, it's just like their nature. So they're kind of whispering and whatever, and my mother, my aunt and the family, and when you realize what they were talking about it's like why were they bothering to whisper?

Speaker 2: 12:34

But but the curious thing with my mum is I'm just realizing that she did actually tell me a lot in the early days when I first arrived in the UK, before my younger brothers and sisters came along, and so a lot of the source came from her and some from my aunt. So in the story I speak a lot about my aunt who raised me, and so a lot of it came from them. So so when I actually got to writing especially, they weren't around anymore. So it was a lot from the memory of them telling me in the beginning about, you know, when they grew up in Jamaica, who the relatives were, who came over, who stayed. So luckily I kind of, you know, was enriched with all that they told me.

Speaker 2: 13:20

So when I got to writing it there was no one else really around and a few people who were left, like some cousins, didn't know much at all, less than I thought they would know. So it was basically on my own and sort of putting it down, digging into my memory and putting pieces together. And so it basically came from that and there was a few missing pieces that luckily one of the contacts that was helping me do family search, a lady called Lisa Hill at Anglia Research in the UK, she'd found a few missing pieces like names and dates of my great aunt in Jamaica and certain dates to help me put together who came over when and who stayed with who at what other time. But most of it sorry to answer your question is from my mother and my aunt in the days when they were giving of information until the tap turned off and you know it was like not so much coming forward but it was rich anyway, what they left me certainly, and I found it to be, I think, um, much to sort of what you're saying.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Oral histories are such an important part of our culture, right, um, and in a way I think you know you've done, through this project, bringing these oral histories into a sort of new, um, modern right on the ways that we connect these stories that have been told to us and again, preserving them for future generations in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1: 14:52

One thing that I also thought of when it came to listening to Daylight Come is the fact that you know, we all have stories that deserve to be documented, to be told, to be saved and preserved. And I think sometimes, just sort of, maybe because of the top down nature of history, people feel like, you know, my family didn't do anything quote unquote remarkable right in history, so, so what's the big deal? But I, you know, but I hope my listeners believe that's completely opposite of my thinking. And so what was sort of the framework for you in thinking these things need to be documented? What are the kinds of stories that you chose to tell and really for us to certainly be proud of, and how do you think this helps, you know, add further context to, of course, you know, for instance, a lot of us hopefully most of us know about Windrush, right, but how is it that you know? By knowing your particular family story? How does it give us broader context about Windrush and other analogous historical events?

Speaker 2: 15:57

I agree with you that there's nothing remarkable about my family story, except I guess it's remarkable in the fact that sort of it's been put down on paper or on voice to be stored and archived. Because the thing is, if we just dismiss these family stories and say, oh, who's going to be interested? Because that was me in the beginning, I was thinking, you know, I'm going to just do this for my sister and put it down. And then, as I was digging further and further, I'm thinking, well, I should probably leave a bigger trace because of what's happening, especially today, with history being rewritten in a bad way, stories being erased.

Speaker 2: 16:41

The more stories even if they're banal, that sort of get put down with dates and times and facts, the harder it is to just sweep them away and say, oh, yeah, but it didn't really, it wasn't really like that, whatever.

Speaker 2: 16:57

So yeah. So that's the key thing. That's why I think people should be encouraged, if they have an inkling, to write a family story, just start doing it, putting it, put it down, and then it doesn't matter what format it takes afterwards. Put down you know the, the trace of it, the details, and put down even stuff that may be very sensitive, that you may not want someone to hear, because that's your draft, your personal draft, and once it's down, then you can rework it, take out what's sensitive, maybe change names to protect people, whatever, but at least get the thing down, because if you don't start and that was my problem at one stage I kept stalling. Then I realized that if I kept stalling any longer it would never be done. And once you get into it, then you start putting the details in, you take stuff out, you rework it. It's down and you can sort of even maybe take half of it or a quarter of it and make a smaller story than you thought you would do, but at least it's done. You can put it out there.

Speaker 1: 18:01

Uh, so it's just added to that collective family storytelling I do want to, you know, if I may, counter a point that you make, because I do think that the story was remarkable in a lot of ways. Right, you shape our understandings of caribbean history in a particular way, especially especially Caribbean migration. Well, no one's migration story looks the same. I will say that, first and foremost, right. I think also, you know, depending on where your family goes, things look different, right, my family largely to an extent more so went to Canada and the US, right, so there are elements of this story that, of course, I know, you know, windrush, etc, etc.

Speaker 1: 18:40

But there were particular context to this that I found very interesting Daylight Come that were, you know, maybe analogous in some ways, but also different from my own family's history.

Speaker 1: 18:48

And so I think when I say remarkable, I maybe mean, like people think, oh, you know, parent wasn't in the military or my grandparent, um, didn't become prime minister or something right. But all of us certainly have remarkable stories to share and I think that certainly came across in daylight come even, you know, thinking about particular things. There is a part of daylight come where you're talking about your aunt's experiences, right, truly, during world war one and world war two, and those are also things that I think add greater context to our understandings. For instance, we just recently did an episode on Caribbean people and World War I, world War II and women's voices certainly are, you know, not oftentimes at the top of that narrative, and so there are different ways that I think a lot of these things come to the fore, through Daylight Cup and so sort of getting into my next question, what was it like for you to trace your lineage and connect these moments between you know, your personal family stories and the larger context, and what did you learn about your family and yourself in the process?

Speaker 2: 19:57

It was actually a long process because I had a lot of material, too much material, to put into the final thing. So I still have a lot left. So that was also the editing process of you know what do you put in, what makes it sort of interesting, engaging for the listener, and sort of you know stuff that you leave out, killing your darlings kind of thing. So you know not to weigh the story down. You know, researching the lineage was basically the information. I had some information from Anglia research that helped me connect dots of when, which ships, because the ships were a big deal coming over from Jamaica to the UK at the time. So you know, windrush obviously is the most known, but there were many ships, often warships, that were converted as passenger ships. The history is worth looking up of the Windrush, because I don't really go into it because it wasn't sort of the key thing in my Daylight Come project. But if the listeners want to explore the actual origin of that ship, I think they'll be quite stunned because there's a huge kind of background to that particular.

Speaker 2: 21:15

While I was searching through the lineage, you know, finding out, you know how my family came. You know finding out. You know how my family came, um, basically I guess learning that sort of. We came from somewhere specific in africa which is, you know, up until then people would say when I was a child they're saying, yeah, but where do you come from, jim baker? You must have come from africa, and africa was this kind of generic place. And so by the research I found out sort of the specific places in Africa where we potentially would have been taken from to be brought to the Caribbean.

Speaker 2: 21:50

So that's also like a anchorage, like a connection, sort of through Jamaica going further back and not just sort of you suddenly appear from Jamaica and brought to the UK. So I think that's quite important and I've got this particular relationship with Jamaica where I've never actually been back. So I left as a child I've got this kind of ambivalent feelings where I'll always protect Jamaica but I have trouble with Jamaicans. So that's, you know, it's a kind of a strange thing and I'm not sure if that happens with other Caribbeans or immigrants that arrive.

Speaker 2: 22:26

Oh, that may be just my personal kind of connection, may or may not be relevant, I don't know but that's my particular thing with my origins and I think maybe actually now I'm thinking about I never thought it before, but maybe it was a way of protecting myself, because when I arrived in the UK I could have actually been weighed down with this kind of split of Jamaican boys grouped together, bad crowds getting into trouble or finding your way and breaking away from that. And so I did the latter, and so I guess it was a conscious decision and I guess that's one of the reasons why I ended up sort of having this disconnect with Jamaica, but just to be able to move on and sort of you know, ending up moving to France later on and then a different kind of, you know, political kind of evolution I don't know if this is maybe, um, if I'm speaking out of turn, but I think, in a lot of ways, perhaps daylight come was this bridge, right, um, to connect you to jamaica.

Speaker 1: 23:32

in a lot of ways, right, I think doing this research which, um, I know from personal experience, can be just so laborious, right, and then to turn it into something in particular, right, that you want to share, that you're hoping to craft in this way to be shared, builds a lot of bridges in some ways, and so, even to that point, how are you hoping perhaps Daylight Come serves as a product that will impact future generations, whether that's in your family or, you know, just listeners?

Speaker 2: 24:06

well, I'm kind of going back to it because I'm currently working on a new podcast uh, audio essay to be more exact and I'm thinking of returning to daylight come to add more study material to accompany it. So at the time when I put it out, I basically did the transcription and the timeline for people to sort of find their way independently of me, but just basically the story of Jamaica. And now I'm working on another story and doing more study materials. I'm thinking of going back to Daylight Come to develop accompanying materials which would be useful for future generations, developing to with a lot of information that you won't remember. You can have accompanying material where you can have, say, quizzes and more engaging study material and sort of tying in with that.

Speaker 2: 25:12

I hadn't, sort of up until recently, shared it with any members of my family. I felt awkward, I sort of, you know, when I put it out. I thought, okay, my mission is done, it's out there, whatever, shared it with friends and relations. And I felt somehow because in the development process I didn't ask my brothers and sisters because they didn't want to be restricted in them making comments and saying, oh, but you shouldn't really say that or whatever, I want you to be restricted in them making comments and saying, oh, but you shouldn't really say that or whatever. I want you to be free.

Speaker 2: 25:46

So I put it out there and time goes by and I realized after a while I actually didn't let any of my family listen. And one day a niece was asking me questions about just in the UK and I live in France, so asking me you know about my life and sort of connections and family back in Jamaica, and so I'm seeing she's curious. I shared it with her and she was the first member and then since then I shared it with other members of the family and it was interesting because she was really touched and she said the kind of there was so much stuff she didn't know about the family personally and about Jamaica and she was really, you know, touched and started sort of researching more about her family, origins, connections, so I can see how it can help future generations certainly I think so as well, and you know, to your point on the additional sort of study materials, that that's exactly sort of the impetus for my project, for things like the Strictly Fact Sounds.

Speaker 1: 26:46

Which brings us to my next question. I'm sure you know in a lot of your own views there are things that similarly pinpoint and creatively showcase Jamaican and, you know, caribbean at large impact in the UK. So are there other materials, are there other, you know songs, things like that that you think you know also similarly document this sort of Caribbean migration story to the UK in a similar vein as Daylight Come does.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Music in general, but not really specifically.

Speaker 2: 27:21

I'm just thinking really of the kind of blue beat at the time we arrived in the early 60s, and that's a whole kind of range and I'd be hard pushed to sort of you know, single out specific tracks but your listeners could really just easily search a blue beat of the early 60s and that's a whole climate and it's kind of atmosphere, the heavy pounding beats that people listening to and that was a precursor to ska and reggae which came later on. It's really for me it's that kind of that blue beat era and sort of one of the early the people kind of associate with his later tracks, um is jimmy cliff. So jimmy cliff, um, one of his big hits was hurricane hattie, which was a hurricane that swept through the Caribbean, and he had a massive hit with that a year later after the hurricane. And that's me one of the songs I associate with my mother telling me about hurricanes in the West Indies. And obviously the title of the project Daylight Come is from the song that Harry Belry bella fonti made famous, the banana boat.

Speaker 1: 28:45

uh, they all sound I definitely caught that um. I also thought of um andrea levy's book. Every light in the house burning um sort of as like analogous material when we think of, you know, jamaicans migrating to the uk and you know how life unfolds after the fact, so that's one that you know I'll also add, uh, but I'll definitely be sure to add, jimmy cliff and harry bellofonte songs to our strictly fact syllabus as well great my final question for you what sort of do you hope for how this will inspire others?

Speaker 1: 29:23

I know we talked about you know how, in a sense, future generations like your niece can be impacted, but what would be, maybe, your advice in terms of, you know, supporting others trying to or hoping to do similar work, to document their own family stories, and really thinking about putting these stories to pen, text, audio, whatever form, and really hoping for them to preserve this for the next generation?

Speaker 2: 29:53

I guess I'd say the younger generation. One advantage they have is AI. So not to write the story, but to be kind of a companion, and so, for example, someone has a story about their grandmother from the West Indies or their family, and just to be able to start somewhere, I think AI is a really good tool so you can either just as recorded that can be transcribed later, that you can build on and just to quickly start sort of you know, roughing it out and laying it out so you have something you can work on, and and also it's so easy today to put it online, to share the information, just essays, on so many platforms that are free, which actually gets rid of the stumbling block of cost, time intensive, because all these tools help to reduce the time. And it's motivating when you can start to see your story taking shape and say you've done the first few pages or the first few minutes and you can start building and developing it.

Speaker 2: 31:03

And I guess sort of you know searching on the internet and seeing resources of I can't none of them spring to mind, but it's very easy to find people who have started putting down their family stories and not directly connected, but I'm just thinking of areas where you grew up in london or the uk and how they've changed, and thinking about how they were heavily maybe, uh, immigrant at one stage. Now that's all changed, and trying to preserve the memory of you know how it was in the past, tied to your family, tied to your heritage, because all that stuff changed and it's gone forever. So it's kind of trying to stamp it with your heritage in a way, if you see what I mean.

Speaker 1: 31:55

So I certainly agree and I think you know I will leave us on that point, because I do definitely agree that you know we can stamp our heritage, as you mentioned, in a lot of creative ways nowadays and ways that I think you know, as we continue to evolve as a people, especially in this digital world, and creating these linkages across time and space and oceans, right nations, these are important ways for us to continue to mark who we are and our legacy and imprint on the world. And so, with that, for all of our listeners tuning in, I cannot recommend Daylight Come Enough. I will link it in our show notes for you all to also listen to as something in your free time, alongside listening to Strictly Facts and Calvin. I thank you and really appreciate you joining us for this podcast to talk about your project, talk about family histories, and you know how we continue to document family stories and so thanks so much.

Speaker 1: 32:52

Of course. Thank you, and you know with that, till next time. Look a little more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit StrictlyFacts facts podcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at strictly facts pod on instagram and facebook and at strictly facts pd on twitter.