Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Childhood and children are the central theme of Baroness Floella Benjamin's autobiography What Are You Doing Here? that chronicles her personal and professional life.Divided into four parts entitled 'Childhood Lasts a Lifetime', 'Which Window Shall We Look Through Today?', 'When One Door Closes Another Opens', and 'Who Would Have Thought?', the book is a blend of histories.Benjamin's own personal and family history is combined with wider British sociocultural and political history from the 1950s onwards, and that of British theatre, film and television, as she documents her experiences as a performer from the late 1960s, and then also as a producer from the late 1980s.In Part I, Benjamin writes about her childhood through to becoming a trainee bank assistant.This is marked by the remnants of British colonialism and the beginnings of the Commonwealth.She describes herself as 'a child of two cultures', being born and spending her early years in Trinidad.Then, with her brothers and sisters, she joined their parents in England after more than a year's separation.Her parents had left Trinidad at the end of the 1950s, as part of the Caribbean migration to Britain taking place post-Second World War, symbolised by the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in 1948.Years later, Benjamin captures her experience of the journey that she and her siblings took, first in a children's book entitled Coming to England, published in 1995.This is then adapted into a children's drama (2005) and ultimately a children's theatre play (2023).She documents the racism of 1960s and 1970s Britain that she encountered both as a child and as a young woman: overt and, on more than one occasion, physically violent from strangers, and exclusionary and demeaning sometimes even from people she knew.As a writer, she
Author: Diane Charlesworth
Institution: University of Lincoln
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408844541