Quote by Grace Nichols: “I have crossed an ocean. I have lost my tongue.”

Migration and displacement do not just move you across geography — they can strip away language, voice, and the specific way you understood yourself and your world. Nichols names this as a double loss: the crossing was real, but so was what it cost. Both truths are held at once without resolution.

I Is a Long-Memoried Woman was published in 1983, as Caribbean migration to Britain was generating intense political conflict, including the racist immigration policies of the Thatcher government. Nichols's collection placed Caribbean women's voices at the centre of a history that British culture preferred to marginalise.

Guyanese-British poet who came to international attention with her 1983 debut collection I Is a Long-Memoried Woman, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Her work centres Caribbean women's experiences of the Middle Passage, slavery, migration, and belonging. She is one of the foremost Caribbean voices in British literature.