Clive Myrie wants you to know that ‘Everything is Everything’

JOURNALIST, NEWS anchor and presenter Clive Myrie has revealed to The Voice Newspaper that his book, ‘Everything is Everything’, is a ‘love letter to the Windrush generation’.

Myrie’s deeply personal memoir tells how his family history has influenced his view of the world. Introducing us to his Windrush generation parents, a great grandfather who helped build the Panama Canal, and a great uncle who fought in the First World War, later to become a prominent police detective in Jamaica, Myrie has had many inspirations that have helped shaped who he has become.

In ‘Everything is Everything’, he reflects on how being Black has affected his perspective on issues he’s encountered in 30 years reporting some of the biggest stories of our time (most recently from the Middle East), showing us how those experiences gave him a better idea of what it means to be an outsider.

Myrie tells of his pride in his roots and why he will forever be indebted to his parents. “My parents were Windrush generation. They came a little bit after the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, they arrived in 1961 and 1962. My dad sailed to Southampton from Jamaica and my mum arrived by plane, flying from Kingston to Heathrow.

“Their early experience in Britain has shaped my attitude to the world and to being Black in this country. They faced difficult times, they faced racism. They faced bigotry. They kept their heads down, as down was their way of dealing with it.

“But I’ve always felt that racism and bigotry is, frankly, the ill and the problem of the persecutor, of the person who is actually engaging in these things. I’m Black and I’m Black. Everything is everything, that’s just the way it is, that’s how god made me, and I am proud of that. If you’ve got a problem with that, that’s your tough luck.

“My parents tried to avoid it, kept their heads down in a way to deal with it.

“And I have decided, certainly in this book, that it needs to be confronted. It needs to be taken on, head on.”

Myrie added: “They (my parents) were decent people, as so many of the Windrush generation were. They didn’t deserve the abuse they got on occasions. No one does.

“Many of the Windrush generation had fought for this country, they were willing to put their lives on the line for this country and they were willing to help rebuild this country. And that sense of decency and honesty and pride in who they are, I hope is something that I’ve managed to carry with me, throughout my life.

“I’m very proud of them. This book is a love letter to the Windrush generation. On their strength and resilience in dealing with the issue that they faced when they came here.

“But all in the service of furthering the cause of their own families, improving their lives and their children’s lives, but also helping to rebuild this country at a time when some didn’t want to.

“Two million whites left this country at the end of the war. They, quite rightly in their minds, didn’t want to be around bombed out rubble buildings and ration books and all of the problems that there were at the end of the Second World War. They didn’t want that either, so they were looking for a new life, so they went to Canada, they went to Australia, they went to New Zealand, South Africa.

“But that left a worker shortage here and that was the hole, the gap that the Windrush generation filled, and they should be honoured for that role.

“People should recognise just how important they were to a nascent NHS, to British Rail, to the buses, to rebuilding Britain, physically with their hands, on building sites up and down the country. That sense of hard work and decency I hope I’ve managed to get a little bit from my Windrush generation parents.”