Steve McQueen's Small Axe Immortalized British Caribbean Experiences Like Never Before

Courtesy of Everett Collection

This retrospective essay on the personal impact and legacy of Steve McQueen's Small Axe for British West Indians, by Nicolas-Tyrell Scott, belongs to a package celebrating Caribbean Heritage Month. Throughout June, we will honor the powerful creativity, ambition, and heart of Caribbean culture through the sharp perspective of writers of Caribbean descent. The Caribbean is not just a tourist destination — it is a region, a people, and an identity rich in history and spirit.

In the 1970 reggae-infused single “Have A Little Faith," Jamaican singer Nicky Thomas acknowledges the cold days and lonely nights in reference to the yearn he felt for his lover. As the backdrop to the closing credits of Small Axe’s Lovers Rock, “Have A Little Faith” embodies the salve of reggae and the lovers rock sub-genre it helped to inspire; soft, tender, but abundant in message and musicality.

Lovers Rock premiered in the fall of 2020. Though quite different in context, the essence of the pandemic can be heard and felt in “Have a Little Faith” — crippling isolation, loneliness that felt eternal, and a longing for love, companionship, and familiarity. A time marked by uncertainty.

The anthology film series to which Lovers Rock belongs, Small Axe, leapt across laptop and television screens adding balm to the pandemic’s first winter, powered by British director Steve McQueen. The five “episode” anthology series was created in service to his Grenadian mother and the Black British community, who he believes needed these dramatized iterations of the realities of the Caribbean experience on television.

“It became a master want and a need, and it was also about my mother because I wanted my mum to sort of switch the television on and see these stories, these stories that she could relate to, that she knew, but hadn’t been sort of visualized yet,” McQueen told Deadline in 2021. “And also, for the Black community in UK to have some kind of relationship with these characters, and the attempt… was to sort of make these five episodes, films, if you will, to sort of fill the can of British cinema because these narratives were completely missing.”

Unbeknownst to him, the five-film project he’d conceived ten years or so prior to its release would galvanize West Indians on both sides of the Atlantic, in its respect and documentation of the Windrush generation and the wholehearted displays of depth across their stories. (As a people, the Windrush generation — derived from Jamaican, Trinidadian, Grenadian, St. Lucian and wider Caribbean families and individuals — helped in rebuilding and stabilizing Britain post-war upon their 1948 arrival in the UK.)

In Steve McQueen's Small Axe, three of these films in particular have resonated with my lived experience as a Black British man of Dominica and Jamaican descent, meticulously illustrating my community and the parts of our history I hold near to my heart on-screen.

Mangrove

Small Axe premiered with Mangrove, the first film in its collection of five, prominently starring Guyanese-British actress Letitia Wright. Mangrove tells the story of the nine Black community activists and Black Panthers who were charged with incitement to riot at a 1970 protest against racist police harassment of the Notting Hill Caribbean restaurant The Mangrove.

The pride that exists amongst Caribbean people is demonstrated in the resilience of not just the Mangrove Nine and their political activism but in the region of Notting Hill and the Mangrove restaurant itself, and our food. Literally nurturing communities through this form of comfort is instinctual to British-born Caribbean communities, the genealogy of care taken from their homes during the Windrush and blossoming further in their homes across England.

These are gastronomic experiences that colored my childhood. From Roti Hut in Shepherds Bush to Brixton’s True Flavours, food has fostered familiarity, safety, friendships and tangible refuge for me each and every week.

In Harlesden, just before the pandemic, Trinidadian locals cleaned tables and chairs for a group of friends and I during a spontaneous visit to their roti shop. Together, our warm intergenerational dialogue and laughter kept us in the shop well over the ten minutes we initially factored in.

I was reminded of this exchange in early scenes of Mangrove, with depictions of jubilance and innocence painting the streets of Notting Hill across the day and into the night; the serious silence needed throughout a game of dominoes too spoke to cultural truths I know and love of my people.

It’s these detailed moments — doing and experiencing life in the most intricate and honest ways possible, multifaceted in our existence and wholly human — that keep the Caribbean diaspora whole in the face of adversity.

Lovers Rock

Besides food, music has also become an instinctual form of cultural production amongst Caribbean communities in the diaspora. From soca to ska, calypso to dancehall, reggae to punta, our sounds have transcended our island nations through outputs like carnival or recreations of sound clash for the global eye. Steve McQueen leans into this musicality holistically in his ode to the subgenre of lovers rock.

Born out of the influence of rocksteady, lovers rock is a Black British extraction of reggae that focused radically on love and emotion against the backdrop of Black radicalism forming across the nation in the ‘70s.

It provided a space for ease and freedom, as audiences would engage in slow “scrub” dance movements, letting off tensions at house parties that ended in the early morning, at temporal peace with one another. In the 2011 documentary The Story of Lovers Rock directed by Menelik Shabazz, popular lovers rock vocalist Sylvia Tella defined the genre as “a language, way of life, [and] a culture.”

Central scenes in Lovers Rock are framed by orange hues, complimenting the range of Black skin tones and making scenes feel familiar and nostalgic; meanwhile, the poised yet charming confidence of an inaugural class of Black Brits of the Windrush generation radiates through the screen. They are now grown enough to make their own decisions, and are choosing to prioritize fun in the face of extreme racial tension in the region.

There are diverse representations of hair across gender, portrayals of mutual consideration between men and women, and painstakingly authentic aesthetic details across the costuming and set design. All of these details allowed Lovers Rock to translate across decades and generations during its pandemic premiere and started a conversation on social platforms like X (formerly Twitter).

The praxis of lovers rock as a genre is felt across the film's second half; as the men and women sing in unison to Janet Kay’s “Silly Games," the song's lyrics and the intentional love that Kay seeks linger in the eardrums. The courtship, the standard of love she requires, and the intention behind romantic endeavours is immediately understood. Lovers rock and its tradition continue to transcend time — in 2018, British half-Grenadian singer Estelle released her fifth album, a record entirely in the subgenre, aptly titled Lovers Rock.

The genre is an inherently British sound, one that could only be communicated with justice on-screen by a British West Indian themselves. It is an understatement to call McQueen's Lovers Rock an formidable feat.

Education

Black British Caribbean actors are prioritized the Small Axe anthology, with seminal figures like Tamara Lawrence. Lawrence helps to navigate the anthology's fifth and final film Education, which explores the methods of institutionalized racism exposed within British schooling in 1971. In service of the exposure of this practice, Small Axe tributes Grenadian politician Winston Bernard Coard and his booklet How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System: The Scandal of the Black Child in Schools in Britain.

Diligent in its reflection of West Indian ego and character, Education navigates a mother’s plight as she learns of the education system's intentional deceit towards her son. Portraying the eldest sister, Lawrence helps her family by teaching her parents of the evolving forms of discrimination across the country. Education's sharp dialogue and slow burn approach to West Indian family dynamics and intergenerational conference is a masterclass in pace, realism, and vigilance.

Steve McQueen may be decorated for his works across Hunger, Shame, and Twelve Years A Slave, but in service to his Grenadian and Bajan ancestry with Small Axe he demonstrates a relentless pride, confirming that throughout his career, there will always be space carved out for Caribbean and British audiences.

Years after its debut, Small Axe is still evergreen, still tender in its interpretations, still audacious in its realities, and ultimately a project that reiterates the importance of documentation and Caribbean-centred cultural production.

The Caribbean nations are oft still seen and treated as commodities. Artists of Caribbean descent seizing the power of their own narratives across the diaspora combats this, helping to shape the trajectory of our people and archive their nuanced experiences, canvassing traditions and re-birthing them for the world to bear witness.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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