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The term
“Black-British Writing” is generally used to refer to
literary texts produced by writers of African, Caribbean or Asian
racial and cultural origin. The category is now employed in organising
courses in Higher Education, especially in the United Kingdom, and
for the publication and marketing of literary as well as critical
texts in the subject area. However, like other similar literary
classificatory terms, such as “Commonwealth Literature,”
it has not been without its fair share of criticism. Indeed, the
writer Fred D’Aguiar in an essay in Wasafiri a few years ago
stated that he was opposed to the term as it was reductive of the
hugely diverse concerns of the literature it purported to describe,
bringing together into an incongruous composite assembly writers
from radically different cultural backgrounds. Salman Rushdie had
expressed similar reservations about the term “Commonwealth
Literature” in his book Imaginary Homelands a few years earlier.
It is clear that writers in particular do feel strongly against
their work being seen largely in terms of the author’s racial
biological origins instead of its intrinsic aesthetic and thematic
value.
Moreover, it is not the writers alone who are critical of the notion
of “Black-British Writing;” Critics such as James Proctor
have pointed out how the reduction of the complex variety of the
texts to the idea of “Blackness” goes against the spirit
of the literary texts themselves which often seek to go beyond the
essentialised racial identity “implied by the concept of “Blackness.”
It is argued that the texts highlight the limiting and constraining
effect of the term, foreground instead the heterogeneity of what
it means to be “Black-Black British.” Thus, Black-British
Writing must be seen as articulating a fundamental Transnational
and Transcultural formation of Diasporic identity in Britain.
However, there has been a shortage of terms which could aptly describe
this corpus of writing. The problem has to do with finding a description
that would replace the term “Black” and still cover
the range of writers that the label currently includes. Added to
this difficulty of taxonomy is the larger issue of ethnic categorisation.
I recall a few years ago listening to a radio programme in which
an Asian man was complaining about being referred to as Black. He
did not believe that he was Black and suggested that he should be
described as an “Indian or Asian. Indeed, recently, it has
emerged that the terms Indian or Asian are also controversial as
some members of those communities want to be known by their religious
identities so as to be seen to be different from Asians or Indians
who are Moslems. The desire to break down cultural forms of identity
along religious lines, though with a long history on the Indian
subcontinent itself, assumed its current inflection in the wake
of attacks on some Hindus and Sikhs who had been presumed Moslems
by White racists in the wake of the 7th July bombings in London.
Indeed, a man called Ammo Singh was reported to have joined the
racist British National Front (BNP) in order to work out what he
described as a relationship of “mutual benefit.” Extreme
as that might, it nevertheless shows the shifting nature of ethnic
identification in Britain today and the continuing tendency of members
of ethnic minorities to retreat to their narrower group identities
when the opposition Black and White is overridden by other differences
such as religious or geographical ones.
The term Black-British had been developed in the 60s, very much
modelled on the African-American Civil rights movement’s re-appropriation
of “Blackness” as an expression of resistance to its
negative connotations in dominant discourses of race where it functioned
as a term of abuse. This approach was immortalised, among others,
by the singer James Brown’s famous refrain: “Say it
loud: I’m Black, I’m Proud!” It was in this context
that the term Black became a political slogan of struggle and self-affirmation
in 1960s and 70s Britain as Racism evolved into a particularly vicious
strain that brought together Enoch Powell’s high-minded and
theoretically sophisticated racist ideology with an openly muscular
racist practice that translated in violent and murderous attacks
on Black people in the streets by gangs of white youths. Thus, it
became an umbrella term of solidarity used by the Anti-racist movement
in its opposition to the oppression of minority ethnic groups. (See
Avtar Brah, The Cartography of Diaspora, 1995) However, it is not
clear to what extent, away from the world of the committed Anti-Racist
activists, this ideological stance filtered into the consciousness
of ordinary people across the various communities constituting the
new political Black formation.
The unease with the term “Black-British” has not been
limited to Black writers and Asian religious particularists –
some leading Black politicians, especially on the right, have equally
expressed disquiet over it: Lord Taylor, the Black Conservative
Peer in the House of Lords, once suggested that the term “Afro-Saxon”
replace the term which he thought referred more to people’s
pigmentation than to their cultural origins and, particularly, their
affiliation to the British nation. His proposal was evidently a
commendable attempt to come up with a non-racial ethnic designation
for people of African origin living in Britain today. Nevertheless,
its evident quaintness would obviously exclude a number of writers
of recent African origin, such as Ben Okri, who might find no particular
reason to link themselves to Saxons, even though, of course, in
the larger scheme of things, Saxons like other Europeans could be
said to have originated from Africa! Moreover, a literature course
with the appellation “Afro-Saxon” might suggest a Pre-Renaissance
literary movement, perhaps attracting students more interested in
the recondite aspects of the ancient forms of the English tongue
than in the experience of recent immigrants of African and Caribbean
descent and others.
In this context, it may be argued that in the absence of an incontrovertibly
suitable equivalent, the term “Black-British Writing”
remains a useful and valid category for organising a particular
group of texts within British literature. Until there is another
and widely accepted “ethnic label for the communities from
which the writers covered by the term originate, literary and cultural
critics will continue to employ it, preferring it to other less
immanently persuasive contenders. Its current use facilitates curriculum
organisation and development, enabling students in Higher Education,
in particular, to devote their intellectual energies to understanding
the key thematic and stylistic issues in this area of literary production.
In turn, such courses contribute to the increased awareness of the
writing among the general readership, helping in disseminating the
literature. Above all, they engender ways of reading and interpreting
the texts that illuminate not only this group of texts, but also
its relationship to British literature as a whole and Post-colonial
literatures in general. In this regard, Black-British Writing offers
not only a pedagogical institutional space for the propagation and
acquisition of certain forms of knowledge about this particular
group of texts and its links to other literatures it is intimately
connected to, but also affords the opportunity for advanced research
into the literary texts and their authors. Specifically, it serves
as a site from which we are able to look at the ways in which British
and Post-colonial literary forms have developed into a distinct
expression of a given people historically originating from other
places, but whose identities are now deeply embedded within the
British nation.
Examining this body of literary texts together offers a comparative
approach to the ways in which various ethnic minorities have inhabited
the British Isles and also how, from their new habitat, they have
reworked their relationship to cultures of origin. For writers of
African and Caribbean background, the memory of Africa is a central
shaping consciousness. This is as evident in the earliest Black-British
writers such as Olaudah Equiano in his famous book, The Interesting
Narratives of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) as it is in the
work of more recent writers such as Diran Adebayo. If for Equiano,
Africa offered the validation of a lost humanity in the face of
the dehumanisation of Slavery and the Slave Trade, for Adebayo,
especially in his My Once Upon a Time (2000), it provides a cosmological
source of aesthetic belief and devices. His transplantation of Eshu
from the religious groves of Nigeria to the mean streets of London
bespeaks an imaginative adaptation of cultures of origin for a specifically
modern British cultural experience.
For Bernadine Evaristo, in her novel, Lara, Africa and, indeed the
wider African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly
in Brazil, offers a template for a Transcultural formation and ontology
that can be a model for not only a multi-cultural Britain, but also
one that is profoundly Transcultural too. Evaristo’s interest
in locating Black-British identity historically registers earlier
waves of settlers, for instance, 19th Century Nigerian sailors in
Liverpool. However, it is in her most daring historical novel, The
Emperor’s Babe (2001), that she presents us with a Black Londoner
with a difference: a veritable Black Londinium of Imperial Roman
proportions in the character of her formidable heroine Zuleika.
Even so, for me, it is perhaps, Fred D’Aguiar’s The
Longest Memory and Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (1991) as well as Higher
Ground (1989) which offer some of the most haunting representations
of the past, especially in the harrowing effects of the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade and Slavery on individuals and societies in Africa and
the Diaspora. If Black-British Writing offers a vantage point, albeit
a provisional one, from which to begin to understand and continue
to study the experience of the African Diaspora and those of other
communities in Britain, in its full totality of historical and cultural
formation, then its efficacy as a space of critique is both necessary
and worth preserving and, indeed, even struggling for. 
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