Know you not that love, when firmly established, is priceless? There is no child who could make me forget that love and no brother, nothing that could soothe me, not even all sorts of riches.
. . .
I cry for her with tears of compassion and of longing and sympathy for her, and loving friendship . . .
Sarah Parker Remond (1815–1894), abolitionist, lecturer, suffragist and much else, who leads the nineteenth-century grouping, demonstrates many of the themes and serendipitous connections that characterize this collection. A prime example of internationalism, she was born in Salem, Massachusetts (where her father had been brought as a child from the Dutch island of Curaçao), and lectured and studied in England before relocating to Italy, where she became a doctor and married. Her letter of September 1866 to the London Daily News, in which she waxes eloquent on “the reactionary movement against the coloured race in the United States”, and castigates the social commentator Thomas Carlyle for having “claims to the gratitude of all negro haters on both sides of the Atlantic”, makes one wonder how she might have reacted to a tweet by Donald Trump. Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s essay “The Bedford Women” delves further into her remarkable story, along the way revealing personal links much closer to home.
It gives pause for thought that Elizabeth Keckley (1818–1907), her life bridging the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, was describing first-hand the trauma of enslavement in her autobiography Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868—exactly one hundred years before the “mould-breaking year” that Jarrett-Macauley refers to, when “on university campuses from Paris to New York, students were protesting against the old order, against bureaucratic elites, against capitalism, sexism and racism and all forms of authoritarianism”, one direct result being the birth of black studies programs in such places of learning as Cornell, Howard and Harvard. And 1968 would be blighted by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in April (later that month MP Enoch Powell gave his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, scaremongering about mass immigration to the UK), and made notable too for the moment when at the Mexico City Olympic Games, African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in an iconic Black Power salute on the podium after winning medals, watched by, among others, the only black girl in Angela Cobbinah’s Cornish village, who recalls: “I felt an unfamiliar emotion. Call it connection or kinship, or the bubbling of a youthful rebelliousness . . .”
Such connections, and bonds of kinship, actual as well as intuited, strengthen the links between contributors to this volume, and those in my earlier anthology, and those who hopefully will discover themselves in these pages or draw inspiration to continue the legacy in their own ways. There are the literal mother-daughter relationships, beginning here with Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842–1924) and Florida Ruffin Ridley (1861–1943). It is especially pleasing to note the emergence as a writer of Yvonne Bailey-Smith, having raised and empowered three children (Zadie Smith and her brothers) to successful careers, and to see Attillah Springer follow the pathway of her mother Eintou Pearl Springer, a contributor to Daughters of Africa, and to see Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, achieve prominence in her own right. Exciting, too, to see work from Juliane Okot Bitek and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ, whose fathers’ writings I have enjoyed, and illuminating to read the experience of Arthenia Bates Millican (1920–2012), mentored by a father who was mired in “stuckness” but taught by Langston Hughes about “the value of humor in literature as a means to obliterate the soreness from difficult bruises to the soul”.
We each have our individual experiences of the mother-daughter relationship, some of which are shared in these pages, such as Marina Salandy-Brown’s “Lost Daughter of Africa”. Recognition of connection to the crucial and indelible maternal spirit is given by H. Cordelia Ray (1852–1916) in her 1991 poem “To My Mother” and in Akosua Busia’s elegiac “Mama”:
She is the centre of my earth
The fire from which I warm my soul
The spark that kindles my heart.
The sustenance I feed my daughter
Is the nourishment I sucked from her once-succulent flesh
Turned brittle-boned, held together by willpower
Mama feeds me still—
Permeating the very personal stories in these pages is always an awareness of the wider world, and of the impact of national and international politics. As well as honoring her mother, Cordelia Ray celebrates the heroic Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution expelling the French, British and Spanish armies that enforced slavery in Haiti and Santo Domingo. Effie Waller Smith (1879–1960), meanwhile, both addresses world issues in her poem “The Cuban Cause” and finds time from the perspective of the first decade of the twentieth century to praise “The ‘Bachelor Girl’”:
She’s no “old maid,” she’s not afraid
To let you know she’s her own “boss” . . .
Of politics and all the tricks
And schemes that politicians use,
She knows full well and she can tell
With eloquence of them her views . . .
She does not shirk, but does her work,
Amid the world’s fast hustling whirl,
And come what may, she’s here to stay,
The self-supporting “bachelor girl.”
(Definitely one of the “Independent Women” sung about by Destiny’s Child.)
In many ways 1992 seems longer ago than a quarter-century; yet, while much has changed, many challenges remain to impact on the publication of work by women of African descent. Who imagined in 1992 that we would celebrate the first African-American US president in 2008, and who could have predicted what would follow Barack Obama’s achievement, a decade later, on the watch of his successor in the White House? Much more empowering to think of 2018 as the year former first lady Michelle Obama broke records on the publication of her autobiographical memoir Becoming, which sold 1.4 million copies in its first week.
In 1992, Toni Morrison had not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize. Only the following year did she become the first black woman to win that laureate, and to my mind her international celebrity had been slower to come than it should have been, given that The Bluest Eye was published in 1970. Since then, I had looked up to her, and was privileged to spend time with her when she was in London for the British publication of Beloved—I interviewed her in 1988 (recorded by then fledgling filmmaker Sindamani Bridglal, and subsequently shown on Channel 4), not long before she won the Pulitzer Prize. Toni Morrison was my beacon. In the 1960s, when I started out as a publisher, she was the only other black woman editor I knew of, the first black woman senior editor at Random House, championing books by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Henri Dumas, as well as compiling The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays and other documents of black American life. She continued as an editor while producing extraordinary novels of her own, before leaving publishing in the 1980s to devote more time to her writing, including her play Dreaming Emmett, about the 1955 murder of the black teenager Emmett Till—also the subject of Bonnie Greer’s contribution to this present anthology. Beloved, too, was inspired by a true story, that of enslaved African-American Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison discovered while compiling The Black Book. History “rememoried” unfailingly drives many of the stories that keep these pages turning.
In 1992 came Morrison’s novel Jazz, the second in a trilogy that ended with Paradise (following publication of which I would again have the honor of being in conversation with her, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1998), as well as her succinctly powerful volume of essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, containing the stand-out quote: “As a writer reading, I came to realise the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer.”
That special year 1992 also saw the publication of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, which remained on the
New York Times bestseller list for months, and with the election of Bill Clinton as US President, Maya Angelou would in 1993 read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at his inauguration, the second poet (after Robert Frost at Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961) in history to read a poem at a presidential inauguration, and the first African-American and woman.
Many accomplishments were years away, and names now very familiar and deservedly lauded were still at the starting line. Jackie Kay, current poet laureate (or makar) of Scotland, had only just begun to receive recognition and the accolades that would start piling up after the 1991 publication of her first collection of poems, The Adoption Papers; her additional talents as novelist and memoirist were yet to be shown to the world. Ama Ata Aidoo was on her ever-upward journey, and was two decades away from becoming the subject of a film by Yaba Badoe.
Custom, tradition, friendships, mentor/mentee relationships, romance, sister-hood, inspiration, encouragement, sexuality, intersectional feminism, the politics of gender, race and identity—within these pages is explored an extensive spectrum of possibilities, in ways that are touching, surprising, angry, considered, joyful, heartrending. Supposedly taboo subjects are addressed head-on and with subtlety, familiar dilemmas elicit new takes.
How candid and engaging is Jay Bernard’s “I resist the urge to destroy my own records by reflecting on archives, how I use them, and what they have meant to me”:
I used to be a bit of a psychogeographer. All criticisms considered, I used to like the term, the ideas, and made a zine for a short time called Psychogeography for the Modern Black Woman. I equated my gender with the city around me. I was not simply a woman, but a specific knot of places, perceptions, possibilities. It detailed my walks around London and mentioned the bookshops, squats and other spaces I used to go to—Silver Moon, Index, Kennington Books, New Beacon—locations that made me make sense. Only one of those, New Beacon, still exists.
Isn’t that just what happens? Things disappear.
How fearlessly revelatory is Nawal El Saadawi in “About Me in Africa—Politics and Religion in My Childhood”, in which she writes:
I was brainwashed by my official education as a Muslim, Egyptian girl from the working class. In primary school the British and Egyptian teachers praised the upper-class girls, with fair white skin. My maternal Turkish grandmother despised my dark skin, which I inherited from the poor peasant family of my father.
My maternal aunt used to hide my dark skin with white powder, and would straighten my hair with a hot iron. I liberated my mind from this slavery by educating myself. Also, my enlightened mother and father helped me to undo what teachers did to me.
How disarming and informational is Zuleica Romay Guerra in “Something About Me”, which concludes by saying:
I am the Cuban Revolution, I am an outcome of the process started in the sixteenth century when, weighed down with chains in the lower decks of the slave ships, brutally dropped into their own excrement, and thrown overboard as garbage when they were on the point of death, more than a million African men and women arrived upon this island in order to keep on writing a history in which their offspring—all Cubans today, without any qualifying prefixes whatsoever—keep on with our struggles to win the fullest justice ever.
How courageous and touching is Andaiye’s recollection of her amity with Audre Lorde:
I do not remember when I wrote Audre but I did, and I remember that she answered immediately and sent me a copy of A Burst of Light with the inscription, “Sister Survivor—May these words be a bridge over that place where there are no words—or where they are so difficult as to sound like a scream!”
And so began my friendship with Audre Lorde, around the sharing of the fear of living with, perhaps dying from, cancer. She wrote often, mostly on cards. She’d say, “I need your words too.” I couldn’t write too many. So I called, often. And she called too.
Lorde’s is a name that recurs in other contributors’ work, including that of Edwidge Danticat, Sisonke Msimang and Panashe Chigumadzi, who writes:
It wasn’t until I met the force of the unflinching stories of our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters written by black women—Yvonne Vera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Ama Ata Aidoo, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé—that I was compelled to ask more of my view of their worlds, to find an answer to the question: what did it mean to be a black woman in my grandmother’s time?
Echoes and cross-references abound; the history we all are part of creating can be reimagined in many ways. Makhosazana Xaba and Diana Ferrus both pay poetic tribute to Sarah Baartman. Dorothea Smartt contributes “Poem Beginning With A Line From Claudia Rankine”, and Rankine herself contributes “Making Room” from her innovative Citizen: An American Lyric.
In my introduction to the 1992 anthology, I concluded that “Throughout these women’s words runs the awareness of connectedness to a wider flow of history, to the precursors, our foremothers. Our collective strength, like that of a chain, derives from maintaining the links.”
The different ways of connecting to an African heritage is an ever-present theme, as are stories of migration, and specifically “Windrush stories”, typified by the writing of Andrea Levy, whose father was among those immigrants who sailed to Britain from the Caribbean on the Empire Windrush in 1948, to be joined soon afterward by her mother. To quote from Levy’s acclaimed novel Small Island: “It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country’s defence when there was threat.”
Windrush is an inescapable reference point in the British-Caribbean nexus, whether mentioned specifically (as in Beverley Bryan’s “A Windrush Story” or Selina Nwulu’s poetry) or informing and permeating the creative consciousness. Stories of mothers separated from offspring, and the resultant psychological effects, inform many of the contributions.
Ifeona Fulani’s essay “Three Islands, Two Cities: The Making of a Black/Caribbean/Woman Writer/Scholar” talks of how her parents’ migration, “a few steps ahead of the great wave of Caribbean migrants to England in the late 1960s”, led her to becoming accustomed to being “the single grain of allspice floating in the milk jug” in the course of her very British education, and of her own transatlantic criss-crossings with which so many others would find common cause.
Jamaican-born Yvonne Bailey-Smith draws on her own memories of rejoining a mother who had gone ahead to the promised land that forever beckons immigrants, laying the ground for her daughter Zadie later to muse—as she is accepting the Langston Hughes medal in New York—about the significance of “all those years I’d spent as a child in England trying to prove that I was both Black and British; that I knew their plays and poems and history, that I could get into the finest institutions of education they had to offer, that I could perhaps even add a few words to the history of their literature—that I, too, was England.”
Yvvette Edwards in her short story “Security” brilliantly captures the emotions of a septuagenarian woman regarded as a foreigner worthy of deportation after half a century of sacrifice and thwarted hope in Britain. Carmen Harris, in her “Hello . . . Goodbye”, pins her hopes on being able to recreate an identity through her father’s migration story.
Sue Woodford-Hollick’s “Who I Was Then, and Who I Am Now” gives another aspect of finding identity in the course of growing up in Britain, as does Simi Bedford’s excerpt from her novel Yoruba Girl Dancing, showing the particular experience of being an African at boarding-school in England shared by many (myself included). Others who speak to the British experience include Kadija Sesay, whose formative years included being fostered (an experience in common with Patience Agbabi). Time and again, a topic that arises is the need to be uplifted by finding oneself mirrored in early reading.
Whether the journey is from a childhood in West Africa—as happened to Nah Dove—or from rural Cornwall in England’s southwest—Angela Cobbin
ah’s early life—it is London that encapsulates the Black British experience, with all its possibilities for racism, and much else besides. For Donu Kogbara, whose harrowing tale is of being kidnapped in her Nigerian homeland (“Losing My Fragile Roots”), London has become a sanctuary.
Women reveal themselves in these pages as survivors of violence and trauma. Verene Shepherd gives some valuable context in “Historicizing Gender-Based Violence in the Caribbean”. A variety of partnerships and marital relationships elicit poignant writing, including Barbara Jenkins’ “A Perfect Stranger”, Reneilwe Malatji’s “My Perfect Husband”, and Catherine Johnson’s “The Year I Lost”.
Andrea Rosario-Gborie, whose personal commentary from the perspective of her last days of working in Hollywood has resonances for today, identifies 1992 as a landmark in other ways: the year of major rioting in Los Angeles in April, following the acquittal of four police officers in the Rodney King beating criminal trial, while in the same month in Sierra Leone, West Africa, a group of young soldiers launched a military coup that brought to power a new twenty-five-year-old head of state.
Minna Salami, introduced to feminism by her mother, acknowledges that “we are feminists because there were women before us who were feminists. What causes the sense of loss, then, is that due to the invasion of Africa, the majority of historical records of these women are missing. So when someone says that feminism isn’t African, we are reminded that we do not have the historical proof to show how continuous our presence is in the continent.” She quotes from my introduction to Daughters of Africa — “Tradition and history are nurturing spirits for women of African descent. For without an understanding of where we have come from, we are less likely to be able to make sense of where we are going.” She goes on to assert: “Without doubt, it was this sense of loss that led me to Oya, who unlike any other figure in precolonial African history has expanded my purview of where I come from and of where I am going.”
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