A Bite of the Apple

by Lennie Goodings

  In the 1970s and 80s the feminist houses (like the traditional ones) were largely white and largely published white authors—even if we were conscious of needing to be more inclusive. I remember that in doing the publicity for The Heart of the Race I was really finding my way; the literary and media world was changing, but slowly, and I very much needed to be guided by the authors. Even though white feminism could hardly be called mainstream or at the centre of things, it was my world and it was time to step out and learn. And writers of colour were telling me why. The late Toni Morrison told a story about being on an American talk show and being asked when she was ever going to write about white people. ‘You know you can only ask that question from the centre of the world . . . He’s patronizing; he’s saying, you write well enough, you could come on into the centre if you wanted to . . . And I’m saying, Yeah well, I’m gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the centre look for me.’

  The world was beginning to tilt; voices from the margins were breaking through.

  Says the memoirist and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, ‘I remember the day Salman Rushdie was described as a British writer and how that made me feel . . . he was the first and the best and he . . . changed the literary terrain so others could grow.’

  When Salman Rushdie won the Booker in 1981 it wasn’t just the fact that a British Asian had won the prize that was important, but also that his novel, Midnight’s Children, in so many ways, began the thirst for literature about life beyond these shores.

  Prize lists for novels are a great barometer of society. If I look to the Booker, the Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange and Baileys), and even the Best of British lists—which, though driven by marketing, were selected by writers—I see a very gradual change of subject matter and of visibility for British authors of colour since Virago was founded.

  In fifty years of the Booker Prize, nine writers of colour have won, three of them women: Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, and (co-winning with Margaret Atwood) Bernardine Evaristo, the first black British woman to win the prize.

  The shortlists over all the years are not much more cheering: only thirteen women of colour and only four are British: Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, the late, much-loved Andrea Levy, and Evaristo.

  The Women’s Prize for Fiction, set up in 1996 to celebrate, honour, and recognize the voices of women overlooked by prizes such as the Booker, is an international prize with diverse longlists. There have been only five women of colour winners in twenty-four years: Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Kamila Shamsie, and Tayari Jones, three of whom are British.

  When Granta took up the Best of Young British Writers, the number of women writers of colour were, in 1983, only Buchi Emecheta and in 1993 none. The 2013 list, however, featured seven women of colour.

  Perhaps it feels reductive to make lists of prizes and recommendations, and to tally and highlight writers, but such things are hugely important: they make the headlines, indicate a nation’s taste, significantly influence readers’ choices, and, not least, often launch writers’ careers. The conversation around race and writing has powerfully shifted but in my experience, and in using these lists to see the clear evidence, it is a recent occurrence: mostly taking place only since 2000.

  And, of course, one could quite correctly point out that publishing does not have many people of colour in powerful positions.

  Over the years there have been many initiatives to try to correct this imbalance. GAP—Greater Access to Publishing—playing on the obvious (gap in the market, bridging the gap, mind the gap)—was set up in the late 1980s by Margaret Busby—the writer and founder of the publishing house Allison and Busby—with the late Ros de Lanerolle, the then Managing Director of the Women’s Press, and others, including me, and it did feel very much up against the grain.

  Even though there were many small black publishing houses at the time—Akira Press, Karia Press, Karnak House, Black Ink, Inky Fingers, Arawadi, Black Womantalk, Zora Press, and the long-established New Beacon Books and Bogle-L’Ouverture—the mainstream houses were not multi-cultural. We went out to the UK book trade under the banner of Toni Morrison’s statement, ‘It’s not patronage, not affirmative action we’re talking about here, we’re talking about the life of a country’s literature.’

  Margaret and I wrote a piece about our group for the Bookseller, pointing out the success of black and Asian writers but noting that ‘the desire for a multi-cultural list does not seem to have extended to a multi-cultural staff’. We formed to act as a campaigning and information group; to alert career guidance people to the possibilities of jobs in publishing; and to create a register of African, Caribbean, and Asian people experienced in different aspects of publishing.

  We ran a day-long conference (funded by the Greater London Authority) and encouraged the trade to think harder about how to encourage applicants of colour. GAP was followed by other initiative in later years, particularly Diversity in Publishing Network (DIPNet), founded by Elise Dillsworth, then an editor at Virago, and now a literary agent, with Alison Morrison. Similar encouraging and lobbying groups continue today, including Sharmaine Lovegrove’s radical work with her imprint, Dialogue, at Little, Brown. But none of us are there yet.

  In 1991 we published the paperback of the novel Joy by the black American writer and actress Marsha Hunt. As she said, because ‘publishers want to make money and the consensus was until publishers can see the fiscal advantage of signing up black British-born writers, they won’t bother’, she decided to set up a prize with backing from Saga magazine and help from the Book Trust. Dear Margaret Busby was a judge, as was Steve Pope, co-founder of X-Press. I too was a judge, as Virago promised to publish the first winner—female or male. Marsha set the rules, that ‘the author had to be a writer born in Great Britain or the Republic of Ireland having a black African ancestor’, which ironically attracted criticism from the Commission for Racial Equality and opened a discussion about what exactly is black British writing. Marsha ran the prize for four successful years and launched four new writers.

  The first winner was Diran Adebayo for Some Kind of Black. We stuck to our promise and he was Virago’s first living male novelist. (He later moved to the Abacus list at Little, Brown.) His novel was remarkable, a wild urban ride through London. It was 1996 and a long way off from the list of recognized black British writers that publishers can produce now.

  A year later our author Patricia J. Williams delivered the Reith Lectures, which we published as Seeing a Colour-Blind Future. She spoke about understanding and probing ‘the distance between the self, and the drama of one’s stereotype’, which is ‘the question at the centre of our resolution of racism’.

  The drama of one’s stereotype; the injustice could hardly be better expressed.

  Racism, like sexism, is still far from being eradicated, however the writers telling stories and the gatekeepers deciding who gets to tell them is changing. The conversations are shifting.

  Stepping outside one’s culture, learning the limits of one’s knowledge, is a challenge to editors, particularly white Western ones. We can get it wrong. I was reminded of Waris Dire’s insistence that the fight against FGM went beyond culture when we published Masih Alinejad’s The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran in 2018. Masih is now exiled from her beloved Iran for speaking out against the enforced wearing of the hijab. But she says, ‘We don’t want to be saved by Western feminists . . . we are brave enough.’ She rails against Western women who visit her country and cover their heads, which she says is mistakenly out of respect, as all that does is ‘legitimize the discriminatory law’. It makes it worse. ‘You should stand up for your own values, for your own dignity’, not justify a discriminating law.

  Similarly, a contributor to our anthology Fifty Shades of Feminism, Sayantani DasGupta, calls for a sisterhood of solidarity rather than ‘saving’.

  Thirty-four years after the first Feminist Book Fair, I
am fascinated to attend a new Feminist Book Fair in November 2018, at the Barbican in London. Stalls with feminist books occupy the downstairs floor and upstairs there are talks. Joanna Bourke, feminist, historian, and author of our book Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present and Lola Olufemi, black feminist, former Women’s Officer of Cambridge University Student Union, and author of a book for young people, Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power, share a stage with others to talk about After #MeToo. Though one might think this ‘After’ is suspiciously like the ‘post’ in post-feminism, we are having conversations with more nuance and awareness of intersectionality. Joanna points out that looking at a problem historically can give us hope because ‘things don’t have to be the way things are, history shows we can change things’; though it also tells us that the battle is a serious one, as ‘things are deeply embedded in media, in law, in art . . . but because history forces us to think structurally—we can’t just say women are women are women’. The definition of woman has and will continue to change.

  As does the defining of people of colour, for although publishing houses are no longer only male, white, and Oxbridge, editors of colour and from working-class backgrounds are still rare. Lola Olufemi said, ‘The feminist pundit class is not attuned to race and class.’

  Diran said to me, when we published him, ‘White people like talking about racism—because then it’s about them.’ I hear him in my mind as I witness and enjoy the fact that one of the bestselling books of 2017 was Renni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

  She went on to win the much-welcomed Jhalak Prize for the Book of the Year by a Writer of Colour, founded by Sunny Singh, Nikesh Shukla, and Media Diversified, the previous year.

  The old, tired narratives are being seriously disrupted at last.

  Chapter Nine

  Beyond Borders

  We had a little run-in with boundaries in the late 1980s. We received a manuscript from an agent who told us she was representing a British Asian author who had written some remarkable short stories for young people. We read and loved them, and decided we wanted to publish the collection in the Virago Upstarts series. The author’s name was Rahila Khan. Could we meet her? No, said the agent, who also hadn’t met her; she was apparently keeping the fact that she was writing fiction a secret from her family, and she didn’t live in London and could never get away from her home. So we corresponded by letter: agreeing the cover image, the cover copy. Rahila Khan provided us with a full biography, which we printed in the book: ‘Born in Coventry in 1950. She has lived in Birmingham, Derby, Oxford, London, Peterborough, and Brighton. In 1971 she married and now has two daughters . . . [in 1986] her first story, ‘Pictures’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Morning Story and since then five more have appeared on the programme.’ It was frustrating, but the many reasons provided to explain not meeting seemed credible.

  Then the agent rang to say she had news about the author, and could we meet for lunch? Ruthie and I went off in great expectation: finally we would learn more. We arrived at the restaurant to find a slightly nervous agent. She had at last met Rahila Khan; or rather, she had met the person who wrote under that name. (And, it turned out, at least one other too.) His name was Toby Forward, and he was an Anglican vicar. Maybe he believed and felt he had just proved that it was easier to get published as a British Asian woman than a white man. Most surprisingly, this had never been done to us before.

  Outraged, we went back to the office, sent out a press release, asked for the books in the shops to be returned to us, and pulped all his stock in our warehouse. I now see this was a little extreme. We could have probably just laughed it off—and then pulped his book. But we felt enraged by his duplicity. Possibly naively but in good faith we had taken ‘her’ story as the truth about the author and had presented his book as fiction by a British Asian woman to young people. We felt that we too were part of the misrepresentation—and we did not like being duped.

  The press release set off fireworks. I was asked to go on Breakfast TV, BBC Radio 4, World at One, and it was all over the press. I protested falsehoods, talked about authenticity and ‘literary blacking-up’ (today I suppose I could have talked about cultural appropriation); the media attacked us for sexism and lack of humour; the tabloids had a go at us with headlines about feminists defrocking a vicar. Oh, not a time I would like to live through again . . .

  Aside from thoughts on racism, lies, and feminism, a conversation and questions about the text emerged. Does it matter who wrote it if a book is good? Our answer: well, it also depends how you are presenting the book. Question: what about the Brontës—they published under false, male names? Answer: they had to. Question: can you tell the difference between male and female writing? Answer: no. Question: is it true that female writers of colour have an easier ride than white men in getting published? Answer: no, look around you. Question: did the Reverend Toby Forward have the last laugh on the feminists? Answer: nobody agrees on that one! Question: is it okay for a vicar to dissemble? Answer: hmmm . . .

  A few years later, Toby Forward, under his real name, wrote another young person’s book and in it there were two rather nasty characters. One was named Lennie and the other Miss Goodings.

  Writers reveal who they are by the way they conduct themselves with readers and with the writing community.

  Angela Carter was what I call a good citizen writer: she went out of her way to help other writers. Virago published Angela’s The Sadeian Woman and The Magic Toyshop in the Classics, but the way I got to know Angela better was through her discovery of the writer she brought to us: Pat Barker.

  Angela Carter loved to talk: she was famous for long, winding, wandering, fascinating telephone calls and, when they came my way, I loved them too. I feel she would have taken to email and possibly even Twitter; she was a sociable soul with voracious curiosity and always wanted to know what was going on, to be part of it. She was clever, witty, and eccentric in her dress and manner which gave her a slightly distracted demeanour—but she was actually bull’s-eye sharp with bracing, sometimes lacerating, observations about people, literature, and politics. Instinctively and fiercely moral, she wasn’t afraid to veer from the feminist party line. She was also funny, laughed often, and was good at—and obviously enjoyed—swearing.

  She felt deeply connected to us at Virago—particularly to Carmen—but she was so kind and attentive to me too: sending me a little cloth doll for my new baby girl with a note, ‘Bravissma! Welcome to Amy.’ Her own relationship to being a mother seemed joyful. Perhaps coming late to motherhood, and certainly because she was more than supported in his care by her partner Mark, she appeared at ease and her adoration of her little boy, Alex, was palpable. When he was very young he drew a wild-haired picture of her on his small blackboard and Angela suggested it was a perfect representation of her—and it was—for our cover of Nothing Sacred, a collection of her brilliantly sharp political and cultural pieces from New Society. She knew herself.

  Her relationship to Mark Pearce, who was eighteen years younger, was of great interest and mystery to us younger women at Virago. We knew the story: that they had watched each other for weeks, she from the window at which she wrote at her home in Bath and he from across the road, where he was building an extension on a house. She ran over to him one day to ask him to help fix a burst tap—and he never left. Tall and lean, dark and bearded, very handsome, he was shy and rather unsmiling. I know him now as a passionate, talkative man working with refugee charities, but back then he was almost completely silent. At parties, when we would find him standing quietly at the side of the room, Alexandra and I would try, out of politeness and, admittedly, deep curiosity, to engage him in conversation. Though he didn’t actually rebuff us, and he was obviously kind and adoring of a very voluble Angela, who could be the life of a party, he made it clear that chat was not for him. She described him as ‘like a werewolf’; we thought of him as a man from one of her stories.
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  The ICA arranged a Literary New York weekend of talks and invited the great American writers Grace Paley and Susan Sontag—and also Angela Carter, among others—for a Saturday panel in the 1980s. I can see them on the platform: little, round, talkative, and generous Grace; sharp, unswerving (and unnerving) Susan Sontag, her famous lick of grey-white hair across her dark head; and Angela. Attentive, she cocked her head, listening, assessing, and presenting a slightly diffident, amused demeanour that disguised what I knew to be someone with decided opinions. As usual, she spoke slowly and searchingly, laughing a bit when arguing—her deflection.

  The wide-ranging conversation eventually settled, fascinatingly, on what could be judged as literature. Voices of writers—working-class writers and writers from ethnic minorities—from beyond what was regarded as mainstream culture were at last reaching the big publishing houses, but Susan Sontag was cautious and wary: boundaries needed to be drawn. She argued, uncompromisingly, for upholding the calibre of quality literature; if these new stories were to be regarded as literature they had to reach a certain standard. Grace, in turn, felt particularly strongly that this cultural change was important and that news from the margins was exciting and potentially transformative; that literature would be broadened and very much for the good. Angela, I felt, sat somewhere between the two.