Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (2022)
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (2022)
One: heritage, childhood, family, origins
Prioritizing education, my parents managed to pay for my oldest brother to attend prep school for a few years. He still recalls the time when his class had to read out loud in turn from the popular racist children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), about Sambo and his father, Black Jumbo, and mother, Black Mumbo. Sambo had long been a racial slur in America and Britain and mumbo-jumbo was a pejorative term for black languages, which were considered nonsensical. When my seven-year-old brother, the only child of colour in the class, was forced to read from this racist text, everyone in the room erupted with laughter. He’s never forgotten it (14-5).
As a child, you are profoundly affected by this level of hostility without being able to intellectualize or articulate it. You feel hated, even though you have done nothing to deserve it, and so you think there is something wrong with you, rather than something wrong with them.
A child needs to feel safe, to feel that they belong, but when you are prejudged before you even open your mouth to speak, you feel as if you don’t. It seemed unfair because I felt the same inside as my little white pals. We liked the same music and television programmes, breathed the same air, ate the same food, had the same feelings - human ones. In time I developed a self-protective force field around me, which persists to this day (16).
I was a tomboy, squashed between two brothers who let me play with them until they didn’t, bonding with each other more than they could bond with the girl in the equation. I’m the fourth in the family and we middle children tend to be very independent for obvious reasons. You just get on with it. I’ve always felt myself to have an inner strength, by which I mean that I’m not needy or clingy, I don’t crave approval all the time and I’m happy with my own company. In terms of the span of my life and my career, a tough inner core has been essential to my creative survival. This hardiness was probably first developed in my very early years. I’ve never been in therapy as I like to live with my demons. By this, I don’t mean that I’m living with unresolved trauma, but that I’ve become adept at self-interrogation and have never felt driven to seek help. I like to work things out for myself, and I guess this book is a massive act of self-interrogation (25-6).
It’s very clear to me writing this, that my creative career and activism can be tracked back to growing up in a political household where individuality was encouraged by my mother, and both parents exemplified social responsibility and political engagement (30).
Two: houses, flats, rooms, homes
I am glad that I didn’t grow up in a home or within a family where society’s norms were paramount. Yes, my father was a tough disciplinarian who didn’t know how to relate to his children, but he was also a rebellious spirit in the sense that he didn’t care about what other people thought, while my mother was committed to being unorthodox. I was never pressurized to pursue a particular kind of career, or to marry someone of their approval or to please the neighbours. I was never encouraged to have children, and dutifully provide them with grandchildren. They’d have got nowhere if they’d tried.
When I was a teenager intent on becoming an actor, my mother did suggest I learn to type so that I could fall back on secretarial work if it failed. You can imagine what I thought of that. She was right, though, although not quite as she intended. Typing is always useful, especially once computers became commonplace. I still can’t type properly.
Essentially, I am grateful that I was not raised in a family where I had to fulfil my parents’ ambitions for themselves through me, and that I was encouraged to become the architect of my own adult life (54-5).
I never entertained the idea of not working in theatre, in spite of my erratic income; it was my passion and I had to fulfil it. The idea of being bonded to a mortgage-debt appalled me. I imagined that I’d have to take on a nine-to-five job to pay it off, doing something I hated. I envisioned, in true melodramatic fashion, my emotions numbed by routine, my imagination murdered, my free spirit imprisoned, my dreams unfulfilled. I reckoned I’d rather be poor, which is just as well, because I was.
And so I was on the move, at one stage every year, a veritable home-hopper, either willingly or through necessity. At one point I even felt restless if I didn’t move frequently. I liked the adventure of living in different homes. Perhaps if I’d inherited a lovely apartment in Notting Hill, as a friend of mine did as her graduation present, I might have wanted to stay put. Then again, I might not have become a writer, or the kind of writer I became, or perhaps been very driven or productive. I was never writing from a place of financial security or emotional complacency, or in a stable domicile. When you move around a lot, you have to be mentally agile and adapt quickly to new environments. Moving home as much as I did forced me to live by my wits, which I reasoned was no bad thing for my creativity (66).
In my thirties, my theatre days behind me and focusing on writing, I found undemanding part-time jobs, usually two days a week, because my priority was to be free to write. I was obsessed with writing my book Lara at this time, and it was really hard to drag myself away from it. I worked for a festival of women photographers, about which I knew zilch, but I did the research in order to perform well at interview. The rest of the team tolerated me, even though it was clear I was out of my depth. I also worked as an administrator for a small management consultancy, even though my typing was awful, and for a theatre organization.
Actually, jobs where I could pursue my own writing were absolutely perfect. In one such organization, when I was alone in the office, I used to work on Lara when I was supposed to be carrying out my admin duties. Computers in those days were rudimentary, but I soon learned how to change from the manuscript page to a work page when my boss walked into the room. When he really got pissed off with me at failing to deliver on his required measurables, I wore a short skirt the next day to work and watched the rage go out of him. It wasn’t a miniskirt, but at a mere two inches above the knee, subtly revealing. When my boss walked into the office intending to reprimand me for not delivering on my duties, he needed only to look at my legs to be defeated by them, and for his annoyance to deflate.
We women notice where men direct their attention, even if they’re not aware that we’ve clocked it. As a good feminist, it was my duty to expose his patriarchal obsession with female body parts by taking advantage of it, thereby redressing the balance, right (68)?
By my mid-thirties, I had begun to long for a place of my own, buying lifestyle magazines to drool over that which I did not possess. My fantasies were populated not by down-to-earth flats in London’s least appealing districts, nor small suburban homes, neither of which was remotely affordable to me in any case, but by the most capacious open-plan barn conversions, warehouse apartments in New York with double-height walls, sprawling seaside villas in tropical countries.
By my early forties, at the social gatherings of my peers, I noticed that I was often the only person in the room who was not a homeowner, even though I was the Published Author in their midst, yet nonetheless failing at all of society’s rites of passage that they had all fulfilled: long-term partner, children, proper salary, homeowner, pension - in various sequences of priority. Most of these things had not been my ambition, but surrounded by people who were living comfortably and futureproofing their lives, it was hard not to compare and contrast, in spite of the fact that I had doggedly eschewed convention and therefore had no right to complain. In my case, my creative life choices had led to peripeteia and precarity, although, of course, for many people they do not. Now here I was in middle age and the idea of a house, pension and mortgage seemed quite attractive, as did a long-term partner (74).
Three: the women and men who came and went
Romantic love. Random sex. Hopeless crushes. Short-lived flings. Proper relationships. All of these experiences contributed to making me the person and writer I became, one for whom the pursuit of freedom was paramount: freedom to move home, freedom from a conventional job, freedom to follow the whims of my sexuality, freedom to jump from one encounter to another, freedom to write experimental fiction. Even when my freedom was seriously curtailed, as it was during one relationship in my twenties, I broke free and carved out the life I wanted for myself again (79).
Thereafter followed a long-distance love affair where we travelled between each other’s cities and filled the time in between by writing the most romantic letters to each other. Evidence of the intensity of our feelings is in the letters we’ve kept. While memory is a fickle thing, the letters between myself and eX state the truth about our love affair. Re-reading them after so long, I am reminded how important this relationship was to me. It’s one thing verbally expressing your love for someone, but it’s something else writing thousands of words that articulate what you mean to each other, and it created a written record of the relationship.
eX was someone who revealed herself through her letters and in person, and her openness made me want to dismantle my own bolted-on defence mechanisms, although I wasn’t completely successful in doing this. I was a toughened-up black Londoner who had grown up in a society where I was seen as an outsider, whereas she was a white Netherlander who fitted visually into her country’s majority white environment. In one letter she wrote, ‘Bernie, it’s good to be vulnerable; please don’t get scared for your own feelings, and be proud of yourself, because you’re absolutely worth it (85-6)!’
She preached an anti-success ideology, or rather what she called ‘sickkkk-cesssss’, delivered with all the venom of a pantomime hissing snake. Successful people were morally reprehensible, to be scorned, had sold their souls to the devil. It was another warning sign I ignored, that it would be wise to step back from someone who scorned ambition. As a feminist I was supposed to be fighting for women, especially black women, to succeed, to be heard. I was supposed to be wanting more of the cake, not crushing it underfoot. I didn’t then have the wherewithal to understand that she was disappointed at her own downturned fortunes, and resentful of those who were achieving what she most desired: money, fame, status. Instead, she drove a cheap car and lived in social housing - mine - although it was a cosy housing-association attic flat in an Islington square that was primarily occupied by privately owned Edwardian town houses. Hardly the Projects of Chicago South Side or South Central LA.
A few years after we split up, she hired a Rolls-Royce to drive around London, dropping in on my father, who reliably reported back, which I guess was the whole point (91).
After I’d firmly rejected her kind offer to publish my poetry, she proceeded to demolish it. It really wasn’t any good, she now declared, and had previously proclaimed otherwise to boost my confidence, because I was lost when I met her and she, magnanimously, had been intent on saving me at great sacrifice to her own well-being. (Like God, I suspect.)
TMD’s renunciation of my writing was the last straw. Her previous praise had been on condition of my subservience. She had been my biggest cheerleader but now took credit for my development as a writer, yet she had never offered me a single constructive editorial comment - so how come, babes?
At night while she slept, I wrote poetry, but I was in emotional turmoil and my muse had gone AWOL. The self-belief I’d been developing prior to the relationship, and which I rebuilt after it, is the single most important thing a writer needs, especially when the encouragement we crave from others is not forthcoming.
These were the end days. It was time to go, but how? A friend who saw that I was stuck, offered to sub-let me her council flat on the other side of London.
I was petrified of telling TMD that I was going, but she was surprisingly accepting - perhaps she’d had enough herself. We fought about what was mine or hers, and I left.
*
In years to come I would understand that the controlling person in a relationship is dependent on the partner being weak, yet the supposedly weak one is more likely to thrive when they leave, while the ostensibly stronger person is less able to cope on their own. If you derive your power from subjugating another person, then you are the one who is weak and dependent.
The biggest lesson - which is obvious, but experiencing it at close quarters drove it home for me - was that the abuse of power is not the preserve of men, or white people, or heterosexual partners. Nor does it thrive in a vacuum. I was not a victim, although for many years afterward I saw myself as one. I now prefer to view myself as complicit in a relationship where I gave my agency away to the point where it was hard to reclaim it. I was always free to leave. After all, I was young with no dependants to consider. She exerted a formidable psychological hold over me and when I tried to assert myself, the relationship deteriorated into violence on her part. If I had not been seduced by the force of her personality at the beginning, and ignored the warning signs, she would never have grown into such a monster in my life. I fed the monster until it became unbearable to be anywhere near it. I allowed myself to be dominated, not by a man or a white person, but by another black woman. The lesson I learned was to detect the early signs of a control freak and to back off (99-101).
A married friend once told me she had discovered that marriage was freedom, not imprisonment, which was the opposite of my own belief system. Yet when I married David, having been avowedly against marriage for most of my life, I understood what she meant. Before David, I’d had mostly unsatisfactory relationships, or periods where I sought relationships, which had taken up emotional energy and headspace. I realized that making a public and legal commitment to David in marriage had freed me up to get on with the other areas of my life - the most important of which is my writing (112-13).
Four: drama, community, performance, politics
Drama schools are intense laboratories that demand a high degree of self- and group interrogation. To a certain extent, the unthinking self is dismantled so that you can be rebuilt with a deeper understanding of who you are, which in turn enables you to create convincing characters - or so the theory goes. Attendance was daily and compulsory, and the course entirely practical. We didn’t sit in lecture theatres, but under-took a packed timetable of workshops on movement and voice, acting and devising, rehearsals and productions. We students spent all day interacting together, and getting to know each other in depth. As a consequence, meaningful friendships were fast established (118-19).
Running a black women’s theatre company required a certain feistiness and bloody-mindedness from the protagonists. My political voice was first developed during those theatre years as we fought a long-running battle against the forces who didn’t want us to exist. In theatre, as in many professions, people are wary of voicing their opposition to inequalities around race, gender or sexuality, because it might endanger their careers. Actors, in particular, are dependent on maintaining good relationships and reputations in order to find work in such a precarious profession. As Patricia and I were at the helm of our own company, we didn’t care about burning bridges. We wore our feminist politics on our sleeves and spoke out when it was necessary, including getting into arguments with the black men who thought feminism was a white disease, and that our company was unnecessary and divisive. When we were criticized for being ‘separatist’, we replied that the arts establishment favoured men first, and then white women, and that our so-called separatism was actually responding to theirs. (In any case, we did work with men and white people, mainly behind the scenes (125).)
A friend’s mother suggested I tone down my wacky dress sense because it made me stand out too much; I’d be targeted by racists. I laughed her off, much as I do bad advice today. I wasn’t going to become less of who I was - to make myself invisible - in order to try to live a risk-free life.
I lived down the road from George O’Dowd before he became the pop star Boy George, whose androgynous style was gorgeously eccentric. We never knew each other, but our fathers did. David Bowie, who had grown up near where I went to secondary school in Eltham, was then blazing a trail with his spectacularly outrageous androgynous style. These days I can see that, like them, as a suburban kid, far removed from the then hip spots of the King’s Road or Carnaby Street, I wanted to make a statement about where I wanted to position myself in society. In my case, instead of trying to please Mr and Mrs Suburbia with their 2.4 kids who set a ‘gold standard’ I could never live up to, my clothes were a sartorial demonstration of the direction of my ambition: I was going places and I couldn’t wait to get as far away from them as possible.
Anyone looking at me then would know that this young lady was not in training for a workplace where she’d be obliged to turn up in some kind of office-wear. It was obvious that I was in training to be in the arts, and the idea of working in an office would have filled me with suicidal thoughts. Not long ago, one of my siblings asked me why on earth I dressed to stand out as a teenager when the whole point of our childhood was to try to fit in. I had my answer at the ready, yet was surprised that we’d never actually had this conversation.
I credit the youth theatre with broadening my horizons in every way possible. It not only introduced me to the arts but also nurtured my individuality, empathy and imagination within a collective, collegiate, non-competitive environment, as well as developing my self-esteem, self-confidence and self-knowledge. Further, we were encouraged to think for ourselves - unlike the Catholic Church I had grown up in, where we were coerced to have blind faith and allegiance to an invisible presence or be damned to eternity in the fires of hell; or at school, where our English teacher made it clear that her interpretation of a work of literature was the only correct one, and so in order to do well in class, we had to second-guess what she thought of a poem, rather than come up with our own ideas. And if we became a bit unruly at the youth theatre, we were talked to respectfully, unlike at home, where I lived with the threat of corporal punishment (132-4).
During those teenage years I transitioned from someone who had long been transported by other people’s lives through reading novels to someone who, through performance, tried to metamorphose into other people, which would lead to my desire to inhabit lives that were not my own through becoming a writer of fiction myself.
I spent the next decade, up to my mid-twenties, acting, and I now realize that when you perform writing, you absorb it differently than if you’re just reading the words silently or even out loud. When you become characters, find their truths and communicate them, usually within the context of your relationships with other actors in rehearsal and performance, you are inside an alchemical process whereby the self you know and the self you are becoming through performance are integrated and emotionally connected. When you are doing so in front of a live audience, the experience can be mutually enhancing, and the vibrations resounding around the performance venue can be electrifying.
As a storyteller, I am continually drawn to understanding and conveying human psychology and to inhabiting the lives of my characters, feeling them from the inside, much as I had as an actor. My propensity as a novelist has been for first-person narratives, and for developing the ventriloquist skills necessary to bring them alive. This can be traced back to when I was an actor, firstly, and further, one who also wrote and performed her own scripts. The coalescence of the act of writing with the art of performance enriched my understanding of the possibilities of characterization in fiction, which continues through to this day.
Moreover, drama gave me a passion, a focus and sense of direction for my future. I was never a young person who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their adult life. The youth theatre also provided an antidote to the school’s rigidly conformist cultural ethos, which was alienating for those of us who could never fit in, even if we tried (135-6).
Five: poetry, fiction, verse fiction, fusion fiction
My original intention with Lara was to drag myself away from poetry and write fiction, because I wanted to tell the story of the opposition to my parents’ English-Nigerian marriage, and thought the expansiveness of a novel made it the most suitable form to do so. Novels about this aspect of British society barely existed then, and not from an African-English perspective. I wanted to put my parents’ story on the map.
I first drafted the book in prose, even though I’d never written prose fiction and struggled to believe myself capable of the task in hand. This didn’t stop me, because the urge to write my parents’ story was so insistent. After three years, I had an unfinished manuscript of two hundred pages written on an electronic typewriter, but it was all over the place - a right mess. I had no understanding of narrative structure, and the spirit of poetry that had infused and energized my writing up to this point had disappeared. In making the transition from poetry to prose, my use of language fell into a coma. Painfully, I admitted to myself that, as I derived no pleasure from reading back what I’d written, neither would anyone else. I still wanted to tell this story, but I had no idea how to do it.
Three years in, I attended an Arvon Foundation residential writers’ course in the countryside, with no plans to go to any classes but to sneakily use it as a writing retreat. The organizers weren’t having this, so I was made to show up for workshops, and in one session I found myself writing a poem for an exercise, my first poem in over three years, and I instantly reconnected to my love of language. I knew then what I had to do. When I returned to London, I threw the original manuscript of Lara into the bin, literally, so that it disappeared without trace, and embarked on rewriting the story as poetry. Discarding the manuscript was a necessary symbolic gesture for me in order to start completely afresh, although I wish I hadn’t. I like to keep records of everything I write.
Problem-solving is integral to the creative process, and I realized with Lara that I’d been struggling to write in a style that wasn’t true to my poetic instincts. It had taken me three years to pinpoint the problem and find a solution. For the next two years I rewrote the story as poetry, feeling a new commitment and passion for the storytelling involved. It wasn’t easy at the beginning; I would spend half the week looking at a blank sheet of white paper in front of me, refusing to leave my desk until I thought up the opening line of a new page, a new poem, from which the rest would inevitably cascade more easily.
Lara was written while I was living in the attic flat in Brockley, working in a bedroom with a view over south London. The view is so vivid in my mind because I spent so much time staring out at it while trying to conjure up the right words for a story with multiple protagonists from different countries and eras. I worked part-time, earned little and socialized rarely as a result. When I was involved with a man, he usually came and went in the dark, so there was little distraction. It was a period of great solitude.
Once each poem had been redrafted by hand a few times, it was transferred onto my computer. I would then print out each revision and revise it by hand before entering my edits back onto the screen. I might go through this process up to forty times. When I read the poem back and it flowed effortlessly, saying what I wanted to convey, and I didn’t want to change a word, or even a comma, I knew it was completed.
By now, my practice was far removed from when I’d first begun to write poetry and been unable to change a single word. Back then, the first draft was the final draft and I would have been devastated if anyone had suggested revisions. Soon enough, I learned that most writing is actually rewriting, and that the words you scribble on the page are the raw material from which you might be able to sculpt something of substance. We writers spend our lives learning how to manipulate language to express precisely what we wish to communicate. Even as I write this, I’m constantly making adjustments to my vocabulary and reconfiguring my sentences so that they accurately deliver on my intentions.
Six months into writing the new Lara, on surer footing in terms of style and substance, I progressed from writing one page a week to several; two years after its poetic rebirth, it was complete. The book had taken five years in total, but I had finally reached my destination.
Literary genres are not just external labels. They are techniques, approaches, infrastructures, methods that facilitate the concepts behind our writing. Poetic concision, compression and imagery enabled an expansion of the original story of Lara beyond my parents’ marriage. My research took me into my parents’ ancestry, bringing seven generations to life, including my own childhood. In a sense, the book was my response to the letter I’d sent to my long-lost relative in Nigeria all those years before enquiring as to my father’s family and my relatives there.
Because I built the story up through small units of poetry, it became more manageable, whereas the sheer number of words in a prose novel had intimidated and overwhelmed me to the point where I felt I was drowning in them.
The final edit involved laying every page of the text out on my living-room floor and organizing a chronology for it.
I never regretted spending three years producing a discarded first version of the book, because that’s not how I saw it - then or with future work. The creative process for me is an experiment - trial and error - a trip into the unknown, which leads to new discoveries.
*
Writing Lara grounded me in a practice that continues through to today, where my books will go through major redrafts, sometimes up to five. I will typically spend years working on a book without showing it to anyone, because I want to know what I think of my work before someone else gives me their opinion.
I initially thought of Lara as a narrative poem until it was about to be published by Angela Royal Publishing, and we discussed how to market it. We then decided to categorize it as a verse novel so that it would sit in the more popular fiction section of bookshops. (There are no hard-and-fast rules about verse novels; everyone explores the form differently (146-50).)
The Emperor’s Babe itself began as a series of poems about a girl of Nubian parentage who grows up in Roman London eighteen hundred years ago, which I’d written as a part of a writer’s residency at the Museum of London. It only became a novel because I pitched the idea to my now editor and publisher, Simon Prosser, and based on these early poems I was offered a contract. It quickly grew into a verse novel of two hundred and fifty pages and proved to be a wildly enjoyable writing experience. My protagonist, Zuleika, endures marriage to a rich Roman, Felix, but falls in love with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a real historical figure from Leptis Magna in what we now call Libya.
All of my books have multiple starting points. My fascination with history is one of them and my interest in black and multicultural society is another. I first encountered the untold African history of Britain in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) by Peter Fryer. The book opens with the sentence, ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here’- referring to a legion of Moors from North Africa stationed at Hadrian’s Wall near Scotland as part of the Roman Army in AD 211. Having grown up with the myth that Britain had been a white country until the twentieth century, it was a pretty explosive read. Staying Power also unearths the black history of Britain from the 1500s onwards, evidencing a continuous presence up to today. This in turn led me to earlier books by J. A. Rogers, Ivan Van Sertima and Edward Scobie, with their own angles on the hidden narratives of black history. Reading them as a young woman made me feel that I was part of a continuum in Britain and Europe. People of African origin were not just Johnny-come-latelys, but an integral part of the continent’s roots. I was drawn to work creatively with this history but didn’t know how to, until it came to fruition with The Emperor’s Babe.
The novel’s conceit is a direct challenge to the monocultural myth of British history, and with it I sought to devise a linguistically heterogeneous society that in some way echoes the melting-pot origins of the English language. The dominant narrative mode is standard English but the characters also deliver a lexical concoction of Latin words, a Scots-Latin pidgin invention, Americanisms, cockney rhyming slang and neologisms. Towards the beginning of the book, as Zuleika introduces us to her unhappily married life with Felix, she says, ‘Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman bitch for decorum classes,/ learnt how to talk, eat and fart,/ how to get my amo amas amat right, and ditch/ my second-generation plebby creole./ Zuleika accepta est./ Zuleika delicata est./ Zuleika bloody goody two-shoes est./ But I dreamt of creating mosaics/ of remaking my town with bright stones and glass./ But no! Numquam! It’s not allowed.’
The book is playfully anachronistic, a temporal mash-up - history and the contemporary blended together in a parallel universe, so that while it’s set nearly two thousand years ago, it feels very modern. I wanted it to feel immediate, vital, as if my historical figures are alive today.
I’m more interested in writing interesting sentences than grammatically perfect or beautifully understated ones, and this novel is my most linguistically rebellious and disruptive (154-6).
The first draft of Soul Tourists was written in prose, as per my publishing contract, but it was glaringly obvious that yet again my use of language was dull to the point of being lifeless and the structure was undisciplined to the point of being lawless. This time it didn’t take me three years to recognize the problem, but I didn’t know how to fix it and it was probably unfixable, although Simon kindly stuck with it - and with me.
I implanted some poems into the text for the second draft, which Simon liked, and he encouraged me to experiment, to go for it. I then turned the story into what I term a novel-with-verse, which incorporated prose fiction, prose poetry, poetry, scripts and a couple of non-literary devices such as the end of a relationship described through two budgets. In the process I reduced the manuscript from ninety thousand to fifty thousand words. As with Lara, I did not use any of the original text. The book took four years to complete. (When my students object to being told to completely rewrite a two-thousand-word short story they’ve dashed off overnight, I have to crack a smile.)
*
Soul Tourists is the least successful of all my novels in terms of critical response and reader reception, yet it’s also my most formally inventive. If I’m honest, I’m not sure that it’s the sum of all its parts, although I do like some of its parts. It was an overambitious experiment, trying to explore multiple figures from European history through the prism of a contemporary relationship, which resulted in overloaded narrative. The fragmented form adds another layer of complication, requiring the reader to constantly shift between different literary genres. In this instance, the form probably gets in the way of the story, while the central characters don’t have room to breathe because the ghosts keep appearing when you least expect them, and interrupt the dynamic flow of the couple’s relationship.
I’m not sure that readers feel an emotional connection to this book. Not sure that I do, either (158-9).
A word on feedback: receiving editorial notes and improving my writing as a result has been crucial to the development of my writing skills, even when I’ve found it hard to hear that something isn’t working. As writers, we can be too close to the text to see clearly what we’ve written, and unless we are only writing for ourselves, we need people to assess our work-in-progress critically, and offer constructive responses. In my case, this might involve rewriting an entire novel I’ve already spent years hammering out without feedback. The aim is for the writing to be the best that it can be, and it’s very hard, perhaps impossible, for the creator to be the objective assessor of the creation. I have had different readers for different books, sometimes friends who are avid readers and will be totally honest with their feedback, or other writers who can detect and articulate exactly what needs reworking. Sometimes they get it wrong. One respected reader of Girl, Woman, Other thought I should dispense with all but three of the characters, after I’d spent years creating a novel whose strength rested on its multiplicities. If I had been a younger writer, I might have doubted myself. Instead, I ignored her advice.
Simon Prosser and his team have worked closely with me on seven books now, and I cannot overestimate the value I place on their editorial feedback, which, luckily for me, has always been in tune with my ambitions.
Yet when I first received critical feedback that required massive rewrites, I used to get upset, although I’d never show this. I’d hide the manuscript in a drawer, not wanting to see it lying around taunting me with enormity of the task ahead. Once I began my rewrites, and I saw how the novel improved, I was relieved that its weaknesses had been caught prior to publication. Over time, I toughened up, and always welcome editorial notes. I am the writer I am today because I worked with my editor and his team, who never accepted anything but the very best from me (166-8).
Writing is so much more than a technical exercise. In the past I have shed tears along with my characters when I’ve put them through hell or made them reflect on past traumas or remember loved ones they’ve lost. When I was writing Lara, I recall rocking myself on the floor as I tried to imagine what it was like for my slave ancestors in Brazil. When my characters suffered, I suffered with them. When a character I was attached to died, I cried. I felt their fears and I felt their joy. Writing can still be experiential for me, although not quite so intensely, or so dramatically - thank God.
Writing a novel takes stamina and an unstoppable drive, more so when you’re not sure you’re heading in the right direction and have to start again. Every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year spent crafting a manuscript so that it materializes into your ambition for it, requires immense dedication. For every writer who produces novels at speed, there are many more of us for whom the writing process is a lot more complicated, although not unenjoyable. When writers complain that writing is painful, I wonder why they do it. Surely we do it because it’s incredibly rewarding.
My experimental gene, the need to be different, has always been there, from the moment I decided to make a virtue of my outsider status as a teenager. It’s not something I impose on my writing for superficial or spurious reasons. My creative spirit is adventurous, an exploration of the unknown, a need to transform the ordinary into something new. I write because I have an urge to tell stories, even when I don’t know what those stories will become, or what they will reveal when they are completed.
So I start a work of fiction with an idea and deliver it through a story, focusing on the actual storytelling. I don’t over-intellectualize this process because it will get in the way of the writing. I work out the themes of my novels once they are completed and I need to contextualize what I’ve written. It’s only then that I have the head space to be able to formulate what I consider to be its thematic undercurrents. Most writers cannot get away with not talking about their books as part of the promotional roadshow, and it’s advisable for us to try and set the context about it ourselves. If we know we’re doing something different because we’ve read extensively around our subject matter, then we need to take control and spell it out.
However, our books exist as works of art in their own right, and once published, they are out there on their own in the world. Readers, critics and academics, with varying levels of knowledge of the literary history most apposite to our work, and with different points of view, expectations and personal tastes, will offer their own summaries, interpretations, analyses and responses, which expand and even change the context of the book. Sometimes, the book they’re reviewing is the only one of yours they’ve read and they don’t always get even the basic facts right. One such review for Mr Loverman, in a major newspaper, opened by describing me as a ‘young, female, performance poet from east London’. I was at this stage fifty-three years old. I’d never been a performance poet, and I’ve never lived in east London. What can you do? At least it was a good review.
So we write our books, we try to set the critical terms for them, but we cannot control the reader or critical response (172-4).
My goals, as always, is to continue to write stories and to develop my skills. There is no point of arrival whereby one stops growing as a creative person; to think otherwise will lead to creative repetition and stagnation (175).
Seven: the self, ambition, transformation, activism
The most important lesson learned was to cultivate the art of positive self-talk in the battle against self-doubt, aided by writing joyful ‘affirmations’ on index cards, and reciting them aloud several times a day. An affirmation is a short personal, passionate and positive statement in the present tense about something you want to achieve, but written as if the goal has already been achieved. It’s not a yearning or a hope that something might happen, but a statement that it has actually happened - a way to bring about the desired reality, not through some kind of hocus-pocus magic, but by taking the steps necessary to achieve the goal. I still use affirmations to pump me up with confidence and a commitment to making the best of everything - personal and professional.
Writing a positive affirmation is the opposite of setting oneself up to fail. It retrains the mind to expect the best outcomes, as do creative visualizations - another tool in my personal development skillset - in which you visualize the ideal scenario for whatever you are seeking to achieve. These days the generic term for this practice is ‘manifestation’. Of course, one still has to do the work, that goes without saying. Wishes rarely materialize out of thin air. An American boyfriend, whom I met in a nightclub, introduced himself to me as a writer. I was impressed, only to learn that he hadn’t got further than a few pages of his screenplay. Still, I liked his American chutzpah, until I realized over the course of eighteen months that his writing never progressed beyond a few pages. Manifestations don’t work if you don’t do the work.
And if you do the work, but you don’t get the desired result, then you bounce back from the disappointment and plough on regardless, continuing to be positive. In the last few years I’ve actually progressed from the idea of bouncing back to telling my students to ‘bounce back in the act of falling’, so that they never actually hit the ground. It has served me well. I will talk myself out of my disappointments as soon as they are happening, so that I don’t find myself on the downward spiral of self-pity.
Even now, when I approach writing a new book, I’ll pen an affirmation declaring that it’s wonderful - without having written a single word. This is not to say that I’m deluded or stupid. Rather, that I am filling myself up with energy and positivity and expecting the best possible outcome from my creativity, as opposed to approaching my work with dread at what I predict will be its inevitable failings.
In time, I learned to reject the concept of failure altogether, even though it’s the antonym of success, so if I believe in one, why not the other? I think it’s because the concept of failure has such a negative finality to it. As a ‘positivity propagandist’, which someone called me the other day, I believe that as we progress through our lives, when things don’t work out when we want them to, it simply leads us on to the next stage, and the one after that. Essentially, I find the idea of failure demotivating.
When Lara was published, I wrote an affirmation about winning the Booker Prize - a wild fantasy because I was as far away from winning it as a writer could be. Yet I’d seen how winning that prize could improve writers’ careers, bringing their work to mainstream attention, and because I was thinking big, it seemed obvious to envision winning it. Over the years my writing wasn’t tailored to win the Booker Prize, that would lack creative integrity and be impossible to second-guess, with a different jury every year. I simply wanted it in my sights. It’s like an actor who commits to being the best they can be in every role, while dreaming or visualising that one day they’ll win an Oscar.
A positive mental attitude (PMA) has kept me going whenever I need to work through the problem-solving of the writing process, and with my career in general. Even when the odds were stacked against me, I have believed that somehow, some day, I’d break through. This doesn’t mean that one ignores the negativity out there, or that one can completely eliminate self-doubt, but it helps mitigate against being dragged down by either.
As my resolve deepened over the decades, I was never prepared to settle for less than I desired. A writer once told me that water finds its own level and she’d found hers, which in real terms means that she always expects low sales for her books and accepts them as her fate. I could never be so resigned. I had trained my mind to expect the best my profession had to offer, even when it didn’t happen. My book sales for many years were so low that I never looked at the biannual royalty statements when they arrived. Great reviews were never enough to translate into shifting a respectable number of units. Nor could I change tack and write what is called ‘commercial’ rather than ‘literary’ fiction, which someone advised because commercial fiction is the kind that dominates the bestseller lists. I had to stay true to my own artistic impulses while wanting a mass readership for my books nonetheless. I was stubborn and seemingly unrealistic, until the vision translated into reality when I won the Booker Prize and everything changed: my radical, experimental, very literary novel found a home in the top-ten hit parade for forty-four weeks.
Need I say at this point that it’s really important to keep your dreams to yourself, because once you move into ‘vision’ territory, plenty of people will impose their own limitations on you, and it’s best not to give them the opportunity. We need to protect ourselves from the naysayers (196-9).
Most black British novelists and poets are not writing directly about racism; they’re channelling their creativity into everything else that we people of the human race experience. To assume otherwise is lazy thinking. In terms of my own work, racism is sometimes a thread running through some of my characters’ lives - because it’s true to life. But it’s rarely at the heart of my work, the exception being Blonde Roots.
Another familiar response is that everything we write is presumed to be about identity. Again, this is not just untrue but patronizing. The implication is that we black authors are always trying to find ourselves through our writing - something that has been said about practically every book I’ve written. Yes, sometimes writers of colour do write directly about identity, but never solely that. In my work, even in the semi-autobiographical Lara, I am exploring multiple themes. Perhaps the ‘identity’ tag persists because those who are unused to our stories feel that they are learning about our ‘identities’, and that skewers their perception of our creativity. We can always analyse literature through the identity prism, and find evidence for it, but that’s rarely all a book is doing.
I have also been told that, whatever I write, I’m writing about myself. I know, crazy. As if I’m somehow an Afro-Roman girl from eighteen hundred years ago, a septuagenarian gay Caribbean man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy living on an estate, or a white slave woman living in a parallel universe! One radio interviewer asked me if all twelve characters in Girl, Woman, Other were versions of myself. Really? A Nigerian immigrant who works as a cleaner and a ninety-three-year-old northern farmer? My books are only about myself in the sense that any work of fiction can be said to be a manifestation of a writer’s preoccupations. The only character who is a fully fictionalized version of myself is the eponymous Lara, and even then, I make things up. It’s what we novelists do (210-11).
One: heritage, childhood, family, origins
Prioritizing education, my parents managed to pay for my oldest brother to attend prep school for a few years. He still recalls the time when his class had to read out loud in turn from the popular racist children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), about Sambo and his father, Black Jumbo, and mother, Black Mumbo. Sambo had long been a racial slur in America and Britain and mumbo-jumbo was a pejorative term for black languages, which were considered nonsensical. When my seven-year-old brother, the only child of colour in the class, was forced to read from this racist text, everyone in the room erupted with laughter. He’s never forgotten it (14-5).
As a child, you are profoundly affected by this level of hostility without being able to intellectualize or articulate it. You feel hated, even though you have done nothing to deserve it, and so you think there is something wrong with you, rather than something wrong with them.
A child needs to feel safe, to feel that they belong, but when you are prejudged before you even open your mouth to speak, you feel as if you don’t. It seemed unfair because I felt the same inside as my little white pals. We liked the same music and television programmes, breathed the same air, ate the same food, had the same feelings - human ones. In time I developed a self-protective force field around me, which persists to this day (16).
I was a tomboy, squashed between two brothers who let me play with them until they didn’t, bonding with each other more than they could bond with the girl in the equation. I’m the fourth in the family and we middle children tend to be very independent for obvious reasons. You just get on with it. I’ve always felt myself to have an inner strength, by which I mean that I’m not needy or clingy, I don’t crave approval all the time and I’m happy with my own company. In terms of the span of my life and my career, a tough inner core has been essential to my creative survival. This hardiness was probably first developed in my very early years. I’ve never been in therapy as I like to live with my demons. By this, I don’t mean that I’m living with unresolved trauma, but that I’ve become adept at self-interrogation and have never felt driven to seek help. I like to work things out for myself, and I guess this book is a massive act of self-interrogation (25-6).
It’s very clear to me writing this, that my creative career and activism can be tracked back to growing up in a political household where individuality was encouraged by my mother, and both parents exemplified social responsibility and political engagement (30).
Two: houses, flats, rooms, homes
I am glad that I didn’t grow up in a home or within a family where society’s norms were paramount. Yes, my father was a tough disciplinarian who didn’t know how to relate to his children, but he was also a rebellious spirit in the sense that he didn’t care about what other people thought, while my mother was committed to being unorthodox. I was never pressurized to pursue a particular kind of career, or to marry someone of their approval or to please the neighbours. I was never encouraged to have children, and dutifully provide them with grandchildren. They’d have got nowhere if they’d tried.
When I was a teenager intent on becoming an actor, my mother did suggest I learn to type so that I could fall back on secretarial work if it failed. You can imagine what I thought of that. She was right, though, although not quite as she intended. Typing is always useful, especially once computers became commonplace. I still can’t type properly.
Essentially, I am grateful that I was not raised in a family where I had to fulfil my parents’ ambitions for themselves through me, and that I was encouraged to become the architect of my own adult life (54-5).
I never entertained the idea of not working in theatre, in spite of my erratic income; it was my passion and I had to fulfil it. The idea of being bonded to a mortgage-debt appalled me. I imagined that I’d have to take on a nine-to-five job to pay it off, doing something I hated. I envisioned, in true melodramatic fashion, my emotions numbed by routine, my imagination murdered, my free spirit imprisoned, my dreams unfulfilled. I reckoned I’d rather be poor, which is just as well, because I was.
And so I was on the move, at one stage every year, a veritable home-hopper, either willingly or through necessity. At one point I even felt restless if I didn’t move frequently. I liked the adventure of living in different homes. Perhaps if I’d inherited a lovely apartment in Notting Hill, as a friend of mine did as her graduation present, I might have wanted to stay put. Then again, I might not have become a writer, or the kind of writer I became, or perhaps been very driven or productive. I was never writing from a place of financial security or emotional complacency, or in a stable domicile. When you move around a lot, you have to be mentally agile and adapt quickly to new environments. Moving home as much as I did forced me to live by my wits, which I reasoned was no bad thing for my creativity (66).
In my thirties, my theatre days behind me and focusing on writing, I found undemanding part-time jobs, usually two days a week, because my priority was to be free to write. I was obsessed with writing my book Lara at this time, and it was really hard to drag myself away from it. I worked for a festival of women photographers, about which I knew zilch, but I did the research in order to perform well at interview. The rest of the team tolerated me, even though it was clear I was out of my depth. I also worked as an administrator for a small management consultancy, even though my typing was awful, and for a theatre organization.
Actually, jobs where I could pursue my own writing were absolutely perfect. In one such organization, when I was alone in the office, I used to work on Lara when I was supposed to be carrying out my admin duties. Computers in those days were rudimentary, but I soon learned how to change from the manuscript page to a work page when my boss walked into the room. When he really got pissed off with me at failing to deliver on his required measurables, I wore a short skirt the next day to work and watched the rage go out of him. It wasn’t a miniskirt, but at a mere two inches above the knee, subtly revealing. When my boss walked into the office intending to reprimand me for not delivering on my duties, he needed only to look at my legs to be defeated by them, and for his annoyance to deflate.
We women notice where men direct their attention, even if they’re not aware that we’ve clocked it. As a good feminist, it was my duty to expose his patriarchal obsession with female body parts by taking advantage of it, thereby redressing the balance, right (68)?
By my mid-thirties, I had begun to long for a place of my own, buying lifestyle magazines to drool over that which I did not possess. My fantasies were populated not by down-to-earth flats in London’s least appealing districts, nor small suburban homes, neither of which was remotely affordable to me in any case, but by the most capacious open-plan barn conversions, warehouse apartments in New York with double-height walls, sprawling seaside villas in tropical countries.
By my early forties, at the social gatherings of my peers, I noticed that I was often the only person in the room who was not a homeowner, even though I was the Published Author in their midst, yet nonetheless failing at all of society’s rites of passage that they had all fulfilled: long-term partner, children, proper salary, homeowner, pension - in various sequences of priority. Most of these things had not been my ambition, but surrounded by people who were living comfortably and futureproofing their lives, it was hard not to compare and contrast, in spite of the fact that I had doggedly eschewed convention and therefore had no right to complain. In my case, my creative life choices had led to peripeteia and precarity, although, of course, for many people they do not. Now here I was in middle age and the idea of a house, pension and mortgage seemed quite attractive, as did a long-term partner (74).
Three: the women and men who came and went
Romantic love. Random sex. Hopeless crushes. Short-lived flings. Proper relationships. All of these experiences contributed to making me the person and writer I became, one for whom the pursuit of freedom was paramount: freedom to move home, freedom from a conventional job, freedom to follow the whims of my sexuality, freedom to jump from one encounter to another, freedom to write experimental fiction. Even when my freedom was seriously curtailed, as it was during one relationship in my twenties, I broke free and carved out the life I wanted for myself again (79).
Thereafter followed a long-distance love affair where we travelled between each other’s cities and filled the time in between by writing the most romantic letters to each other. Evidence of the intensity of our feelings is in the letters we’ve kept. While memory is a fickle thing, the letters between myself and eX state the truth about our love affair. Re-reading them after so long, I am reminded how important this relationship was to me. It’s one thing verbally expressing your love for someone, but it’s something else writing thousands of words that articulate what you mean to each other, and it created a written record of the relationship.
eX was someone who revealed herself through her letters and in person, and her openness made me want to dismantle my own bolted-on defence mechanisms, although I wasn’t completely successful in doing this. I was a toughened-up black Londoner who had grown up in a society where I was seen as an outsider, whereas she was a white Netherlander who fitted visually into her country’s majority white environment. In one letter she wrote, ‘Bernie, it’s good to be vulnerable; please don’t get scared for your own feelings, and be proud of yourself, because you’re absolutely worth it (85-6)!’
She preached an anti-success ideology, or rather what she called ‘sickkkk-cesssss’, delivered with all the venom of a pantomime hissing snake. Successful people were morally reprehensible, to be scorned, had sold their souls to the devil. It was another warning sign I ignored, that it would be wise to step back from someone who scorned ambition. As a feminist I was supposed to be fighting for women, especially black women, to succeed, to be heard. I was supposed to be wanting more of the cake, not crushing it underfoot. I didn’t then have the wherewithal to understand that she was disappointed at her own downturned fortunes, and resentful of those who were achieving what she most desired: money, fame, status. Instead, she drove a cheap car and lived in social housing - mine - although it was a cosy housing-association attic flat in an Islington square that was primarily occupied by privately owned Edwardian town houses. Hardly the Projects of Chicago South Side or South Central LA.
A few years after we split up, she hired a Rolls-Royce to drive around London, dropping in on my father, who reliably reported back, which I guess was the whole point (91).
After I’d firmly rejected her kind offer to publish my poetry, she proceeded to demolish it. It really wasn’t any good, she now declared, and had previously proclaimed otherwise to boost my confidence, because I was lost when I met her and she, magnanimously, had been intent on saving me at great sacrifice to her own well-being. (Like God, I suspect.)
TMD’s renunciation of my writing was the last straw. Her previous praise had been on condition of my subservience. She had been my biggest cheerleader but now took credit for my development as a writer, yet she had never offered me a single constructive editorial comment - so how come, babes?
At night while she slept, I wrote poetry, but I was in emotional turmoil and my muse had gone AWOL. The self-belief I’d been developing prior to the relationship, and which I rebuilt after it, is the single most important thing a writer needs, especially when the encouragement we crave from others is not forthcoming.
These were the end days. It was time to go, but how? A friend who saw that I was stuck, offered to sub-let me her council flat on the other side of London.
I was petrified of telling TMD that I was going, but she was surprisingly accepting - perhaps she’d had enough herself. We fought about what was mine or hers, and I left.
*
In years to come I would understand that the controlling person in a relationship is dependent on the partner being weak, yet the supposedly weak one is more likely to thrive when they leave, while the ostensibly stronger person is less able to cope on their own. If you derive your power from subjugating another person, then you are the one who is weak and dependent.
The biggest lesson - which is obvious, but experiencing it at close quarters drove it home for me - was that the abuse of power is not the preserve of men, or white people, or heterosexual partners. Nor does it thrive in a vacuum. I was not a victim, although for many years afterward I saw myself as one. I now prefer to view myself as complicit in a relationship where I gave my agency away to the point where it was hard to reclaim it. I was always free to leave. After all, I was young with no dependants to consider. She exerted a formidable psychological hold over me and when I tried to assert myself, the relationship deteriorated into violence on her part. If I had not been seduced by the force of her personality at the beginning, and ignored the warning signs, she would never have grown into such a monster in my life. I fed the monster until it became unbearable to be anywhere near it. I allowed myself to be dominated, not by a man or a white person, but by another black woman. The lesson I learned was to detect the early signs of a control freak and to back off (99-101).
A married friend once told me she had discovered that marriage was freedom, not imprisonment, which was the opposite of my own belief system. Yet when I married David, having been avowedly against marriage for most of my life, I understood what she meant. Before David, I’d had mostly unsatisfactory relationships, or periods where I sought relationships, which had taken up emotional energy and headspace. I realized that making a public and legal commitment to David in marriage had freed me up to get on with the other areas of my life - the most important of which is my writing (112-13).
Four: drama, community, performance, politics
Drama schools are intense laboratories that demand a high degree of self- and group interrogation. To a certain extent, the unthinking self is dismantled so that you can be rebuilt with a deeper understanding of who you are, which in turn enables you to create convincing characters - or so the theory goes. Attendance was daily and compulsory, and the course entirely practical. We didn’t sit in lecture theatres, but under-took a packed timetable of workshops on movement and voice, acting and devising, rehearsals and productions. We students spent all day interacting together, and getting to know each other in depth. As a consequence, meaningful friendships were fast established (118-19).
Running a black women’s theatre company required a certain feistiness and bloody-mindedness from the protagonists. My political voice was first developed during those theatre years as we fought a long-running battle against the forces who didn’t want us to exist. In theatre, as in many professions, people are wary of voicing their opposition to inequalities around race, gender or sexuality, because it might endanger their careers. Actors, in particular, are dependent on maintaining good relationships and reputations in order to find work in such a precarious profession. As Patricia and I were at the helm of our own company, we didn’t care about burning bridges. We wore our feminist politics on our sleeves and spoke out when it was necessary, including getting into arguments with the black men who thought feminism was a white disease, and that our company was unnecessary and divisive. When we were criticized for being ‘separatist’, we replied that the arts establishment favoured men first, and then white women, and that our so-called separatism was actually responding to theirs. (In any case, we did work with men and white people, mainly behind the scenes (125).)
A friend’s mother suggested I tone down my wacky dress sense because it made me stand out too much; I’d be targeted by racists. I laughed her off, much as I do bad advice today. I wasn’t going to become less of who I was - to make myself invisible - in order to try to live a risk-free life.
I lived down the road from George O’Dowd before he became the pop star Boy George, whose androgynous style was gorgeously eccentric. We never knew each other, but our fathers did. David Bowie, who had grown up near where I went to secondary school in Eltham, was then blazing a trail with his spectacularly outrageous androgynous style. These days I can see that, like them, as a suburban kid, far removed from the then hip spots of the King’s Road or Carnaby Street, I wanted to make a statement about where I wanted to position myself in society. In my case, instead of trying to please Mr and Mrs Suburbia with their 2.4 kids who set a ‘gold standard’ I could never live up to, my clothes were a sartorial demonstration of the direction of my ambition: I was going places and I couldn’t wait to get as far away from them as possible.
Anyone looking at me then would know that this young lady was not in training for a workplace where she’d be obliged to turn up in some kind of office-wear. It was obvious that I was in training to be in the arts, and the idea of working in an office would have filled me with suicidal thoughts. Not long ago, one of my siblings asked me why on earth I dressed to stand out as a teenager when the whole point of our childhood was to try to fit in. I had my answer at the ready, yet was surprised that we’d never actually had this conversation.
I credit the youth theatre with broadening my horizons in every way possible. It not only introduced me to the arts but also nurtured my individuality, empathy and imagination within a collective, collegiate, non-competitive environment, as well as developing my self-esteem, self-confidence and self-knowledge. Further, we were encouraged to think for ourselves - unlike the Catholic Church I had grown up in, where we were coerced to have blind faith and allegiance to an invisible presence or be damned to eternity in the fires of hell; or at school, where our English teacher made it clear that her interpretation of a work of literature was the only correct one, and so in order to do well in class, we had to second-guess what she thought of a poem, rather than come up with our own ideas. And if we became a bit unruly at the youth theatre, we were talked to respectfully, unlike at home, where I lived with the threat of corporal punishment (132-4).
During those teenage years I transitioned from someone who had long been transported by other people’s lives through reading novels to someone who, through performance, tried to metamorphose into other people, which would lead to my desire to inhabit lives that were not my own through becoming a writer of fiction myself.
I spent the next decade, up to my mid-twenties, acting, and I now realize that when you perform writing, you absorb it differently than if you’re just reading the words silently or even out loud. When you become characters, find their truths and communicate them, usually within the context of your relationships with other actors in rehearsal and performance, you are inside an alchemical process whereby the self you know and the self you are becoming through performance are integrated and emotionally connected. When you are doing so in front of a live audience, the experience can be mutually enhancing, and the vibrations resounding around the performance venue can be electrifying.
As a storyteller, I am continually drawn to understanding and conveying human psychology and to inhabiting the lives of my characters, feeling them from the inside, much as I had as an actor. My propensity as a novelist has been for first-person narratives, and for developing the ventriloquist skills necessary to bring them alive. This can be traced back to when I was an actor, firstly, and further, one who also wrote and performed her own scripts. The coalescence of the act of writing with the art of performance enriched my understanding of the possibilities of characterization in fiction, which continues through to this day.
Moreover, drama gave me a passion, a focus and sense of direction for my future. I was never a young person who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their adult life. The youth theatre also provided an antidote to the school’s rigidly conformist cultural ethos, which was alienating for those of us who could never fit in, even if we tried (135-6).
Five: poetry, fiction, verse fiction, fusion fiction
My original intention with Lara was to drag myself away from poetry and write fiction, because I wanted to tell the story of the opposition to my parents’ English-Nigerian marriage, and thought the expansiveness of a novel made it the most suitable form to do so. Novels about this aspect of British society barely existed then, and not from an African-English perspective. I wanted to put my parents’ story on the map.
I first drafted the book in prose, even though I’d never written prose fiction and struggled to believe myself capable of the task in hand. This didn’t stop me, because the urge to write my parents’ story was so insistent. After three years, I had an unfinished manuscript of two hundred pages written on an electronic typewriter, but it was all over the place - a right mess. I had no understanding of narrative structure, and the spirit of poetry that had infused and energized my writing up to this point had disappeared. In making the transition from poetry to prose, my use of language fell into a coma. Painfully, I admitted to myself that, as I derived no pleasure from reading back what I’d written, neither would anyone else. I still wanted to tell this story, but I had no idea how to do it.
Three years in, I attended an Arvon Foundation residential writers’ course in the countryside, with no plans to go to any classes but to sneakily use it as a writing retreat. The organizers weren’t having this, so I was made to show up for workshops, and in one session I found myself writing a poem for an exercise, my first poem in over three years, and I instantly reconnected to my love of language. I knew then what I had to do. When I returned to London, I threw the original manuscript of Lara into the bin, literally, so that it disappeared without trace, and embarked on rewriting the story as poetry. Discarding the manuscript was a necessary symbolic gesture for me in order to start completely afresh, although I wish I hadn’t. I like to keep records of everything I write.
Problem-solving is integral to the creative process, and I realized with Lara that I’d been struggling to write in a style that wasn’t true to my poetic instincts. It had taken me three years to pinpoint the problem and find a solution. For the next two years I rewrote the story as poetry, feeling a new commitment and passion for the storytelling involved. It wasn’t easy at the beginning; I would spend half the week looking at a blank sheet of white paper in front of me, refusing to leave my desk until I thought up the opening line of a new page, a new poem, from which the rest would inevitably cascade more easily.
Lara was written while I was living in the attic flat in Brockley, working in a bedroom with a view over south London. The view is so vivid in my mind because I spent so much time staring out at it while trying to conjure up the right words for a story with multiple protagonists from different countries and eras. I worked part-time, earned little and socialized rarely as a result. When I was involved with a man, he usually came and went in the dark, so there was little distraction. It was a period of great solitude.
Once each poem had been redrafted by hand a few times, it was transferred onto my computer. I would then print out each revision and revise it by hand before entering my edits back onto the screen. I might go through this process up to forty times. When I read the poem back and it flowed effortlessly, saying what I wanted to convey, and I didn’t want to change a word, or even a comma, I knew it was completed.
By now, my practice was far removed from when I’d first begun to write poetry and been unable to change a single word. Back then, the first draft was the final draft and I would have been devastated if anyone had suggested revisions. Soon enough, I learned that most writing is actually rewriting, and that the words you scribble on the page are the raw material from which you might be able to sculpt something of substance. We writers spend our lives learning how to manipulate language to express precisely what we wish to communicate. Even as I write this, I’m constantly making adjustments to my vocabulary and reconfiguring my sentences so that they accurately deliver on my intentions.
Six months into writing the new Lara, on surer footing in terms of style and substance, I progressed from writing one page a week to several; two years after its poetic rebirth, it was complete. The book had taken five years in total, but I had finally reached my destination.
Literary genres are not just external labels. They are techniques, approaches, infrastructures, methods that facilitate the concepts behind our writing. Poetic concision, compression and imagery enabled an expansion of the original story of Lara beyond my parents’ marriage. My research took me into my parents’ ancestry, bringing seven generations to life, including my own childhood. In a sense, the book was my response to the letter I’d sent to my long-lost relative in Nigeria all those years before enquiring as to my father’s family and my relatives there.
Because I built the story up through small units of poetry, it became more manageable, whereas the sheer number of words in a prose novel had intimidated and overwhelmed me to the point where I felt I was drowning in them.
The final edit involved laying every page of the text out on my living-room floor and organizing a chronology for it.
I never regretted spending three years producing a discarded first version of the book, because that’s not how I saw it - then or with future work. The creative process for me is an experiment - trial and error - a trip into the unknown, which leads to new discoveries.
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Writing Lara grounded me in a practice that continues through to today, where my books will go through major redrafts, sometimes up to five. I will typically spend years working on a book without showing it to anyone, because I want to know what I think of my work before someone else gives me their opinion.
I initially thought of Lara as a narrative poem until it was about to be published by Angela Royal Publishing, and we discussed how to market it. We then decided to categorize it as a verse novel so that it would sit in the more popular fiction section of bookshops. (There are no hard-and-fast rules about verse novels; everyone explores the form differently (146-50).)
The Emperor’s Babe itself began as a series of poems about a girl of Nubian parentage who grows up in Roman London eighteen hundred years ago, which I’d written as a part of a writer’s residency at the Museum of London. It only became a novel because I pitched the idea to my now editor and publisher, Simon Prosser, and based on these early poems I was offered a contract. It quickly grew into a verse novel of two hundred and fifty pages and proved to be a wildly enjoyable writing experience. My protagonist, Zuleika, endures marriage to a rich Roman, Felix, but falls in love with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, a real historical figure from Leptis Magna in what we now call Libya.
All of my books have multiple starting points. My fascination with history is one of them and my interest in black and multicultural society is another. I first encountered the untold African history of Britain in Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984) by Peter Fryer. The book opens with the sentence, ‘There were Africans in Britain before the English came here’- referring to a legion of Moors from North Africa stationed at Hadrian’s Wall near Scotland as part of the Roman Army in AD 211. Having grown up with the myth that Britain had been a white country until the twentieth century, it was a pretty explosive read. Staying Power also unearths the black history of Britain from the 1500s onwards, evidencing a continuous presence up to today. This in turn led me to earlier books by J. A. Rogers, Ivan Van Sertima and Edward Scobie, with their own angles on the hidden narratives of black history. Reading them as a young woman made me feel that I was part of a continuum in Britain and Europe. People of African origin were not just Johnny-come-latelys, but an integral part of the continent’s roots. I was drawn to work creatively with this history but didn’t know how to, until it came to fruition with The Emperor’s Babe.
The novel’s conceit is a direct challenge to the monocultural myth of British history, and with it I sought to devise a linguistically heterogeneous society that in some way echoes the melting-pot origins of the English language. The dominant narrative mode is standard English but the characters also deliver a lexical concoction of Latin words, a Scots-Latin pidgin invention, Americanisms, cockney rhyming slang and neologisms. Towards the beginning of the book, as Zuleika introduces us to her unhappily married life with Felix, she says, ‘Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman bitch for decorum classes,/ learnt how to talk, eat and fart,/ how to get my amo amas amat right, and ditch/ my second-generation plebby creole./ Zuleika accepta est./ Zuleika delicata est./ Zuleika bloody goody two-shoes est./ But I dreamt of creating mosaics/ of remaking my town with bright stones and glass./ But no! Numquam! It’s not allowed.’
The book is playfully anachronistic, a temporal mash-up - history and the contemporary blended together in a parallel universe, so that while it’s set nearly two thousand years ago, it feels very modern. I wanted it to feel immediate, vital, as if my historical figures are alive today.
I’m more interested in writing interesting sentences than grammatically perfect or beautifully understated ones, and this novel is my most linguistically rebellious and disruptive (154-6).
The first draft of Soul Tourists was written in prose, as per my publishing contract, but it was glaringly obvious that yet again my use of language was dull to the point of being lifeless and the structure was undisciplined to the point of being lawless. This time it didn’t take me three years to recognize the problem, but I didn’t know how to fix it and it was probably unfixable, although Simon kindly stuck with it - and with me.
I implanted some poems into the text for the second draft, which Simon liked, and he encouraged me to experiment, to go for it. I then turned the story into what I term a novel-with-verse, which incorporated prose fiction, prose poetry, poetry, scripts and a couple of non-literary devices such as the end of a relationship described through two budgets. In the process I reduced the manuscript from ninety thousand to fifty thousand words. As with Lara, I did not use any of the original text. The book took four years to complete. (When my students object to being told to completely rewrite a two-thousand-word short story they’ve dashed off overnight, I have to crack a smile.)
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Soul Tourists is the least successful of all my novels in terms of critical response and reader reception, yet it’s also my most formally inventive. If I’m honest, I’m not sure that it’s the sum of all its parts, although I do like some of its parts. It was an overambitious experiment, trying to explore multiple figures from European history through the prism of a contemporary relationship, which resulted in overloaded narrative. The fragmented form adds another layer of complication, requiring the reader to constantly shift between different literary genres. In this instance, the form probably gets in the way of the story, while the central characters don’t have room to breathe because the ghosts keep appearing when you least expect them, and interrupt the dynamic flow of the couple’s relationship.
I’m not sure that readers feel an emotional connection to this book. Not sure that I do, either (158-9).
A word on feedback: receiving editorial notes and improving my writing as a result has been crucial to the development of my writing skills, even when I’ve found it hard to hear that something isn’t working. As writers, we can be too close to the text to see clearly what we’ve written, and unless we are only writing for ourselves, we need people to assess our work-in-progress critically, and offer constructive responses. In my case, this might involve rewriting an entire novel I’ve already spent years hammering out without feedback. The aim is for the writing to be the best that it can be, and it’s very hard, perhaps impossible, for the creator to be the objective assessor of the creation. I have had different readers for different books, sometimes friends who are avid readers and will be totally honest with their feedback, or other writers who can detect and articulate exactly what needs reworking. Sometimes they get it wrong. One respected reader of Girl, Woman, Other thought I should dispense with all but three of the characters, after I’d spent years creating a novel whose strength rested on its multiplicities. If I had been a younger writer, I might have doubted myself. Instead, I ignored her advice.
Simon Prosser and his team have worked closely with me on seven books now, and I cannot overestimate the value I place on their editorial feedback, which, luckily for me, has always been in tune with my ambitions.
Yet when I first received critical feedback that required massive rewrites, I used to get upset, although I’d never show this. I’d hide the manuscript in a drawer, not wanting to see it lying around taunting me with enormity of the task ahead. Once I began my rewrites, and I saw how the novel improved, I was relieved that its weaknesses had been caught prior to publication. Over time, I toughened up, and always welcome editorial notes. I am the writer I am today because I worked with my editor and his team, who never accepted anything but the very best from me (166-8).
Writing is so much more than a technical exercise. In the past I have shed tears along with my characters when I’ve put them through hell or made them reflect on past traumas or remember loved ones they’ve lost. When I was writing Lara, I recall rocking myself on the floor as I tried to imagine what it was like for my slave ancestors in Brazil. When my characters suffered, I suffered with them. When a character I was attached to died, I cried. I felt their fears and I felt their joy. Writing can still be experiential for me, although not quite so intensely, or so dramatically - thank God.
Writing a novel takes stamina and an unstoppable drive, more so when you’re not sure you’re heading in the right direction and have to start again. Every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year spent crafting a manuscript so that it materializes into your ambition for it, requires immense dedication. For every writer who produces novels at speed, there are many more of us for whom the writing process is a lot more complicated, although not unenjoyable. When writers complain that writing is painful, I wonder why they do it. Surely we do it because it’s incredibly rewarding.
My experimental gene, the need to be different, has always been there, from the moment I decided to make a virtue of my outsider status as a teenager. It’s not something I impose on my writing for superficial or spurious reasons. My creative spirit is adventurous, an exploration of the unknown, a need to transform the ordinary into something new. I write because I have an urge to tell stories, even when I don’t know what those stories will become, or what they will reveal when they are completed.
So I start a work of fiction with an idea and deliver it through a story, focusing on the actual storytelling. I don’t over-intellectualize this process because it will get in the way of the writing. I work out the themes of my novels once they are completed and I need to contextualize what I’ve written. It’s only then that I have the head space to be able to formulate what I consider to be its thematic undercurrents. Most writers cannot get away with not talking about their books as part of the promotional roadshow, and it’s advisable for us to try and set the context about it ourselves. If we know we’re doing something different because we’ve read extensively around our subject matter, then we need to take control and spell it out.
However, our books exist as works of art in their own right, and once published, they are out there on their own in the world. Readers, critics and academics, with varying levels of knowledge of the literary history most apposite to our work, and with different points of view, expectations and personal tastes, will offer their own summaries, interpretations, analyses and responses, which expand and even change the context of the book. Sometimes, the book they’re reviewing is the only one of yours they’ve read and they don’t always get even the basic facts right. One such review for Mr Loverman, in a major newspaper, opened by describing me as a ‘young, female, performance poet from east London’. I was at this stage fifty-three years old. I’d never been a performance poet, and I’ve never lived in east London. What can you do? At least it was a good review.
So we write our books, we try to set the critical terms for them, but we cannot control the reader or critical response (172-4).
My goals, as always, is to continue to write stories and to develop my skills. There is no point of arrival whereby one stops growing as a creative person; to think otherwise will lead to creative repetition and stagnation (175).
Seven: the self, ambition, transformation, activism
The most important lesson learned was to cultivate the art of positive self-talk in the battle against self-doubt, aided by writing joyful ‘affirmations’ on index cards, and reciting them aloud several times a day. An affirmation is a short personal, passionate and positive statement in the present tense about something you want to achieve, but written as if the goal has already been achieved. It’s not a yearning or a hope that something might happen, but a statement that it has actually happened - a way to bring about the desired reality, not through some kind of hocus-pocus magic, but by taking the steps necessary to achieve the goal. I still use affirmations to pump me up with confidence and a commitment to making the best of everything - personal and professional.
Writing a positive affirmation is the opposite of setting oneself up to fail. It retrains the mind to expect the best outcomes, as do creative visualizations - another tool in my personal development skillset - in which you visualize the ideal scenario for whatever you are seeking to achieve. These days the generic term for this practice is ‘manifestation’. Of course, one still has to do the work, that goes without saying. Wishes rarely materialize out of thin air. An American boyfriend, whom I met in a nightclub, introduced himself to me as a writer. I was impressed, only to learn that he hadn’t got further than a few pages of his screenplay. Still, I liked his American chutzpah, until I realized over the course of eighteen months that his writing never progressed beyond a few pages. Manifestations don’t work if you don’t do the work.
And if you do the work, but you don’t get the desired result, then you bounce back from the disappointment and plough on regardless, continuing to be positive. In the last few years I’ve actually progressed from the idea of bouncing back to telling my students to ‘bounce back in the act of falling’, so that they never actually hit the ground. It has served me well. I will talk myself out of my disappointments as soon as they are happening, so that I don’t find myself on the downward spiral of self-pity.
Even now, when I approach writing a new book, I’ll pen an affirmation declaring that it’s wonderful - without having written a single word. This is not to say that I’m deluded or stupid. Rather, that I am filling myself up with energy and positivity and expecting the best possible outcome from my creativity, as opposed to approaching my work with dread at what I predict will be its inevitable failings.
In time, I learned to reject the concept of failure altogether, even though it’s the antonym of success, so if I believe in one, why not the other? I think it’s because the concept of failure has such a negative finality to it. As a ‘positivity propagandist’, which someone called me the other day, I believe that as we progress through our lives, when things don’t work out when we want them to, it simply leads us on to the next stage, and the one after that. Essentially, I find the idea of failure demotivating.
When Lara was published, I wrote an affirmation about winning the Booker Prize - a wild fantasy because I was as far away from winning it as a writer could be. Yet I’d seen how winning that prize could improve writers’ careers, bringing their work to mainstream attention, and because I was thinking big, it seemed obvious to envision winning it. Over the years my writing wasn’t tailored to win the Booker Prize, that would lack creative integrity and be impossible to second-guess, with a different jury every year. I simply wanted it in my sights. It’s like an actor who commits to being the best they can be in every role, while dreaming or visualising that one day they’ll win an Oscar.
A positive mental attitude (PMA) has kept me going whenever I need to work through the problem-solving of the writing process, and with my career in general. Even when the odds were stacked against me, I have believed that somehow, some day, I’d break through. This doesn’t mean that one ignores the negativity out there, or that one can completely eliminate self-doubt, but it helps mitigate against being dragged down by either.
As my resolve deepened over the decades, I was never prepared to settle for less than I desired. A writer once told me that water finds its own level and she’d found hers, which in real terms means that she always expects low sales for her books and accepts them as her fate. I could never be so resigned. I had trained my mind to expect the best my profession had to offer, even when it didn’t happen. My book sales for many years were so low that I never looked at the biannual royalty statements when they arrived. Great reviews were never enough to translate into shifting a respectable number of units. Nor could I change tack and write what is called ‘commercial’ rather than ‘literary’ fiction, which someone advised because commercial fiction is the kind that dominates the bestseller lists. I had to stay true to my own artistic impulses while wanting a mass readership for my books nonetheless. I was stubborn and seemingly unrealistic, until the vision translated into reality when I won the Booker Prize and everything changed: my radical, experimental, very literary novel found a home in the top-ten hit parade for forty-four weeks.
Need I say at this point that it’s really important to keep your dreams to yourself, because once you move into ‘vision’ territory, plenty of people will impose their own limitations on you, and it’s best not to give them the opportunity. We need to protect ourselves from the naysayers (196-9).
Most black British novelists and poets are not writing directly about racism; they’re channelling their creativity into everything else that we people of the human race experience. To assume otherwise is lazy thinking. In terms of my own work, racism is sometimes a thread running through some of my characters’ lives - because it’s true to life. But it’s rarely at the heart of my work, the exception being Blonde Roots.
Another familiar response is that everything we write is presumed to be about identity. Again, this is not just untrue but patronizing. The implication is that we black authors are always trying to find ourselves through our writing - something that has been said about practically every book I’ve written. Yes, sometimes writers of colour do write directly about identity, but never solely that. In my work, even in the semi-autobiographical Lara, I am exploring multiple themes. Perhaps the ‘identity’ tag persists because those who are unused to our stories feel that they are learning about our ‘identities’, and that skewers their perception of our creativity. We can always analyse literature through the identity prism, and find evidence for it, but that’s rarely all a book is doing.
I have also been told that, whatever I write, I’m writing about myself. I know, crazy. As if I’m somehow an Afro-Roman girl from eighteen hundred years ago, a septuagenarian gay Caribbean man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy living on an estate, or a white slave woman living in a parallel universe! One radio interviewer asked me if all twelve characters in Girl, Woman, Other were versions of myself. Really? A Nigerian immigrant who works as a cleaner and a ninety-three-year-old northern farmer? My books are only about myself in the sense that any work of fiction can be said to be a manifestation of a writer’s preoccupations. The only character who is a fully fictionalized version of myself is the eponymous Lara, and even then, I make things up. It’s what we novelists do (210-11).