('Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 years of the Black British Experience' edited by Onyekachi Wambu, 2023)
2021 began grumpily for me. It was the last days of the Trump Presidency, and a couple of runoff elections in Georgia would decide the balance of the Senate and with it the last of the immediate political ramifications of his term. The Democrats needed both seats, I thought, to control the Senate. Maybe one would be a tie. I turned on the BBC World Service at the top of the hour the morning after the votes, hungry.
The news programme led with a clip from the victory speech of one of the candidates – African-American toned so Democrat I imagined, though wasn’t certain: about how he’d grown up on a housing project, the son of a cotton-picking mother etc. Well., okay, but it was the third iteration I’d heard of this ‘Child, grandchild of sharecroppers’ trope in this election cycle already – vice President-elect Kamala Harris had said similar when she’d accepted the nomination at the Democratic Convention and Joe Biden too around that period, and, to mounting horror, I realised that, rather than using this as a brief atmospheric ‘sting’ to take us to the hard news, the programme was playing this segment in full and the man, it turned out, was a pastor so he had stamina. After a couple of minutes of this – and this wasn’t even the purest version of this story you’ve heard as it turned out the pastor’s father had also been a pastor at his same church – the programme followed with an interview with the mother: how did it feel to have your son elected senator? Here a somewhat grisly sequence for the mother’s hearing, at her late age, was poor, the line was faulty and it took a lot of toing and froing to discover, eventually, that she was delighted. At this point, five or so minutes in and still no wiser about the bigger picture, I quit.
Not long after, I chanced upon the singer Joan Armatrading, who had a new album out, being interviewed on the impeccably liberal Channel 4 News. Presenter John Snow was establishing that that she’d moved from the Caribbean to the UK in the late 50s: “So you’re part of ‘The Windrush Generation’ then?” His expression flecked with sympathy and hope. “What was that like?”
This could be interesting. I’d spent a bit of time with Joan some years back when we were both part of a British Council delegation to South Africa – a motley crew that included the writer Jackie Kay, Diane Abbott MP and our recently departed Prime Minister, then in his Spectator days – and detected, it will not surprise to even the casual observer of her career, a reticent but independent spirit, not necessarily someone to get off the bus, you might say, just because someone else says so, and there were a couple of things that might make her bristle here: the arguable inflation of said Windrush Generation – with the Windrush Scandal the racial scandal du jour – to facilitate an entry, even a shadow, for her own independent project. A little something crossed her face, a move towards composure, you felt, as eloquent as the fleck: ‘I can’t give you a woe-was me-story, John, I had a happy childhood.’ Cue wailing and gnashing from the Production Gallery.
There have been many positives to emerge from the social justice movements of recent times, (shifts in atmosphere that start to emerge in our neck of the woods around the simultaneous millennial moment of the Macpherson Report and this anthology’s first volume), but one of the most striking consequences equally surely has been the calcification of a certain sentimentality around the presentation and discussion of the black subject, particularly the black diasporan subject, in our media and public spheres.
Black as fight, this being whose inner and outer is variously endangered from cradle to grave. One whose life is bigger than themselves somehow. Political, problematised (“Today, on ‘Business Weekly’, the black people who loved their hair but have hated it since coming into contact with whites…”), in need – of future empowerment; if a youth, often, of saving from a fall. Perhaps, if she’s an upcoming biracial artist and you’re a radio arts interviewer looking to freshen the pot, you start these days with a question about the troubles of finding a place, though some may hear shades of tragic mulatto.
Such an artist will often find their work couched within the hitherto low, treacly, persuaders of ‘celebration’ or ‘inspiration’, the language of a Hallmark greeting card. Some will collude in this themselves (‘Buy my book!! # Celebrating Black Women’s Voices…’). These received phrases reach their zenith across the land in Black History Month but any month will do. (“June 2022, Lenny Henry’s Caribbean Britain – Episode 1 BBC: Lenny Henry is joined by a host of famous faces as he celebrates his Caribbean-British heritage…’).
What is now glutinous fug has long time hovered. As a child I remember being struck by just how many TV news reports featuring African-Americans would, at some point, have a bunch of them singing in church. It could be, I don’t know, a piece about Gas price hikes in the US, and they’d speak to a white Pennsylvanian by his truck and a white Texan on the freeway and then they’d cut to a black couple and behind them would be some gospel-y robed ones. You sensed the push for symbol, for human archetype: the noble response to suffering, or something about community – the best of how ‘we’ used to be, perhaps? At a time when most of my schoolmates, most European moderns, were fleeing the church in droves, it did feel a tad quaint, and sat somewhat uneasily with their coverage of the then front line of black civil rights, apartheid South Africa, where, despite as many churches and as many Christians, their preferred group singing showed locals engaged in war-like chants and dances.
Then, as a professional, I was hired to write a BBC documentary ‘Out of Africa’, a show that would sweep through black world history with five-minute slots on various black heroes, such as the Fab Four (Marcus, Mandela, Martin, Malcolm). Anxious to avoid the impression that, if whitey didn’t exist to struggle against, black heroes would be out of a job, I argued to include decolonial heavyweights like Sankara, Nkrumah, Lumumba, politicians with strong, indigenous-centred programmes for their countries or continent, in vain. When they are bad they are very, very bad and when they are good it can be like that.
For sure it’s underdog, it’s vulnerable, but that has its glamour and there’s other meat too for the fashionistas to chew on in the big life, especially for those partial to a bit of retro chic. The Sky trailer for 2021’s Black History Month has images of Martin Luther King and black moderns with their arms raised, a la the Olympians of ’68, cut with shots from the new 60s Black Panthers’-themed ‘movie ‘Judas and the Black Messiah ‘. The widely lauded ‘(Black Is)’ album by the British ‘mystery’ group Sault, released during the Black Lives Matter days of 2020, similarly recalls those times in its stark ‘fist’ cover and its wish to summon a similar, Curtis Mayfield et al- tone and urgency for now (‘Why We Cry, Why We Die’). There are welcome signs of a globalist black sensibility here but you couldn’t quite call it vision. On ‘Bow’, the names of the countries of the African continent are intoned over drums, in a stirring-roll call that you feel would have worked better fifty years ago, before decolonial disappointments. Coming out at a time when Nigerian youth’s continuing ‘End Sars’ protests against their own police brutality were going viral, it avoids the hard questions.
The political, it turns out, is indeed personal. Aesthetic, fantasy, taste… To properly articulate my issues with the fug, I could speak of fears that oppositional or divergent energies among black culturemakers will be soaked up or squeezed out by the ‘‘Diversity and Inclusivity’ embrace, similar to what Mike Phillips in ‘London Crossings’ writes of happening during the official Multiculturalism of Britain’s 70s and 80s, and bemoan the lack of a radical centre, free from the sentimentality of the left and under-appreciation of the right. I might talk of sentimentality’s frequent failure to see whatever’s in front of it properly; to appreciate that, as Joyce Carol Oates writes of the sex-worker character Carlita in ‘How I Contemplated The World From The Detroit House Of Correction And Began My Life Over Again’, ’Beyond her eyes processions move, funeral pageants, cartoons.’ Or of how, partly because of this, so often it trades on essentially unearned emotion and cite the swift decimation of Netflix’s Diversity initiatives this year in the face of the company’s first economic setbacks as the latest testament, and all of that would be true yet still fail to account quite for this nasty, saccharine aftertaste, something like the taste my mother’s Sweetex pills left me with when you added them to tea.
There are various contributors to where we are now – the wider climate of identity politics and culture wars, the ubiquity of the once frowned upon tabloid-y ‘human interest’ approach across our media, the mainstreaming and increasing use of therapy, with its attendant language, in the West, all adding to our current tyranny of feeling. To these you can add the trickle down effects of certain modish books and concepts within the black world (of which the latest to my attention is Afro-pessimism), the world of the socials, whose currency is ‘likes’ and whose populist, Highest Common Factor tendencies will always favour the more visceral, straightforward, activist-y performance, and if I list them it is not to say these are all ‘bad’ in themselves or lack merits in some cases, rather that the tone and parameters that these have helped generate too often reminds me of a certain common kind of emotive, issue-centric Young Adult fiction, a genre that is not a favourite and, indeed, was not even around when I was in its demographic but which I see, if the reading habits of my Creative Writing students are anything to go by, now (along with Fantasy) dominates.
My own youthful stories were different. Like the SARS protesters, the first, ongoing threat to me and my siblings’ bodies was another black body. There was the senior, religious relative who told of the Biblical curse of Ham and its application to black folk as if he really believed it, a tale I’d first come across in an abridged children’s version of the Bible at the time I was guzzling Greek myths like the myth of Sisyphus and perhaps the combination of these two have fostered a suspicion of any curse-like, agency-free story where we haul the same type of stones up the same hill, forever encumbered. Then the close young adult relationship with a friend whose emerging mental distress was signalled by disproportionate reactions and manipulative behaviours so that when I hear of the Jordanian-American author whose contract was cancelled by her publisher, citing her failure to appreciate ‘historic racism’ after she’d posted about an African-American subway employee whom she’d spotted eating on the network, contrary to regulation, triggering a condemnatory Twitter storm, I too feel triggered. A truly unappetising story with sneaks all round… Were they not taught my first rule of the playground: don’t sneak. Ah, perhaps too adolescent, this aversion to the screamers. Like Joan, perhaps, a generational thing. My own head so caught up in those years in the tough world of film noir, the bloody zones of Jacobean theatre, an atmosphere I saw summarised in an article by the critic W. A. Edwards, writing in Scrutiny II magazine about the plays of John Webster, that was as chime-y and as dreamy as anything more orthodoxly inspirational: “Events are not within control, nor are our human desires; let’s snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of tight corners, and meet the end without squealing.” Overarching doom here, too, you could say, but there seemed some dignity, heroism in the response, and a notion of cool that feels lost in the world of ‘likes’.
How do we as cultural producers expel the fug, resist its intrusiveness? In our journalism, we’d do well to resist too swift a resort to the someway manipulative ‘As a black person’…/’As an x…’-style set-ups, with their capacity to mute the voice, the reason of anyone who is not x. In our fictions, one starting point is surely to imagine what the fuggers might want and then avoid…If it’s an immigrant story, you might want to go easy on scenes involving the ‘exiled’ newcomers and homeland cooking, with all its obvious metaphoric load. Where there is pain from the traditional sources do not let it dominate so Sisypheans and self-flagellators can score on your behind. You may wish to avoid whites as characters completely, as I tried in one novel, so all that is at most a distant echo or informer, allowing other conversations their centre-ground. Let not your weak prove too strong and noble but sidestep with the mischievous, the less pronounced, the more opaque (perhaps no-one doing it better in Black Britain currently than Hackney’s musical bag of tricks Dean Blunt). Above all, insist on the art of your art so that those who are looking for simpler find no safe harbour there.
Everyone wants lives that have the weight of story: to live in historic times and/ or have a grandiose sense of self. Understandable, but we must be careful of the stories we tell ourselves or that are disseminated on our behalf. Nations have relied on heroic YA notions of war for aeons to fill their armies and prosecute their wars (‘N-N-N-Nineteen’ as the eighties chart-topper about the average age of American soldiers in the Vietnam war went, albeit there was conscription there too). The widespread notion that black people have a higher pain threshold than other races has surely fed into the disproportionate violence meted out to some black suspects by the police or immigration services at the moment of arrest, with sometimes fatal consequences. My own attachment to Webster’s way, alongside a football team, Hotspur, with a predilection for high-scoring, fluctuating fortune type matches, no doubt encouraged a jeopardy-seeking ambition that may have slowed adult progress. Few, it turns out, want too much adventure in the partnerships they seek long-term, much less difficulty; they choose, we know, comfort, security and if black (as a trope, an idea) remains problematic, then it may be fled from. One can envisage a time in a 1000 years, as technological advances increase the ability to choose biological traits via digital coding, when, if this and other current phenomena continue – colourism, intra-racial tensions and disparities etc – the number of people claiming and self-identifying as black is increasing while the number of people who actually are black, in the sense of having significant recent and ongoing black blood, has withered in the diaspora, a little like the fate that has befallen Native Americans, with those remaining ‘true’ black people largely confined to some hardy outposts in what used to be (before ecological change) the mother continent.
Still, there’ll be some glory in it, in them, if they’re living an adult story.