Review: Writing black Britain 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. James Procter (ed.). 2000

People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others besides me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea?

Stuart Hall

Some time in early 2001 I attended a number of seminars and lectures at Uppsala University on black British writing. Among those attending was Diran Adebayo. His writing at the time was receiving a lot of attention and, in the British black community (at least), he was to be the next big thing. That didn’t quite happen. But, I remember his passion and ambition. In the company of Adebayo was a young British academic – at the time employed at Stirling University (now at Newcastle University) – called James Procter. Procter was, I recall, congenial, funny even, over coffee and lunch. As a lecturer, however, he was dreadfully dull (sorry James). Nevertheless, it was obvious that he knew his stuff and, bit-by-bit, he started to open my eyes to a body of literature I knew little about. More than that, Procter was very careful to situate his discussion of texts in a cultural-historical context, weaving literature through lived experience, and this enhanced my appreciation and enjoyment.

At the end of the seminars, I bought Procter’s recently published anthology Writing black Britain (as one feels obliged to), a wonderful collection of (written) texts and text extracts, literary and non-literary, communicating ‘black’ British experiences in post-WWII Britain. In many ways, it serves as an exemplary example for Language and Literature teachers considering how to think about and select texts for Part 3 of the course, Literature – Texts and Contexts.

Procter’s general introduction, written in the sometimes turgid, abstruse prose of the academy, is nevertheless fascinating. Procter discusses the difficulty of writing history – there’s a Theory of Knowledge connection right there. In beginning his anthology in 1948, coinciding with the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury, Procter is acutely aware that he is constructing a history, ignoring a pre-history, or even the historical context which ‘brings’ the Windrush to British shores. Procter knows that he isn’t capturing history; he’s fashioning it. Nevertheless, Procter is also participating in a bigger discourse of revising or recovering history, of giving a place to under-historicised peoples and literatures. Then there is the category ‘black’: What does black mean? Who is included? Who is excluded? Who says? The world is more complex that the labels we give it (but arguably need), and the contested nature of the category illustrates a central understanding of the Language and Literature course: Meaning is not fixed, and it is frequently challenged. Fortunately, Procter does not intrude too much. He acknowledges the problem of selection in his choice of texts and extracts, of presence, absence, and partiality (again, Theory of Knowledge), but the range and richness of the literature in this anthology is a pleasure in itself, and is there to be enjoyed within but also beyond Procter’s historical framework.

Procter’s anthology is separated into three parts – another editorial decision. Part 1 – 1948 to late 1960s – begins with the Windrush generation, writers such as Sam Selvon, James Berry, and George Lamming; London-based writers, and mainly men. Included also in this section of the anthology are the writings of Louise Bennett and Lord Kitchener; regarded as calypso performers in the period, they are today more often considered poets. There is a lesson there. For the growing black population (including Asians), work and housing were sites of racialized tension. These issues, not surprisingly, are motifs in the black literature of the period.

The second part of the anthology, late-1960s to mid-1980s, is for me the most interesting part of Procter’s text collection, although this may simply reflect my own coming of age (the role of the reader, huh?). In this period, Procter argues, racial intolerance in Britain was rising. There was a racialization of crime; ‘mugging’ became a black crime and (in response) black communities mobilized and, literally, took to the streets. As in the United States, ‘black’ became a marker of pride and resistance. The celebration of black identity can be seen in the poetry of, for example, Grace Nichols. And the street is especially prominent in the writing of Linton Kwesi Johnson. Teenage students (perhaps especially boys) are, in my experience, easily turned on to Johnson. The energy of his writing, influenced by the ‘nation language’ of Kamua Brathwaite, his overt political commitment (in a specific, hostile social context), and his performance poetry recited over dub-reggae, make Johnson particularly interesting for the student of Language and Literature. 

The third and concluding part of Procter’s anthology moves from the mid-80s towards the eve of the Millennium. Here, Procter suggests the politics of black representation and identity are challenged and destabilized. The politicization of the epithet ‘black’ in the 1970s subsumed heterogeneous identities and experiences. Thus, the final section of the anthology diversifies the range of voices; there are more women (Jackie Kay is my own favourite of those included) and there are more South Asians, such as Meera Syal and Hanif Kureishi, writers prepared to share a joke and critically appraise their own diasporic communities. But, perhaps as a warning to more extreme post-modern tendencies, and a reminder that ‘black’ means something, whatever it means, the final literary text is Benjamin Zephaniah’s moving poem, ‘What Stephen Lawrence Has Taught Us’.   

Procter’s anthology is a book I have read and re-read. It’s the kind of book I wish people would give me at Christmas, but tend not to. And it has stimulated me to read further. Probably, it hasn’t given me too much to teach, but it has given me ideas about how to teach what I do teach, and it has convinced me – if I ever needed to be – of the value and enjoyment of understanding context(s) in reading literature. There is a wonderful documentary film series made by the BBC called, quite simply, Windrush. Watching it, I am struck by the way the historical narrative of social and political life closely parallels Procter’s framework. Writing history, as Procter seems to suggest, creates a narrative in its own right; a kind of text, offering one version of the ‘truth’. A nod and a wink to Theory of Knowledge is a good way to conclude a lesson in the Language and Literature classroom.