Celebration of Black Britain
Rudies Come Back or The Rise and Rise of 2-Tone
Plus the authors from Penguin’s ‘Black Britain – Writing Back’ and new poems from today’s Black Britain
Screened online Monday 8 – Saturday 13 March 2021 in collaboration with Bocas Lit Fest and Penguin Books UK.
Black Britain has been a long time in the making, created by many generations of people of African and Caribbean heritage living in Britain throughout the twentieth century. This special Your Local Arena, in partnership with Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad, explores how literature and music have played a part in that — from books published in the 1930s, when most of the Caribbean considered itself British, up to the 1990s, when black authors born in the UK were being published, to the music of 2-Tone, where black and white musicians blended blue beat and ska from the 1960s with reggae, soul and punk from the 1970s. This cultural journey, criss-crossing the Atlantic over decades, has led to the rise of what we now celebrate as Black Britain.
For five days, YLA brought you this early BBC Arena film, Rudies Come Back or The Rise and Rise of 2-Tone, which captures the start of the music genre in its hometown of Coventry in 1980. You can still watch here the accompanying film which discusses the rise of Black British culture, featuring Judith Bryan, SI Martin, Mike Phillips, Jacqueline Roy and Nicola Williams, who were all published on 4 February in Penguin’s ‘Black Britain – Writing Back’ series curated by Bernardine Evaristo, as well as Anthony Joseph, representing the legacy of CLR James. Read and listen to new poems by today’s rich mix of Black British poets: Malika Booker, Richard Georges, Keith Jarrett, Hannah Lowe, Maureen Roberts and Roger Robinson. Read the article on the history of Black British publishing by Roxy Harris and Sarah White of the George Padmore Institute, a London-based archive housing materials relating to the black community of Caribbean, African and Asian descent in Britain and continental Europe. And listen to the London by Lockdown podcast by Craig Garret exploring the rise of Black Britain. Together, this Your Local Arena brings a fresh perspective on Black British culture.
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO Arena and The Rise of Black Britain
Judith Bryan, Anthony Joseph, SI Martin, Mike Phillips, Jacqueline Roy and Nicola Williams respond to the Arena film through their own experiences of and novels about building Black Britain.
Judith Bryan is a writer, playwright and academic. Her first novel Bernard and the Cloth Monkey won the 1997 Saga Prize. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in various anthologies and her play, Keeping Mum was produced at Brockley Jack Studio Theatre, London, in 2011 for the WriteNow2 Festival of New Writing. Judith is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Hawthornden Fellow. She has taught creative writing at City Lit, Arvon, Spread the Word and to community groups. She is working on her second novel.
Buy the new Penguin edition of Bernard and the Cloth Monkey here.
CLR James was born in Trinidad in 1901 and was one of the prominent figures in the West Indian diaspora. He was a writer, socialist and pioneering voice in literature who wrote extensively on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilisation, African politics, cricket and popular culture. His works include World Revolution, The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary and his only novel, Minty Alley, now republished in ‘Black Britain – Writing Back’. He died in 1989. Speaking about his legacy is Anthony Joseph (pictured), a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. As a musician and spoken word artist he has released seven critically acclaimed albums which blend Afro-Caribbean music, free jazz and funk. The most recent, People of the Sun, was recorded in Trinidad and released in 2018. Joseph’s novel, Kitch, a biography of calypso icon Lord Kitchener, was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize, the OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. In 2019 he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His latest novel, The Frequency of Magic, is just out.
Buy the new Penguin edition of Minty Alley here.
SI Martin is a museums consultant and author, specialising in Black British history and literature. He is the author of several books of historical fiction and non-fiction for teenage and adult readers, including Britain's Slave Trade (written for Channel 4 to tie in with its documentary of the same name), Jupiter Amidshops, Jupiter Williams and Incomparable World.
But the new Penguin edition of Incomparable World here.
Mike Phillips was born in Guyana, but grew up in London. He worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster on television programmes including The Late Show and Omnibus. He has written many critically acclaimed crime novels, including Blood Rights, which was adapted for BBC television; The Late Candidate, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction; Point of Darkness; An Image to Die For; A Shadow of Myself; and Kind of Union. He co-wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain to accompany the BBC series, and an essay collection, London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001). Appointed the first Cross Cultural Curator for the Tate Galleries in 2005, Mike also wrote for the Guardian, and his public service includes trusteeships of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Most recently, he served as an independent adviser to Inspector of Constabulary Wendy Williams’ Windrush; Lessons Learned Review for the Home Office.
Buy the new Penguin edition of The Dancing Face here.
Jacqueline Roy is a dual-heritage author, born in London to a black Jamaican father and white British mother. After a love of art and stories was passed down to her by her family, she became increasingly aware of the absence of black figures in the books she devoured, and this fuelled her desire to write. In her teenage years she spent time in a psychiatric hospital, where she wrote as much as possible to retain a sense of identity; her novel The Fat Lady Sings is inspired by this experience of institutionalisation and the treatment of black people with regards to mental illness. She rediscovered a love of learning in her thirties after undertaking a BA in English and a MA in Postcolonial Literatures. She then became a lecturer in English, specialising in Black Literature and Culture and Creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she worked full time for many years, and was a tutor on The Manchester Writing School’s MA programme.
Buy the new Penguin edition of The Fat Lady Sings here.
Nicola Williams started her career as a barrister in private practice, specialising in Criminal Law, including three successful Commonwealth death penalty appeals before the House of Lords sitting as the Privy Council. She was a legal expert on BBC World for the OJ Simpson trial verdict in 1995 and a member of the first Independent Advisory Group to the Metropolitan Police Service (following recommendations arising from the Stephen Lawrence Report [1999]). She has been a part-time Crown Court Judge since 2010. A former winner of Cosmopolitan magazine Woman of Achievement Award, she is an active volunteer for the Speakers for Schools programme, a charity which encourages young people from disadvantaged and under-represented communities to enter the professions.
Buy the new Penguin edition of Without Prejudice here.
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S Celebration of Black Britain:
New Poetry from Today’s Black Britain
Malika Booker
‘Always The Mix and Blend’
Malika Booker is a poetry Lecturer at Manchester University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage and the founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. Her first poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). Malika hosts and curates New Caribbean Voices, Peepal Tree Press’s literary podcast. A cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) and won The Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem (2020).
Richard Georges
‘In Your Young Days, for The Specials’
Richard Georges is a writer of essays, fiction, and three collections of poetry. His most recent book, Epiphaneia (Out-Spoken), won the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and his first book, Make Us All Islands (Shearsman), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Richard is a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study and serves as the first Virgin Islands Poet Laureate. He works in higher education and lives on Tortola with his wife and children.
Photo credit: Naomi Woddis
Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator based in London. UK poetry slam champion and FLUPP International Poetry Slam Winner (Rio), his work has included bilingual performances in Bilbao and Madrid, in addition to UK-wide commissions. His poem, ‘From the Log Book’, was projected onto the façade of St. Paul’s Cathedral and broadcast as a commemorative art installation, Where Light Falls, in 2019. His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. Selah, his poetry collection, was published in 2017. Keith was selected for the International Literary Showcase by Val McDermid as one of ten most outstanding LGBT writers in the UK. He has judged the Polari Prize, the Foyle Young Poets Award, and is the Europe and Canada regional judge for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2021. Having recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck University, he is finishing his first novel and teaches on the Creative Writing MA.
Hannah Lowe is a writer and academic in London, UK. Her first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was short-listed for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. Her second collection is Chan (Bloodaxe, 2016). In 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation British poets, an accolade awarded once a decade. She has also published four chapbooks: The Hitcher (Rialto 2012); R x (sine wave peak, 2013); Ormonde (Hercules Editions 2014). (2016) and most recently, The Neighbourhood. (Outspoken Press, 2019). She has been Writer in Residence at Keats House and currently lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University.
Maureen Roberts (MA in Creative Writing, Goldsmiths College) is a Senior Engagement & Learning Officer at London Metropolitan Archives. She is a Trustee of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, London and is also Operations Manager of the Ithaca College London Centre study abroad programme, working as an Administrator and lecturer. From 2010 to 2013, she was Curator of the Keats House Festival, and she was also previously the organiser of the Ithaca College Martin Luther King Scholars London Programme. In 2012, Maureen Roberts represented Grenada as part of the Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus, which was part of London’s Cultural Olympiad. A published author and teacher, her poems have been widely anthologised, including on the Caribbean O level exam syllabus. Maureen is the Founder of the Archives Download group, which encourages BAME participation in archives.
Roger Robinson
‘The Rudeboy Returns’
Roger Robinson is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the 2019 T S Eliot Prize and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. His latest collection, A Portable Paradise, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, has been commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and is currently shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Roger has received commissions from The National Trust, the BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, the V&A Museum and Theatre Royal Stratford East among others. His workshops have been shortlisted for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries and were also a part of the Webby Award-winning Barbican’s Can I Have A Word. He is co-founder of Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records.
A Short History of Black British Publishing
The Roots of Independent Black British Publishing, by Roxy Harris & Sarah White
The 1960s saw the first small independent specialist black publishing houses — New Beacon Books (founded by John La Rose and Sarah White) in 1966, and Bogle L’Ouverture Publications (Eric and Jessica Huntley) in 1968.
Significantly 1966 was not only when New Beacon was founded, but also when the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) burst on the scene. Many West Indian postgraduate students were in London continuing their studies after doing their first degrees in the newly formed University of the West Indies. There was an active students’ centre in Earls Court where CAM held its regular monthly meetings. Adjacent was Nkrumah’s Africa Unity House, forming a similar base for African students, but also hosting liberation movements from Southern and Portuguese Africa. And in the USA there was the burgeoning development of the black power movement. It was a very special time, a concentrated cauldron of ideas.
CAM had an intense and vibrant six years of talks, discussions, ‘warishi’ nights. Ideas explored lived on through friendships and shared interests, and also in the everyday experience of later generations of West Indians who were beginning to put down roots in the UK and form a distinct Black British experience.
This did not mean that no publishing went on at all before 1966. Minty Alley by CLR James was first published in 1936 by Secker and Warburg. New Beacon republished it in 1971, part of John La Rose’s vision to make out-of-print classic texts accessible to a new generation of readers. A considerable number of authors, born in the Caribbean, but with writing that reflected their experience both in the Caribbean and in the UK, began to appear, published by established UK publishers. These included George Lamming, VS Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon. Henry Swanzy, working for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, provided a space for many Caribbean–based writers to hone their craft.
James Currey’s pioneering Heinemann African Writers series provided a rich door to African creative writing. There were also new secondary school texts beginning to reflect the changing attitudes of the newly independent countries.
During the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the publishing of specifically Black British writing or writing addressing the specific Black British experience developed slowly. Bogle L’Ouverture published Getting to Know Ourselves, and Dread Beat and Blood by Linton Kwesi Johnson, Allison & Busby published Buchi Emecheta’s fiction, as well as non-fiction and children’s books. In 1971 New Beacon published the campaigning booklet How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System for the Caribbean Education and Community Workers Association, one of the early black education movement’s campaigning groups. Other start–up publishers included Blackbird Books (Rudolf Kizerman), Karnak House (Amon Sabaar Sakana) and Karia Press (Buzz Johnson). They all struggled, often operating from cramped quarters in their own homes and providing their own funds. They all had to have an activist approach to the works they were publishing — promoting them at public meetings, readings and through direct sales. They shared this activist orientation with the pioneering New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture.
The 1980s saw a qualitative shift in the Black British publishing world. For one thing, government money became available. The British state was faced with the protest movements that had led to the New Cross Massacre Black Peoples Day of Action in 1981 and the uprisings in cities all over the UK that had followed. They needed to absorb or neutralise the protest. Suddenly grants were available, many in London through the Greater London Council and Inner London Education Authority. They helped to provide sustenance and funds for numerous community writing and publishing groups which had started to emerge in 1970s: Akira, the Black Ink Collective, Centerprise, Commonplace Workshop, Out of Many Creative Arts Group, Peckham Publishing Project and so on. Many individual schools around the country were encouraging their pupils to write about their own experiences. The publishing of poetry, stories and autobiographies all flourished, creating a generation whose own Black British experience was being validated as something worth writing about.
In 1982, the First International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books took place. By 1981 New Beacon was working closely, politically and culturally, with Bogle L’Ouverture Publications and Race Today Publications through the Alliance of the Black Parents Movement, the Black Youth Movement and the Race Today Collective. The Alliance, which also had branches in Manchester and Bradford/Leeds, had provided the core organisational structure for the successful Black Peoples Day of Action march. In the autumn of 1981 New Beacon and Bogle, both publishing houses and bookshops, and Race Today Publications, publishing its journal but by now books as well, discussed and acted upon an idea they had for an international book fair. A Call to the Book Fair was sent out in the autumn of 1981 by the two directors, Jessica Huntley and John La Rose:
The aim of the Book Fair is to mark the new phase in the growth of radical ideas and concepts and their expression in literature, politics, music, art and social life. It will be a meeting place for writers, publishers, distributors, booksellers, artists, musicians, film makers and the people who inspire and consume their creative productions.
The first Book Fair was held in Islington, the second in Lambeth and the third in Acton, reflecting the three areas of London where the organisers were based. In 1985 it moved to the Camden Centre, remaining there until the final Book Fair in 1995. The Book Fairs were a great inspiration and helped to nurture many independent black British publishing initiatives at the time. Some fell by the wayside, but a look at the Book Fair brochure published each year with its list of participants and publishers shows the same names coming and growing year after year: Tamarind Press, Verna Wilkins’ pioneering children’s book publisher; Peepal Tree Press started by Jeremy Poynting with work from East Indian Caribbean writers but later widening its net to Caribbean, African and Black British writers. This history is comprehensively documented in the book A Meeting of the Continents (2005).
People and publishers came from all over the world to participate. The Book Fairs and their Festivals provided a platform for discussion around ideas, politics and culture. They built networks and alliances. They carved out a space for independent publishing initiatives. They helped small publishers, who met each other, shared experiences, methods, contacts and skills. They provided an important space to grow and gain confidence. They grew the readership for the wide, varied and distinctive Black British writing which we see today — as well as providing inspiration for those who would go on to become those authors.
Roxy Harris is a founder Trustee (1991) of the George Padmore Institute and is its current Chair. He was a member of The Black Parents' Movement, played a major part in the International Bookfair of Radical Black & Third World Books (1982-95), was a member of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and for many years was a coordinator and teacher at the George Padmore Supplementary School. He has taught in secondary schools, further education colleges, adult education institutes and in universities. He has authored and edited numerous books and other publications.
Sarah White started life as a science historian and worked for fifteen years as the Soviet Science consultant to the New Scientist magazine. In 1966 she and her partner, the late Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, founded New Beacon Books, the UK’s first black bookshop and publisher, where she worked until 2016. Sarah White was a founder member of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books (1982-1995), and the founding Trustee Secretary of the George Padmore Institute (1991). She has been closely involved with the development of the archive collections held at and publications released by the Institute. She has helped to oversee many important projects, such as the five-year Dream to Change the World which ended in 2015 with a very successful exhibition at Islington Museum on John’s life and legacy. Sarah died in 2022.
London by Lockdown: A Travel Podcast
New episode: Drawing a Better Map
As a community and a nation, we can’t know where we are, where we’re going, or where we could be if our map is faulty, incomplete or badly drawn. We also miss out on great stories. To build a better map and truly trace the contours of this place, in all its complexity and beauty, we need to hear all voices, stories and experiences — across the city and beyond. This latest episode explores the rise of Black Britain and celebrates diverse and brilliant Black British voices. As part of this collaboration with Your Local Arena, we hear readings and interviews from authors SI Martin, Jacqueline Roy and Nicola Williams, and we learn how levelling the field in publishing can enrich our understanding of everything from Georgian London to legal thrillers.
Listen to London by Lockdown on all major podcast platforms, and Here.
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