Here to stay
In order to make sense of the present, the British born generation begin to find their voice in poetry and the theatre which had emerged from community centres like the Keskidee Centre in North London which was established in 1970. Older playwrights like Mustapha Mutura in Black Pieces (1972) and Welcome Home, Jacko (1980), Edgar White in Lament for Rastafari (1983) and Michael Abbensetts in Sweet Talk (1974), Samba (1980) and Empire Road (1979) were beginning to write about the lives of young black Britons. While younger playwrights like Caryl Phillips' Strange Fruit (1981) and Hanif Kureishi's Borderline (1981) and Birds of Passage (1983) were mapping out in a more intimate way, a new multiracial Britain.
Philliphs and Kureishi, as they made the transition eventually to novels in the mid 1980s, were the vanguard of a fresh new wave of creativity to rival the pioneers of the 1950s. the process had already began with the emergence of Timothy Mo's Monkey King (1980) and Sour Sweet (1981), and Roy AK Heath's The Murderer (1978) and the his family trilogy, From the Heat of the Day (1979 One Generation (1981) and Genetha (1981). Both novelists won major awards and received critical acclaim.
But it is with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which won the 1981 Booker McConnell Award that this new wave made its greatest impact. It announced a literature that would look back to its source, but would be far more self-confident about its own position in Britain. It wouldn't be marginalised as 'Black', 'Commonwealth' or any other kind of literature that put it at the edges. It would be a fully fledged member of the broad range of British writing. These young writers were critical insiders not outsiders, and had moved from post-colonialism to multicultural Britain. In that year alongside Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta was shortlisted as one of the best young British writers by the Booksellers campaign. In 1983 Grace Nichols won the Commonwealth Poetry prize for I is a long memoried woman.
'Mike Phillips in Blood Rights, explored the complicated and mixed heritage of black and white Britons'
In the 1980s Britain and its institutions started to open up to Black Britons. the decisive incident was the 1981 Brixton riots,and the publication of Lord Scarman's report investigating the causes of it. Scarman identified the causes as police relations and school exclusions. Investment in black community groups was one of the solutions. This investment by national government coincided with new initiatives by local government and the Greater London Council, and led to the support of many black institutions and artists. there was an explosion of poetry and the development of a formidable circuit, which the ground breaking Third World and Radical Book fair in May 1982 aptly captured. It featured poets as diverse as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Montserratian born Archie Markham, James Berry, Fred D'Aguir and John Agard. Berry was to reflect this energy in News For Babylon (1984) the first major anthology of black British poems.
Black Community writing groups such as the South London based African Caribbean Educational Resource (ACER) also flourished, as well as other radical groups supporting discourses on gender and sexuality, much of which was coming over from African American women like Alice walker and Toni Morrison. Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe published the Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain (1985) a ground breaking collection of essays, poems and stories about black women which caught the mood of the time.
By the mid-1980s another group of publishing houses such as Akira, Karia, Dangaroo, and Karnak House had been established promoting another wave of new writers and poets. Radical feminist publishing houses the Women's Press, Sheba and Virago also promoted new black talent. The careers of Mike Phillips, Joan Riley, Martin Glynn, Benjamin Zephaniah, Amyl Johnson, Jackie Guy, Fred D'Aguiar were launched in this wave.
By the late 80's the major writers who had emerged at the start had begun to consolidate their position. Salman Rushdie had followed Midnight's Children with the dazzling Shame (1983) and the powerful and controversial Satanic Verses (1988), Tim Mo produced the epic An Insular Possession (1986), Ben Okri produced two startling collections of short stories Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfews , while Caryl Phillips' The Final Passage (1985) and Joan Riley's the Unbelonging (1985) began the process of rewriting the story of the arrival of their parents.
Meanwhile, Mike Phillips in Blood Rights, explored the complicated and mixed heritage of black and white Britons. Similar territory was mined by Hanif Kureishi in his first novel the Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which followed the success of his screenplays My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987). Some of the older writers, VS Naipaul in particular began finally to deal with Britain. His novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) explores the English countryside and his relationship with both it and the country which had dominated his imagination for so long. The 1990s began with Ben Okri's 1991 Booker McConnell prize winner, the Famished Road, promising bright prospects for the next ten years.
Published: 1998-01-01
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