Neglected black authors are being showcased by Bernardine Evaristo

BLACK BRITAIN: WRITING BACK

THE DANCING FACE by Mike Phillips

THE FAT LADY SINGS by Jacqueline Roy

MINTY ALLEY by CLR James

WITHOUT PREJUDICE by Nicola Williams INCOMPARABLE WORLD by SI Martin

BERNARD AND THE CLOTH MONKEY by Judith Bryan

Edited by Bernardine Evaristo

Penguin Books, £8.99 each

REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING

IN the wake of Black Lives Matter comes Black Britain: Writing Back, a series of six groundbreaking novels by overlooked, or forgotten black British writers. Selected by playwright and novelist Bernardine Evaristo who was co-winner of the Booker prize in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, this is a timely venture.

It is also long overdue. Among Black Lives Matter’s priorities was to protest the airbrushing of black and ethnic minority voices from far distant and recent history, and Evaristo’s selection aims to make a start to rectifying literary neglect.

There are countless famous and influential writers of black and ethnic minority backgrounds who are familiar to anyone interested in fiction, from Toni Morrison and Ngugi wa Thiong’o to Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Jackie Kay. What Black Britain: Writing Back makes you appreciate, however, is the number of less prominent authors left by the wayside.

Evaristo identifies a handful whose work has faded from sight, and deserves a second chance, not just because of its quality but because these were each in their way pioneering. As she writes of the Penguin initiative: “Our ambition is to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation … this project looks back to the past in order to resurrect texts that will help reconfigure black British literary history.” It’s worth pointing out, however, that all these novels were first published in the UK.

Her choices, she stresses, are personal, and not to be read as “an attempt to be definitive or to create a canon”. Evaristo’s views of the literary canon are widely known, and she raised eyebrows when she admitted that writers like Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters did nothing for her. Hence her concern not to sound prescriptive.

Not that all six of these authors are unknown. CLR James is one of the best sports writers of all time, the timeless voice of cricket. He also wrote extensively on African politics, and he turned his play The Black Jacobins, about Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, into a history of the uprising. Less familiar, and the only book in this chronologically lopsided series that pre-dates 1997, is his novel Minty Alley.

Published in 1936, before James left Trinidad, it is a picaresque, wry, colonial-flavoured account of a middleclass young man falling on hard times. When he moves into a low-rent but warm-hearted community on his doorstep that, until this point, he had never even noticed, his future opens up. While few today will have even heard of it, Evaristo writes that Minty Alley, the first novel published in the UK by a black Caribbean writer, “laid the foundation for [VS] Naipaul’s most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas”. That book, meanwhile, remains evergreen.

The other five titles are all from around the 1990s. This was a time when, Evaristo writes, there was a flourishing of publishing by black women writers, one of whom was her. The book that stands out particularly, for me, is Jacqueline Roy’s gripping tragi-comedy, The Fat Lady Sings.

THE comedy is entirely in the main narrator Gloria’s voice, as she observes her own and fellow patients’ behaviour and feelings, while in hospital with severe mental health issues. On the death of her partner Josie, the middleaged, ebullient Gloria has had a mental collapse: “The world goes on the same, as if Josie’s still alive and nothing’s changed … since I got put in hospital, it’s as if time has stopped and the future’s been squeezed out of me.

“It’s all past and present now.” In the next bed is a young woman whose interior monologue is fractured and impressionistic, but clear enough to show what has caused her to be