I’ve always had suspicions, beginning with myself of course, that the urge to represent the so called ‘black experience’ results in part from having lived outside of it. The sense of loss within blackness, the isolation from whatever you thought it was, creates in some way a desire to reclaim and reconcile what you feel it ought to be. This seeming phenomenon is particularly interesting within the context of black British literature.
A rudimentary scan of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary black writers can lead us to argue that they all share a degree of distance from the so-called black experience. What I mean by this is that unlike Zadie Smith and Caryl Philips, the majority of black British people have little to no connection with Cambridge or Oxford University, that unlike Afua Hirsch, growing up in the affluence of Wimbledon is not a reality for most black people, and unlike Musa Okwonga, the issue of homosexuality is not something to be openly discussed in the ‘black community’. And whilst these crude examples codify as social class issues, they are also racial in a very particular way.
It’s in Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo where we can further interrogate this hypothesis. Adebayo, himself an Oxford graduate, chooses to mirror his protagonist on his own experiences at the esteemed university. We first meet Dele in his final year, living the young man’s fantasy of girls, parties and drugs, paying little mind to his upcoming examinations.
It’s not until later in the story that we are transposed to his hometown of inner-city London; it’s rough, rugged and all things stereotypically ‘hood. And although it’s in this space that we assume this to be the real Dele, it’s in between these two worlds (the two worlds: white and black, have and have not), where he really resides.
As we delve further into the narrative it becomes evident that our protagonist lives in isolation, feeling true connection to neither city nor its respective inhabitants. Yes, Dele can speak the language of ‘the road’ at home in London, and yes, he is able to communicate with his Oxford peers without ‘indulging their romance of the real nigga’, yet his very consciousness of his chameleon ability gives us the impression of a young man conflicted in his environment and identity. This sense of internal negotiation is what leads him mid-point to dub himself, ‘some kind of black’.
In an effort to represent a ‘true kind of black’ Adebayo employs the ideology of Pan-Africanism. In a strange altercation between Dele’s sister, Dapo, and the police, she is struck and falls into coma. What ensues is the coming together of a group of Pan-African adherents with a desire to unify the community and stand with Dele in his pursuance of justice. However, things take a sour turn as they begin to take advantage of him, quickly becoming a source of antagonism.
In setting up such a framework, Adebayo steers a sensitive ship. Whilst many of Dele’s experiences put him in opposition to ‘true blackness’ (his status as an Oxford student, his taste for white women, his mistrust of the Pan-African community), Adebayo is careful to avoid isolating the black reader, only his touch is too slight. There is an effort, it seems, to keep Dele ‘on side’, safely within the bounds of blackness, however the result is that we never really get a sense of where Dele stands, what he believes or what he even wants.
Yet perhaps we can read this as the very point. What Some Kind of Black is able to display is the confusion of having to negotiate between worlds and the uncertainty of character and desperation for kinship that can result.
Adebayo begins his novel with a quote by journalist, Danyal Smith, which reads, ‘across the diaspora young people are trading complex identities for tribal affiliations.’ This seems to be as true for Dele as for the black British writer. There is no clear shape in this novel for which we can categorise Adebayo’s work as definitively black British (whatever this may be) yet perhaps the unnamed complexities are far more advantageous for the reader and writer alike. True to its title, the novel is not intended to be black, but rather some kind.
Margin Page
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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