Representation.
What have you been told about yourself? More importantly, what have you believed?
As a young boy growing up I remember telling my mum that I wanted to be white. I can’t remember what led me to say this but whatever it was I obviously didn’t like what I saw in myself.
What had I been told, and what had I believed?
The stereotypes about black boys are all too familiar to regurgitate, but what I will say is that over time I’ve seen myself act them out with a dedication unknown to your finest Ashley Thomas or Daniel Day Lewis. I’ve spoken in ways I was told black boys speak and walked in the ways we were shown to walk.
I suppose this is what happens to everyone: we perceive the world ‘outside’ and are duly taken by what we see. This phenomenon, however (if we can call it that) takes on a particularly interesting aspect when we look into works of black British literature.
Bernadine Evaristo’s novel, The Emperor’s Babe is one such example of this. The novel is set in British Roman times (AD211 to be exact), and follows a young black girl named Zulieka as she tries to navigate herself in and around this world.
Black people, as we may imagine, were far and few between during these times, and whilst there is documentation that registers their existence, in no account were these people speaking for themselves. And so, whilst we have no surviving literature about their actual experiences, what we do have is what was written about them.
Various texts of the time show to what extent black women were defined by their colour, and how a variety of allusions (largely sexual) became extrapolated; black women were exotic, stirred to passion by the sun which made them dark; they were overtly sexual, made so by the dark (and so sinful) nature of their colour; black women possessed bodies in discordance with the ideals of beauty, yet were often considered both grotesque and appealing.
If we can imagine black women of the time being exposed to such representation, we can also imagine in some of the ways this may have been internalized and thus acted out.
Juxtaposing the narratives above with the black female characters in The Emperor’s Babe, what we are able to sense between Zulieka and her friends is an overriding preoccupation with sex and their sexual-ness. They are keenly aware of their exoticism and her friend Venus not only seems to relish in this but also seeks to take advantage of it, even if in a somewhat spiteful and sardonic way.
Zulieka is an aspiring poet, yet as a black woman with artistic endeavour’s she is painfully aware that no one wants to go anywhere to just hear her read, and so it’s with the secret intention of giving a public reading that she decided to throw a sex party. It’s under this guise and promise of sex that she must position her party (and of course, herself) if she wishes to be heard.
Unfortunately for Zulieka, no one is interested, least of all her friends – they end up getting too drunk and revelled in the orgy to pay any attention to her. In this, they serve to fulfil the representation that has been made for, and no doubt expected of, them.
Zulieka’s character is made outstanding for the very fact (as opposed to her friends) that she has dreams beyond the given (sex, marriage). And so, unlike me in my formative years, Zulieka in all her heroics does not accept the representation she is shown; she is not just for sex, she is not just a piece of eroticism.
She wants to be loved, wants to be powerful, wants to fulfil her desires, and most dangerously, takes steps to make this happen. Ultimately, however, she is made to pay for such rebellion. True to the novel as in life, it seems that breaking free from inherited representation does not come for free.
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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