INTERVIEW: A SCHOLAR ON WRITERS, BOOKS, RESISTANCE

Resilience and resistance have long been major themes in the work of writers and artists of African descent, and now these issues are increasingly the focus of research by scholars who have had to forge similar qualities in their own careers.

Dr Suzanne Scafe, a British-Jamaican professor and literature expert, is one such academic, exploring these concepts in her engrossing new book Reading to Resist: Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing.

The volume is the first of its kind to focus on writing by black British women authors “using an approach that highlights the potential of this fiction to intervene into discourses that shape the worlds in which it is situated,” according to publisher Routledge.

Examining a range of concepts that include freedom and agency, moral understanding, and history, Scafe also delves into “issues of importance to the contemporary period such as well-being, success, and achievement”. She offers insights on how literature can help readers to make sense of their experiences and even to inspire activism, fortitude, or understanding.

Reading to Resist covers texts by both celebrated black British-born (or based) writers and those who are less recognized on the international stage. They include Buchi Emecheta, Diana Evans, Nadifa Mohamed and Zadie Smith, as well as Yvvette Edwards, Jacqueline Roy and Jacqueline Walker.

Scafe’s prior research has equally explored Caribbean literature, culture, and gender issues, and she has taught these and other subjects at various institutions in the UK - after beginning her career as a high school teacher in Jamaica. (Born on the island, she moved with her family to the UK as a child, and returned to the Caribbean for several years when she was a young adult.) She is currently an Associate Senior Researcher on the research project MERLIT at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium.

In the following edited interview, Scafe discusses her work with SWAN’s founder Alecia McKenzie.

SWAN: Reading to Resist has a very personal feel, especially since you discuss your own coming-of-age as a reader in a colonial (or postcolonial) context. Could you explain / expand on your motivations for writing this book?

Suzanne Scafe: I formulated the idea for the book as I began reflecting on past experiences and thinking about what reading and literature had meant to my students over the years. 

For the most part, I think that literature opened up new worlds for the readers I’d taught: it opened other worlds across time and geographical space, and it created spaces within which they could reflect on their own worlds. Of course, and this has been important for black and minoritised students, and students in ex-colonial settings, literature also provides insights into the unfamiliar or unknown in an already familiar world.

As I explain in the introduction, I’ve shared the experiences of reading that I witness in my students, but those experiences - of connection and recognition - are quite far removed from some of the ways we teach now, particularly in higher education. So, I began to think about why literature mattered to me and to my students. 

During [Covid] lockdown, I gave some online presentations about this subject to universities, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Issues around literature’s relevance are particularly urgent now that humanities departments in the UK are shrinking and the study of the humanities is being presented as increasingly irrelevant and self-indulgent. As a result, fewer black and working-class students are opting for degrees in this field. Cultural conversations, not just in educational institutions but in the wider world, are in danger of being once again dominated by white, middle-class voices and perspectives.

SWAN: What are some of the effects you’ve seen?

Scafe: These closures, the whipping up of fake culture wars, and the general attack on the humanities serve to limit our participation in the production and reception of culture. If, and when it is taken seriously, black British literature, which is the focus of the book, can work to challenge structures of exclusion, and counter many of the prejudices that have become legitimised in popular and academic discourse. In other words, it can intervene in discourses about history, culture, illness and well-being, education, success and so on, and at the same time, the act of careful reading, of paying close attention to language and meaning, facilitates a critical reading of all texts and all media.

SWAN: The idea of “resisting voicelessness” is one of the themes in your book. How much of this is a leitmotif in your own academic work?

Scafe: ‘Resisting Voicelessness’ is the title of the first chapter, which focuses on black British women’s autobiography. In this chapter, I trace contemporary black autobiographical writing to nineteenth-century slave narratives authored by women, and I connect their demand to be heard to the same demand in the autobiographies I analyse.

Black women auto-biographers across the centuries wrote to counter their own invisibility and the invisibility of their communities: they wrote as individuals but also on behalf of others. They gave voice to their own, otherwise silenced or marginalised experiences, and in the process spoke for others who could not speak. While I wanted to highlight the lived experiences about which these contemporary authors wrote, I also wanted to draw attention to the aesthetic complexities of their work. As with the slave narratives, these contemporary writers are not just documenting the ‘and then … and then’ of a life: they are turning their lives into stories and creating, from their life experiences, a lasting work of art. This focus on form, or what I term in the book ‘aesthetics’ is often missing in the analysis of black British texts - we assume that the experiences depicted in the work are ‘real’ and unmediated. 

In terms of my own writing practice, I’ve always wanted to draw attention to authors whose work has not gained critical or popular attention. I remain surprised by the fact that the work of so many black British women writers continues to be undervalued or ignored.

Pilgrim State, as its author Jacqueline Walker has said, is or was used in Health and Social Care Studies. It’s an incredible account of the author’s childhood, her mother’s experience of mental ill-health and the failure of State institutions, here and in North America, to provide care and support both for herself and her young family. It was written in 2008 and as far as I can see, it hasn’t been republished.

The same is true for In Search of Mr McKenzie, also included in this chapter. Yvvette Edwards’ novels, which I discuss in the second chapter, have received little or no critical attention, despite the fact that her first novel,  A Cupboard Full of Coats, was longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and was republished shortly after.

I write in the first chapter about Charlotte Williams’s autobiography, Sugar and Slate and I was heartened to see that it has been republished as part of Penguin’s Black Britain Writing Back series, initiated by the publisher in collaboration with Bernardine Evaristo. In my conclusion, I write about the importance of this collaboration, which has brought so many important works back into focus. It has meant that some of the work I’ve included, such as Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings, is now easily available.

And finally on the topic of voicelessness, I’ve brought some of my own voice into my reading of these texts, and I hope that readers, black readers in particular, will be encouraged to bring their voices to the critical table.

SWAN: Focusing on Walker’s Pilgrim State and other books, you discuss the “corrective function” of certain texts. Can you expand on this, and describe how it also relates to your scholarly writing?

Scafe: This is an interesting question and gives me pause for thought. I think all black and minoritised writers or writers from the “Global South”, in the global majority, however you want to describe us, are aware that we are writing against the grain. We write to counter popular myths about our lives; to correct historical misconceptions and untruths; to reveal the nuance, complexity and plurality of “black lives”, and so on. We do this because there is a relative absence of stories told about us in our own words.

In the book, I’ve tried also to focus on nuance and complexity. In the sentence that you quote, I write that Walker’s subtitle, “‘How It Really Was’ suggests a corrective function”; however, as well as “telling the truth about an individual life”, the autobiography presents a text that relies on storytelling structures - characterisation, a carefully structured plot, felicitous use of imagery - that is both the “truth” and a work of art. The writing is not intuitive or careless: the corrective function of criticism is to draw attention to the artistry of black British authors such as Walker.

SWAN: Linked to “corrective function” is the idea of “moral repair”. Does this concern go beyond black British women writers? Is it a common theme in writing from the “Global South”?

Scafe: Yes, and you’re right: these ideas are linked. Like the idea of a corrective, “moral repair” is particularly resonant for writers and readers in the “Global South”. I’d originally intended to frame the whole book around ideas of moral repair and reparation, but because this is one of the first books to focus specifically on black British women’s writing, I felt I should widen my critical lens so that readers could see that this writing is available for analysis from a range of different perspectives.

I’d been influenced by what I describe as the “ethical turn” in literary criticism and had written a couple of articles/book chapters that took this approach. I had started to read and think about “moral repair” as a concept that is different from justice, or even from conventional notions of reparation. In the second chapter of Reading to Resist, I look at four novels that focus on murder, two by Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats, that centres on the murder of a woman by her partner, and The Mother, that depicts a mother’s quest for justice for the murder of her son. The work by Zadie Smith and Nadifa Mohamed, also included in this chapter, is centred on historical murders: Kelso Cochrane and Mahmood Mattan. All these texts address “wrongs as wrongs” but also focus both on the structural conditions for wrongdoing which include the blinkered partiality of justice. I try to show that the novels themselves, in asking us to think about generations of systemic oppression, offer the possibility of hope through a practice of remembrance. 

SWAN: You discuss the “complex issues” of “reparation, remembrance, and recovery”. In what particular ways do some of the selected texts address these issues, especially in a historical context?

Scafe: Reparation is now commonly associated with historical injustice and linked to tangible or economic methods of recovery and repair. The first four chapters of the book do look at “repair” as something that representation participates in. When fiction requires us to look again or look differently at injustice and to see wrongdoing and subjugation as practices performed by humans, within systems of oppression that are perpetuated by humans on victims who are also human, then that work becomes an active participant in the conversation about memory, remembrance and recovery.

SWAN: Violence is equally a theme in many of the texts discussed, bringing to mind Véronique Maisier’s book Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood. What do you see as the link between historical trauma and the depictions of violence in the texts, and what is the message from these writers / writings?

Scafe: I’m not familiar with Maisier’s book, though I have touched on the historical roots of contemporary violence in Reading to Resist. Colonialism and historical and contemporary racist practices are also the historical root of violence in contemporary black British contexts. As well as looking at representations of contemporary violence, I analyse novels about slavery. In the fourth chapter I discuss Laura Fish’s Strange Music and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton. These novels use historical archives and do indeed represent the traumatic effects of the violence of slavery and its aftermath on their characters. 

These two novels return to the past in order to animate the everyday lives of historical figures  who were inserted into the margins or footnotes of the records of the enslavers. Both novels foreground the lives of women and the particular practices of violence and subjugation meted out to women in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Caribbean.

More than simply bringing the stories of women to life and light, focusing on their agency as well as their victimisation, I suggest that these novels ask readers to think about what is involved in re-writing the past; I think that’s the intention of both novels. And like most historical novels, these two works of fiction are about the relation between history and the imagination: about the imaginative component of history and the historical frameworks that often constrain fictional work that seeks to overwrite history.

SWAN: A question that we have asked other scholars is this: do you see violence as more of a topic, theme or trope in “Caribbean” or black British literature than in other “regional” writing, and, if so, could you summarize some of the reasons for this, according to your research?

Scafe: I agree that it’s both a theme and a topic of much recent writing in the Anglophone Caribbean. It is central, for example, to the work of Marlon James and it dominates recent writing by Caribbean women such as Lisa Allen Angostina’s The Bread the Devil Knead or Cherie Jones’s How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps her house, or Claire Adam’s Golden Child, all amazing novels. However, black British literature tends to be read in relation to themes and tropes of migration and displacement, belonging, separation and identity.

We have all written about how these ideas shape or define black British writing but in Reading to Resist I wanted to avoid those topics altogether. For example, in the third chapter of the book, which examines representations of mental illness in Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings and in three of Diana Evans’s novels, I’ve tried not to treat madness as a “topic” connected to displacement, un/belonging and colonial trauma, which is how this theme is sometimes presented, and to look instead at how the texts’ language is used to evoke the “madness” of their characters: how do these writers use language to represent a condition of being that is outside the logic of language?

SWAN: Your book also addresses “mobility, achievement and failure”, and you’re involved in a research project on meritocracy. Do black British writers from different personal / geographical backgrounds deal with these issues in different ways?

Scafe: Thanks for this question. Yes, the ideas for this chapter were formulated in 2018, at the first conference on meritocracy and achievement. Readers can access the conference papers online:

https://books.ulb.hhu.de/index.php/hhu_books/catalog/book/21. 

I had begun thinking about how, in the early, canonical writing of pre- and early post-independence Caribbean and Africa, individual achievement was represented as problematic. The examples I mentioned in my presentation were No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe, In the Castle of My Skin (George Lamming) and Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, though of course there are many others.

In these novels, social ascendency into colonial settings and institutions and a world defined by colonial values produced, for their protagonists, cultural, social and existential conflicts that were sometimes insurmountable. In some cases, however, the culture of the characters’ childhood provided an alternative way of seeing and knowing the world and an anchor that rooted them in this culture. 

I see a similar pattern in some black British writing, where success and achievement are represented as causing similar feelings of conflict or ambivalence. The novels I used for this chapter included Natasha Brown’s Assembly and Zadie Smith’s NW and Swing Time: all three are explicit meditations on the proximity of failure to success, where failure is, in these novels, a kind of haunting. I also used Buchi Emecheta’s autobiography Head Above Water, because, for all her apparent success, as the title suggests, her achievements often felt tenuous. She faced similar crises as those expressed in the writing of the younger authors.

SWAN: Are black British male writers addressing similar topics, or is there a gender divide / distinction?

Scafe: I think there are a lot of overlaps in the themes and topics addressed by both male and female writers but of course writing that uses women protagonists or uses its woman characters’ point of view tends also to address the particular kinds of oppressions or obstacles and challenges women face. Both Jacqueline Roy’s characters experience misogyny or sexual abuse but the novel uses forms of cultural expression by women to counter these experiences of subjugation. There is certainly a generational difference, and I find that representations of women in some of the now canonical, critically acclaimed, black British male authored texts, contain traces of misogyny. Even the recent work of these authors can still rely on negative stereotypes or silenced women characters.

10: What do you hope readers (including writers and scholars) will gain from your book?

Scafe: I hope to introduce readers to novels by black British women writers which haven’t gained much critical attention. I hope that the approaches I’ve used suggest the possibility of analysing and using black British writing differently. I’d like to see literature used across disciplines, and I think the topics I’ve used to structure the chapters point to that possibility. - SWAN

Photos (top to bottom): The cover of Reading to Resist; Dr. Suzanne Scafe; images of various books mentioned in the interview.

BOOKS: A PEEP INTO CLAUDE MCKAY’S ‘LETTERS IN EXILE'

Nomadic Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay probably never dreamed that 21^st-century readers would be delving into his private correspondence some 77 years after his death. But that’s probably part of the professional hazard (luck?) of being a literary luminary, or, as Yale University Press describes him, “one of the Harlem Renaissance’s brightest and most radical voices”.

The Press recently released Letters in Exile: Transnational Journeys of a Harlem Renaissance Writer, edited by Brooks E. Hefner and Gary Edward Holcomb. This is a comprehensive collection of “never-before-published dispatches from the road” with correspondents who have equally become cultural icons: Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Pauline Nardal, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Max Eastman and a gamut of other writers, editors, activists, and benefactors. The letters cover the years 1916 to 1934 and were written from various cities, as McKay travelled extensively.

His daughter Rhue Hope McKay, whom the writer apparently never met (perhaps because British authorities in the 1930s prevented him from returning to Jamaica or because he had no inclination), sold and donated his papers to Yale University from 1964 on.

The papers include his letters to her as well, and cast a light on this “singular figure of displacement, this critically productive internationalist, this Black Atlantic wanderer”, as a French translator has called him. But reading another’s correspondence, even that of a long-dead scribe, can feel like an intrusion. It’s a sensation some readers will need to overcome.

Born in 1890 (or 1889) in Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay left the Caribbean island for the United States in 1912, and his wanderings would later take him to countries such as Russia, England, France and Morocco, among others.

His acclaimed work includes the poem “If We Must Die” (written in reaction to the racial violence in the United States against people of African descent in mid-1919), the poetry collections Songs of Jamaica and Harlem Shadows, and the novels Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom. Years after his death in 1948, scholars discovered manuscripts that would be posthumously published: Amiable with Big Teeth (written in 1941 and published in 2017) and Romance in Marseille (written in 1933 and published in 2020). McKay also authored a memoir titled A Long Way from Home (1937), as well as short stories and essays.

While he’s considered a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was a cosmopolitan intellectual - an author ahead of his time, writing about race, inequality, the legacy of slavery, queerness, and a range of other topics. He wrote in a sharp, striking, often ironic or satirical way, and Letters in Exile reflects these same qualities. The collection “reveals McKay gossiping, cajoling, and confiding as he engages in spirited debates and challenges the political and artistic questions of the day,” according to the editors.

Some of the most interesting letters deal with France, the setting of a significant part of McKay’s oeuvre and a place where his literary stature has been rising over the past decade, through a rush of new translations, colloquia, and even a film devoted to his life: Claude McKay, From Harlem to Marseille (or in French, Claude McKay, de Harlem à Marseille), directed by Matthieu Verdeil and released in 2021.

McKay was the “first twentieth-century Black author associated with the United States to be widely celebrated in France,” write editors Hefner and Holcomb in their introduction. They say the letters show that France shaped McKay’s world view, and that he considered himself a Francophile as well as a perpetual étranger.

Through the selected correspondence, we see McKay experiencing France in a variety of ways - dealing with winter insufficiently dressed, participating in the community of multi-ethnic outsiders in Marseille, rubbing shoulders with various personalities during the Années folles, or observing French colonialism in Morocco. And nearly always short of funds.

In Paris in January 1924, after a bout of sickness, he wrote to New York-based social worker and activist Grace Campbell that he’d had the “bummest holiday” of his life: “I was down with the grippe for 10 days and only forced myself to get up on New Year’s day. I suffer because I’m not properly clothed to stand the winter. I’m wondering if anything can be done over there to raise a little money to tide me over these bad times.”

A month later, he wrote to another correspondent about the “cold wave” numbing his fingers and of having to sleep with his “old overcoat” next to his skin, while still not being able to keep warm. He also found the “French trading class” to be “terrible”, complaining that “they cheat me going and coming”.

During his early time in France, he called Marseilles a “nasty, repulsive city”.  But a few years later, writing to teacher and arts patron Harold Jackman in 1927, McKay stated: “I am doing a book on Marseille. It’s a tough, picturesque old city and I would love to show it to you some day.”

Apart from references to his work, McKay discussed global events in his correspondence, made his opinions known, and described relationships. His letters, say Hefner and Holcomb, are at the very least “an essential companion to his most revolutionary writings, from the groundbreaking poetry he produced after he left Jamaica through his trailblazing novels and short fiction and into his extraordinary memoirs and journalism.”

While this may well be true, and as insightful as the correspondence proves, many readers will still have to reckon with the uncomfortable sensation of being a literary voyeur. – AM/SWAN

Photos (top to bottom): the cover of Letters in Exile; a French newspaper article about Claude McKay; a montage of the writer's work.