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.
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?
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.
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”?
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.
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?
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.