Forthcoming Attractions:
Tuesday October 21
Paris '68 Black as Ink (Screening + Discussion)
6:30pm - 8:30pm
The British Library,
London NW1
African-American exile writers were lured to Paris through
the post-war period.
This Documentary finds out why. After, Diran chairs a discussion
about then and
the modern parallels.
Thursday October 23
'On Post-Black'
(Speech/ Discussion),
7pm - 9 pm
Bruce Castle Museum, London N17
or , how to be post-race-centric but pro-black in six easy
steps...
A plea for a new 'Post-black' agenda in the UK in these Barackified
times.
Sunday November 16,
Reading
The Arvon foundation,
Lumb Bank, Yorks
Tuesday December 16
The Big Read: London
writers meet
the Readers
18:00-21:00. Free.
The British Library,
London NW1
An evening with writers/ broadcasters Sarfraz Manzoor, Esther
Freud,
Adam Thirlwell, Ekow Eshun, and Diran Adebayo.
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Oh Barack. Dear, dear Barack.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...
Number one, you're a smoker! It seemed barely credible, in these
days of the New Health and with that practice now barely legal,
that one of ours could regain the world's most powerful office.
You, in your twenty-two month great adventure, have proved yourself
the most inspiring cigs-man since football's Johann Cruyff.
I thought of you as a pair of young women from my local estate
accosted me by the newsagent's last weekend and asked me to
do them a favour. 'Puff on these," I eased my conscience,
as I handed over the goods, "and you may become Barack
one day."
Smoking is not important, but I read it as a sign, along with
the other evidence - your one time dabblings with drugs, your
lingering relationships with radical former tutors, your poker-playing,
your liking of hip-hop and that clever, nuanced TV show 'The
Wire', that you are, basically, a hip, 'down', college boy,
a type that many millions around the globe get and have no problem
with. You're at the slightly naughtier end of that set, to be
sure - you are, in Jimi Hendrix's phrase 'experienced', but
that, as regards your role-model prospects, is even better.
For too long, the minority-thick, poorer communities of this
hemisphere have been swayed by the entertainers, by the street-educators
of Rap's capitalist classes, by the streets of many of their
lives; now there is blatantly another way, also achievable,
also solvent, also cool enough. You, your college-professor
self and your equally-qualified, wife, buttressed no doubt by
the added authenticity that a country with a long-time sizeable
black middle-class furnishes you, and that the rest of us in
the west can only envy, have dramatically raised the relevance
and the leadership-potential for us black intellectuals, black
'elites'. Now, both street and scholar have one excuse less.
I like you too because, though I've had many issues with your
party down the years (not least with the one you're most often
compared to, John F-didn't have the-balls-to-invite friend Sammy
Davis Jnr to his inauguration-Kennedy), as I have with your
nearest equivalents on our side of the pond, I've always rather
it was your lot than the others. I fancy I'll welcome your foreign
policy more than I did the Iraq-bombing Bush, indeed more than
I did the last Democratic incumbent, the Somalia-bombing,Rwanda-avoiding
Clinton. There seems to be a hope, as you'lll know, in some
parts of the world that you will be somehow President-for Africa,
President-for-the-south: I do not expect that - you have to
be America's President and act in its interests, but I do expect
more, because you are, as I say, experienced.
Experience, inexperience. Funny things ...Some years ago, at
one of our big literary festivals, Hay-on-Wye, I had the pleasure
of meeting one of your literary 'greats', the late New Yorker
Norman Mailer. Across a crowded 'Green Room', our eyes met,
as they will when one is the author of 'The White Negro' and
the other is the only black in the house. So, we spoke and although,
I'm embarassed again to say I don't recall so much of it - Suzanne
Vega wafted across and I quite wanted her autograph - we did
chat about New York and I remember leaving with the distinct
impresion that I - for all his New York talk down all these
years - may have seen more of that city than he because I had
seen all his bits - the Village, the upper East side, but he
had seen little of some of mine - the Flatbush Avenues, the
Fort Greenes, the Bed-Stuys. That black is so often discussed
as if it's 'less' when in fact, especially, I guess, at the
elite end, it tends to be more.
You have that moreness in spades, and that counts for so much
in a country as insular and as ethnically segregated as your
own. With Hawaii, Indonesia, black and white America and, crucially,
Africa, you have a fair chunk of the world in you. The Africa
is key because it is likely to give you, in the many racially-accented
matters you will face, a difference in spirit.
We Africans seem to have a milder take on these things. Hard
to say why it might be, except the fact that our relationship
with European masters was much briefer than the hundreds of
years for which black peoples were subjugated in the Americas,
during slavery, the plantations, and after. Our cultural practices
were less disrupted, our mass entry to the West more recent,
less traumatised on the whole. I'm sure you've noticed that
subtle but clear difference between say, an African-American
gathering and an Africans-in-America one, as I have between
a British Caribbean- gathering and a Brit-African- one; between,
dare I say it, you and your African-American wife whose still
burning upset was apparent when she said that now, for the first
time in her adult life, she was proud of her country. There
is a deeper ease of spirit amongst Africans of direct descent.
I've increasingly suspected that it would take an African or
a biracial person, these who could to some degree stand outside
the heavy history of the Americas, to see beyond, and make white
America relax sufficiently for the game-changing breakthrough.
And it does fit so sweetly; the African returning to America,
but this time not in a slave hold; now the captain of the ship.
That you have 'got beyond' is a tribute to your vision and to
what I really, really like about you. that you are the first
person to execute a near-perfect 'post-black' campaign and,
in so doing, solve the disconnect that has long plagued minorities
and the coalitions they have forged in the west.
Here is the problem: whites, as your campaign has proved beyond
doubt, don't like race, but we do. They don't fully 'get' race,
and this is particularly true in countries like mine which,
unlike yours, was not founded on race. Many western whites do
not even see themselves most of the time as being part of a
'race', their race being the norm. For them, race is something
that happens to other people and when it does, it is something
they feel embarassed or threatened by or defensive about or
uncomfortable with, or wary of or weary of or impatient with,
and this is just as true among the progressive whites with whom
we have done most of our dealings. The left love racism, my
God, how they love racism - the great proportion of black stories
that get attention or get commissioned are to do with or reduced
to racism, the one black story they can examine themselves in
- but they don't truly respect race; they see it, the stuff
that still has to be done because of it, as second-rate, parochial,
temporary, something that all bright, right-minded people surely
wish to get beyond, so we can all be happy, hanging together
and having children who look a bit like you. Blame it on a commitment,
to the universality of man, I guess, plus their tendancy, in
concert with certain one-note blacks, to always problematize
race, but for most black people, race is only a problem when
it's racism. The rest of the time, race and what goes with it
is fine. It's is normal, they understand, for human beings to
bond and racial-cultural bonding, is one of the ways, in which
we do it. Race, for minorities, is mainly about resources. Race
is what has allowed a bunch of newly arrived, mainly illegal
Nigerian and Congolese immigrants to find haven and a job at
my north London barbers, One of them would have had a cousin
who worked there, and so he comes first cap in hand, and soon
the word spreads to his countrymen and then to fellow Africans.
Race and culture what accounts for that shared-secret smile
at that black party, a hundred strong , when some rare groove
tune comes on that their parents had and that didn't make the
charts Race is what has made 90+ percent of African-Americans
who turned out Tuesday vote for you. Race is true.
In our post-Civil Rights, post-Windrush period, when racism
can no longer be relied upon to be the ring to bind us all,
this disconnect is now impacting in-house. We have the emergence
of our own black middle-class, still a relative sprinkle, but
many of them feel they're doing perfectly well thank you, and
race-as-problem has proved no hindrance in their careers; who
feel that racial calls are the refuge of the weaker ones, though
race may have fasttracked them, as it may have you. Or some
like me who, in various journeys through lands like yours and
mine, hasn't seen the amount of racism he might have expected
to if certain stories were true, and so was not surprised at
the scale of your victory yesterday; who has seen, if anything,
racial suspicion, usually diffused when people meet and discover
other matters to connect through. Still others who are blacks-in-Britain
but not part of a black community they perceive as being too
race-minded. And running beneath, the coming thing, certainly
in our neck of the woods - a nineties/ noughties generation,
less ideological, more materially-driven, more 'post-racial'
in aspiration. One more inclined to believe they can have it
all in a Leona Lewis-X-Factor, Olympics, inclusive Britain kind
of way, just as this big Britain has begun to turn the screws
on what it expects from its newer arrivals. Witness the numerous
attacks we've been having these last few years, stepped up since
our 07/ 07, from central government, from Trevor Phillips at
the Equalities and Human Rights Commmision, to this year's UK
Defence Report, on the dangers and failures of multiculturalism,
on the need for a revitalised, more enforced sense of Britishness.
It is seductive, this velvet-glove-in- toughish-fist offer,
not least because the alternative - our established, Civil-Rights-filtered
black British-approach, despite certain hype to the contrary,
still seems a thing that is failing too many; the many black
youth underachieving at school, the many black actors and directors
still getting rusty on British film sets (not). The answer,
the likeliest route though all these camps, all with their claims
to legitimacy, could only be 'Post-Black': in my Britain-oriented
conception (because Britain seemed most where it was needed),
an acknowledgement that the race-centric methods and philosophy
we've employed for doing black culture since the Windrush have
had their time, and the search for more viable alternatives
and strategies that still have a progressive, pro-black agenda.
I have been talking up 'Post-black' for a while now, and I have
to say nothing I've ever broached over many years of public
fora raises the hackles of black audiences quicker. It's because
they assume I mean 'post-racial', some neutered, 'sellout' thing
(proof, if any were needed that, notwithstanding our own youth-tendancies,
the 'post-racial' lens through which white commentators have
seen you has been largely yet another race matter in which whites
are interrogating their own hopes and fears). But it's not post-racial
or even post-black really, I explain, just post-this black,
this present way of doing things. Our new approach has to be
more layered, has to speak to people who want to hear different
things. Layered in the way that yours was a campaign of majority-targetted
words, and quieter signs.
No, not post-racial, not just a one-stop-shop. Better, newer
than that - that much has been clear by the choices you've made,
the church you attended (and which person of colour did not
know someone, after 9-11, who said, like Reverend Wright, that
these were America's chickens coming home to roost?), and that
wonderful speech on race you then had need to give. You're more
this sweeping line in the sand. A hundred years ago, your African-American
forbear WEB Du Bois said that the problem of race, 'the colour
line', would define the 20th century. The 21st century's equivalent,
for black westerners at least, will be the line dividing those
who are race-centric and those who aren't.
This Post-Black era, now you've finally got it up and running,
will bring richer dividends, wider reach, without doubt, to
black artists, entrepreneurs and politicians alike, certainly
on our less-race battered, and less black-populated side of
the pond. It will mean some re-focus of energies, a change in
some of the debates we get engaged in. If Britain is more averse
now to a certain kind of black identity, to fleshen out just
one possibility, then why not put ourselves at the forefront
of the citizenship debates that are currently of so much import
to old and new Europe? After all, us black Britons, with our
newer, particular take on citizenship, should have much to offer
here that's useful to new others, or old ones remaking themselves..
I feel a film coming on: a Pole , a black Briton and a Romany,
a wry , hunam comedy; funds from the big paymaster that is the
European Union... New coalitions, new self-identifications.
Any winning idea to win through must have both economic and
charismatic or 'dignity' appeal. You with your charisma, the
reasonableness that shines through you, and, darn it, all that
power, are the poster-boy we've been looking for.
I put a bet on you, Barack, a while back at the start of your
grand adventure, at lovely long odds, to do the Double - the
Democratic nomination then the presidency. I only collected,
you see, if both came through. So what can I say, bro? You've
not only done this mighty thing you've done, you've solved a
quiet, little, credit crunch too!
Luv ya,
Diran.
(c) Diran Adebayo 2008
* Diran's short story, 'P is for Post-black' is in the collection,
'Underwords: The Hidden City' (Maia Press). |
