Serena Alagappan

Yousif Qasmiyeh shatters and reconstructs a traditional conception of time in order to understand how time enigmatically exists in the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. How does one measure time when one is itinerant, always waiting, in between? How does one track past time that feels erased, inaccessible, or uprooted? These questions are not answerable in any neat or comprehensive way. But Qasmiyeh’s poems live in these unknowns and require readers to embrace time’s elusiveness.

If we look at the first poem in the collection, ‘In arrival, feet flutter like dying birds’, it concludes with, ‘In the camp, time died so it could return home’ (7). The line can almost be read in pentameter. But there is one syllable too many: ‘home’. Although ‘home’ is found on the same line as the ten syllables that precede it, it rhythmically lives elsewhere. ‘Home’ upends what might have been the line’s metrical and structural unity. In this analysis, the poem’s form reflects a metaphorical rendering of home as dislocated – disjointed in the context of time in the camp. 

Other sonic qualities of Writing the Camp add texture to Qasmiyeh’s theory of time. Some of Qasmiyeh’s poems are harmonious in their cadence and imperfect rhyme: ‘There is nothing sacred about the sacred, save the eyes. / On the threshold, they slaughtered us and time’ (25). Other poems use short, stunted fragments: ‘God, find time, never find it’ (56). This inconsistency mirrors the sundry representations of time Qasmiyeh presents in his collection. The result is a kind of palimpsest or layering: time is variously ‘suspended’, ‘incinerated’, ‘feverish’, ‘imperceptible’, ‘severed’, and ‘slaughtered’. 

The poems consistently subvert normative linear movement through language that defies chronology: phrases recur, aphorisms furnish universal resonance then challenge their own logic: ‘In good time, time cuts the throat of time’ (93). 

Qasmiyeh also ruminates on time through a recurring metaphor of the body in the context of displacement. In ‘If this is my face so be it’, he writes, ‘Walking alongside his shadow, he suddenly realized that it was both of them who needed to cross the border’ (23). These lines describe a pivotal moment in time in the refugee experience. Here, the body and its shadow are portrayed as two discrete entities, a division that reflects Qasmiyeh’s rendering of time and experience as dissociated. 

In ‘Flesh when mutilated called God’, the poet recounts, ‘the elderly woman by the mosque once claimed to have seen time in the flesh’ (87). The line asks the reader what time personified or embodied might look like.

In another poem, ‘The camp—is it possible?’, Qasmiyeh proposes an answer: ‘Whoever gives birth in the camp, gives birth to the archive in the shape of flesh’ (47). With these lines, Qasmiyeh recasts the figures in the poem as actors in a broader historical narrative. In so doing, he redistributes agency to residents of the camp, which is so often represented by outsiders (as also in the poem ‘Anthropologists’). He implies in ‘If this is my face so be it’ that, like time, the refugee, who ‘can/neither come nor depart’, exists in a space on the edge (23). 

Qasmiyeh is not alone in this reckoning with liminal space and time. His words evoke other poets and writers who engage with the malleability of time in the refugee experience: Warsan Shire (‘The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room’), Khaled Mattawa (‘time will belong to the departure of other travelers’), and Mohsin Hamid (we think of the magical doorways, thresholds for migration, that compress time in Exit West). 

In his writing on the camp, his family, and the refugee experience, Qasmiyeh takes nothing for granted, even, or rather especially, the idea that time is a concept we can easily capture. But in leveraging everything that is so complex about time, Qasmiyeh succeeds in summoning not only the world of the Baddawi refugee camp, but also new ways for how we might conceive it.

Cite this: Alagappan, Serena. “Close reading of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s Writing the Camp.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2022, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-qasmiyeh-writing-the-camp. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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C. J. Griffin

SOMEBODY ELSE

If I was not myself, I would be somebody else.
But actually I am somebody else.
I have been somebody else all my life.

It’s no laughing matter going about the place.
All the time being somebody else:
People mistake you; you mistake yourself.

Published in Jackie Kay’s Off Colour (1998), the poem ‘Somebody Else’ describes a split-self speaker, trapped in the titular refrain of being ‘somebody else’ (27), and this sets the keynote of the whole collection. This divided speaker feels that they are a secret unto themselves. They lack a definitive name, age, gender, race, or sexuality. They identify themselves by their estrangement. The two observations in ‘People mistake you; you mistake yourself’ are connected by a semi-colon, which seems to imply cause and effect (‘People mistake you because you mistake yourself’). However, the semi-colon could also connote opposition or contradiction between the observations. The grammatical context underpins the speaker’s insecurity about how they come across and their lack of independence. This existential and ontological vulnerability – a sense of oneself and the world around them as secret – recurs throughout Off Colour’s liminal and concealed speakers.

‘From Stranraer, South’ depicts a woman forced to repress her love for another woman, after her confession to her mother leaves the latter bedridden (42). Similarly, ‘Hottentot Venus’ depicts Sara Baartman, a nineteenth-century South African woman exploited in Europe through freak shows and circumscribed by racism: ‘My sigh is black. My heart is black. / My walk is black. My hide, my flanks. My secret’ (25). Only Baartman’s ‘secret’ avoids narration as either ‘black’ or bestial (as captured in the loaded words ‘hide’, and ‘flanks’). As in ‘Somebody Else’ and ‘From Stranraer, South’, secrecy is necessitated by outside forces. However, in ‘Hottentot Venus’, secrecy has an explicitly protective dimension. It expresses a limited but unexhausted agency, the possibility of something imperceptible railing and shouting back from within.

Jackie Kay’s concern with secrets and secrecy, being and becoming, are not restricted solely to Off Colour. Indeed, when talking about the act of writing, Kay has claimed: ’We often write because we have a secret self’. Secrets and secrecy are so foundational to our sense of self that they are part of the creation and defence of our identities and bonds with others. It is no wonder, then, that Kay, a writer fundamentally interested in possibility and identity, retains an abiding interest in visibility and invisibility, concealment and revelation, and the dynamic interplay of hiding and yet wishing to be seen.

The relationship that Kay’s work has with the secret is ambivalent. In Red Dust Road (2010), the known absence of Kay’s biological parents enables her fantasies about her birth mother being Shirley Bassey and her birth father ‘a handsome cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela’ (43). Yet when Kay has her first meeting with her biological mother, she describes it as being ‘like a kind of grief; only I’m not sure that I was grieving my birth mother, I think I was grieving the imaginary mother I’d had in my head’ (67). Rather than Kay’s mother, it is the secrecy that has preconditioned their relationship that forms part of Kay’s grief. Concealment enabled her imaginative invention of happier possibilities. Yet it also accentuates the pain of the moment when reality intervened.

However, the secret is not always a source of negative experience. For example, in Kay’s short story-collection Reality, Reality (2012), she often writes of love as a great and wonderful secret. ‘Grace and Rose’ describes the ‘[r]omance’ between the eponymous characters as ‘like a wee cove that nobody found but you… our secret’ (74–5). Similarly, in ‘Bread Bin’, the protagonist describes seeing contented relationships pass her by: ‘secretly smiling sixty-year-olds when I’m out and about’ (81). Thereafter, the protagonist describes the exploration of their own sexual identity and her first adolescent experiences of that ‘tight, secret feeling […] Love’ (82, 84). The story ends in describing this feeling again, in the present, when the protagonist wakes up from her sleep during a train journey and meets ‘Martha’: ‘There was something in the way that she smiled – a kind of openness. I knew then. I just knew that I would wake up many more times to Martha smiling at me’ (86). The love’s secret expressed as ineffable openness – a kind of affective resonance – is palpable here.

This regard for love as a secretive but exclusive experience of reality created by chance, can be neatly illuminated if we put it beside philosopher Alain Badiou’s writing about love in the present-day. In In Praise of Love (2012), Badiou laments a contemporary, contractual, ‘safety-first concept of “love” […] love comprehensively insured against all risks’. He identifies this understanding of love to be expressed by the appeal and purpose of online dating apps, which promise the elimination of risk, chance, and the ineffable – the secret, in other words. Comparatively, Kay’s own writing, above and elsewhere, celebrates love as a mysterious experience crafted by the certainty of chance and the chance of certainty. Connected to this, her debut novel, Trumpet (1998), focuses largely on the relationship of Joss and Millie Moody in post-WWII Glasgow. As with the chance encounter with Martha on the train in ‘Bread Bin’, Millie meets Joss ‘when giving blood on the same day’:

I approach him and ask him out. It is 1955. Women don’t do this sort of thing. I don’t care. I am certain this is going to be my lover. When you are certain of something, you must take your chance. (12)

All of Kay’s work ambivalently allows for the rehabilitation of the secret in a century increasingly deprived of a right to it. Secrets and secrecy compensate for privation and prejudice in Kay’s writing. But they also allow for a world in which the chance and risk of accidental encounters can create happier possibilities. ‘Without this love’, writes Kay, ‘nothing could ever be well’: it is a ‘gift the heart wrapped early in this life’ (‘Thirty-Five’, The Empathetic Store, 15).

Works cited

Badiou, Alain and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love trans. Peter Bush (London: Profile Books, 2012).

Kay, Jackie, Scottish Laureate Jackie Kay on Growing Up LGBTQ | One Person, Two Names | Random Acts, online short film, Random Acts – Channel 4, 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYY-hCuvS8c> [accessed 14 Oct 2021].

—, The Empathetic Store (Edinburgh: Mariscat Press, 2015).

—, Reality, Reality (London: Picador, 2012).

—, Red Dust Road (London: Picador, 2010).

—, Trumpet (London: Picador: 1998).

—, Other Lovers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993).

Cite this: Griffin, C. J. “Jackie Kay: Identity, Secrecy, and Love.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-kay-identity-secrecy-love. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Moneeka Thakur

‘The freezer is empty.

There is nothing there. A bag of frozen peas, frosted over with age.

There are two old clear plastic takeaway containers.

I open one and am met by a familiar smell. It’s Mum’s food. Some bhaijas. And another container, this one has sweetcorn kadhi in it.

The smell is so soothing. I can practically feel the coarseness of the cumin seed between my front two teeth. I don’t know what to do. There I am, in her kitchen, holding her food, clutching it like a second chance.

If I eat her food, that’s it. That’s the last of it. That’s all there is. That’s all there will be. No more. Only memory.’ (75–76)

Molly Wizenberg observes that ‘food is never just food’. Rather, ‘it’s also a way of getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be’. This observation on the inherent importance of food to personal identity is pertinent in Nikesh Shukla’s writing, and in particular his memoir Brown Baby (2021).

Like many British Asians, food signals Shukla’s connection to his Indian identity, reminding him of the region his mother came from, and to which she was returned only after her death in 2010. His memoir is addressed to his five-year-old daughter Ganga, named after the river Ganges that flows through India and Bangladesh, in which Shukla scattered his mother’s ashes. Shukla observes that ‘food is home and home is what I yearn for’ (67). In this instance, home not only refers to Shukla’s mother but his homeland, as the loss of his mother’s cooking severs an important connection to his South Asian heritage. Food signifies both his Indian background and a sense of belonging he yearns for in Britain, a country where he often feels marginalised. Food is an integral part of a nation’s culture, reminding migrants of what is lost in diaspora, and now remains irretrievable, like those who have passed away.

The connection between food and Shukla’s Indian background is particularly prevalent in a scene where he visits his parents’ house, soon after his mother’s death. There, he discovers her leftover bhaijas and sweetcorn khadi in the freezer. When he defrosts this food, the ‘kitchen swells’ with the smell, which is ‘like a swirl, a whisper, a groan, a warmth’ (76). His vibrant description of her food at once leads his memory back, and challenges prejudices associated with Indian culture in Britain. Earlier in the memoir, Shukla observes how the smell of curry is often used to mock South Asian people. He recalls how his mother ‘forced me to change out of my school uniform the second I got home […] because the last thing my mum wanted was for my clothes to smell of her cooking’ (15). Krishnendu Ray has identified ‘white resentment of the smell of Asian food, and of Asians themselves’, noting that this applies ‘to public and private life alike’. Shukla’s mother recognises this resentment and seeks to protect her child from it, both within the home and out in public. Despite her caution, Shukla is still bullied for his ‘shit skin’ by fellow pupils on the playground (20). He reflects how he ‘remember[s] the conflation of shit and curry only too well. Brown curry, brown poo, brown skin’ (15). The juxtaposition between food and ‘shit’ emphasises the illogical nature of racism in that a form of sustenance is deemed akin to waste. This flashback exemplifies how components of South Asian culture, which are turned to as sources of comfort in the private realm of the home, often become targets of abuse in public.

However, the adult Shukla dismisses this prejudice, and thereby aims to negate its power. He now considers his mother’s worries to be ‘laughable’ as ‘we all know, curry smells delicious’ (15). This pride in the food of his homeland is reaffirmed after he encounters the smell of his mother’s cooking a final time. He yearns to ‘bottle and spritz it on myself and call it my signature scent’ (76). The use of the word ‘delicious’ and the metaphor comparing the scent to perfume repackages South Asian culture as something luxurious as well as comforting. Shukla rebrands Indian culture as desirable rather than something shameful. His longing to wear his family history as his ‘signature scent’ emphasises his desire to present his culture as a key component of his public identity. Unlike his mother, he seeks to flaunt his Indian heritage in defiance of bigotry and racism.

The Proustian importance of smell and taste in reawakening past memory is further highlighted when the scent of bhaijas and sweetcorn khadi is enough to momentarily resurrect Shukla’s mother’s presence. He frequently refers to his mother as ‘frozen’ in an argument he had when he last saw her (9, 158). The act of defrosting the food compares the revival of Shukla’s mother to cryonics, the practice of freezing deceased bodies in the hopes of reviving them in the future. The personification of the kitchen ‘swell[ing]’ with the scent of his mother’s food evokes imagery of pregnancy, signifying her momentary rebirth, as the ice that preserves her memory is thawed. This emphasis on life contrasts with the ‘shit’ that the playground bullies associated Indian food with. Bhaijas and sweetcorn curry instead become a reinvigorating vessel, returning Shukla back to more comforting times (75).

Indian food and culture, and its sight, smell, and taste, are removed from the notion of being offensive and instead reconfigured as extraordinary. Through finding his mother’s food, Shukla rediscovers pride, solace, and comfort in his heritage.

Works cited

Krishnendu Ray, Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia (California: University of California Press, 2012), p. 151.

Nikesh Shukla, Brown Baby (London: Bluebird, 2021).

Molly Wizenberg, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), p. 1.

Cite this: Thakur, Moneeka. “Close reading of Nikesh Shukla’s Brown Baby.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-shukla-brown-baby. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Gavin Herbertson

Robinson’s work has always tackled subject-matter and themes which many would consider controversial and has drawn in a diverse array of sources and influences to do so, ranging from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to Netflix’s Top Boy. In “Beware”, for instance, the reader is warned about the dangers of police brutality in simple, stark terms:

When police place knees
at your throat, you may not live
to tell of choking.

Written in response to the death of 20-year-old Rashan Charles, who was killed by police in East London in 2017, the haiku feels remarkably prescient in its anticipation of George Floyd’s murder in the USA in 2020. The certainty implied by its opening conjunction, the subordinating “When”, coupled with the purposefulness of the verb “place”, generates the sense that police violence is at once deliberate and inevitable. Robinson’s spoken-word roots are also detectable in the haiku’s orality. The bitter, pained assonance of the long “O” sound in “throat” and “choking”, and the harshness of the plosive alliteration in “police place”, work in tandem to reflect the violence of the act itself.

Elsewhere in A Portable Paradise, and throughout Robinson’s oeuvre more broadly, contemporary concerns are mapped onto older forms in much the same way. In “Slavery Limerick” (2019), for example, Robinson takes the form’s clichéd comic opening, “There once was a man from Nantucket”, but strips it of its humour. His “man from Nantucket” is replaced with Bill, a runaway slave, turned thief, who yells “Fuck it” as he ignores the commands of a man holding him at gunpoint. The humour is subverted by, and supplanted with, the grimness of an execution.

In “Corbeaux” (2019), by contrast, the highly technical villanelle form is employed to explore nature’s inherent cruelty. In a villanelle, two lines are intermittently repeated verbatim across the stanzas before coming together in a terminating rhyming couplet. Inspired by Ted Hughes’s animal poetry – an extract from which is affixed as an epigraph – Robinson’s poem considers the feeding practices of scavenging “corbeaux”, the Francophone Trinidadian name for black vultures. The circling nature of the villanelle form mirrors the motion of the birds, who ‘circle the clouds when something has died’ before descending to feast.

However, it is in the opening section of A Portable Paradise that we find Robinson’s most celebrated verse to date. Therein, readers encounter a series of interconnected poems which reflect on the devastation wrought by the Grenfell Tower disaster (2017; see also Ben Okri’s “Grenfell Tower: A Poem”). The first of these, “The Missing”, presents the fire in terms of religious salvation; its victims are shown ascending to heaven in an “airborne pageantry of faith” (line 36). Through this allegorical conceit, Robinson is able to demonstrate the gulf between the euphemistic manner in which the disaster was discussed by the media and the gruesome reality faced by the victims and their families. In one particularly shocking vignette, from the close of the first stanza, the reader encounters a woman rocking “back and forth” yelling, “What about me Lord, / why not me?” (lines 10–12). Allegorically, she is praying fervently, wondering why she has been left behind on Judgement Day. Non-allegorically, she is traumatised by the fire, screaming for answers, and wishing she had burned to death alongside those she loved.

Robinson’s most recent collection is deeply thought-provoking and utterly necessary. Throughout, he displays a level of technical virtuosity few other poets writing today can match.

Cite this: Herbertson, Gavin. “An analysis of Roger Robinson’s A Portable Paradise.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-robinson-a-portable-paradise. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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C. S. Bhagya

Brick Lane is a novel whose events span decades and wide geographical distances. The narrative focus shifts from Mymensingh District, East Pakistan in 1967 to London and Dhaka in the 1980s and 1990s, and includes the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, along with its impact on global politics. Ali’s novel tells a story of immigrant life in Britain through the eyes of Nazneen, a young woman who has just moved from Bangladesh after her arranged marriage to a much older man, Chanu. Running in parallel to Nazneen’s story is her sister Hasina’s in Dhaka. Rebellious even as a child, Hasina provides a foil to Nazneen’s fatalism, as she rallies against the future determined for her by her parents.

The narrative unfurls the intimate histories of multiple generations of women in Nazneen’s family, exposing how their circumstances and cultural contexts have shaped their attitudes to life. Hasina’s story shows that women who dare to dream and violate the rigid cultural expectations imposed on them inevitably face social censure and are punished for their audacity. By contrast, Nazneen evolves from a woman who believes in the complete erasure of her choices by the forces of destiny, to one who quietly learns to reclaim her autonomy.

Nazneen’s fatalism, inherited from her mother Rupban, does not get bequeathed to her daughter Shahana, whose personality is instead shaped by her upbringing in a completely different cultural landscape in Britain. The British context also informs Nazneen’s transformation, as she navigates the frequently bewildering hierarchies at Tower Hamlets, where the family lives, and the frightening sweep of London metropolitan life beyond the confines of their low-income housing estate.

Nazneen’s frustration with her husband Chanu’s “boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie” leads her on a path of sexual awakening and self-discovery. Her relationship with the much younger and more attractive Karim teaches her about her own desires and self-worth. She eventually learns to rely less on the men in her life and become financially independent. 

So that when, at the age of thirty-four, after she had been given three children and had one taken away, when she had a futile husband and had been fated a young and demanding lover, when for the first time she could not wait for the future to be revealed but had to make it for herself, [Nazneen] was as startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye.

Through Nazneen and Hasina, Ali’s narrative shows how women’s lives and their bodies are entangled in networks of patriarchal and racialised forms of structural violence in both London and Dhaka. Hasina’s letters to Nazneen reveal how her first act of rebellion – elopement and marriage with her lover – has led to a life of pain and exploitation. The words of Hussain, a jute mill worker and Hasina’s acquaintance, capture the vulnerability of impoverished women like her to such forms of unseen but normalised violence after Hasina is unceremoniously fired from her factory job: “Hussain say ‘Sometime when people see a beautiful thing they want to destroy it. The thing make them feel ugly so they act ugly.’”

Ali uses the epistolary (or letter) portions of the novel to trace the passage of time, outlining the mundane and significant aspects of both sisters’ lives as they grow older and wiser in their different ways. These letters not only inform each sister about the other’s life but also emphasise the chasm between them, deepened by time and space, as they continue drifting in different directions. They also offer an important example of how different registers of language are used and examined in the novel.

Hasina, May 1995: “I pass these nights write to you sister. Flat is clean everything in good order. What I can say?”

Experiments with English in the novel underscore how the language works, by turns, as a source of both empowerment and discrimination. English, the language and its literature, becomes a channel of social aspiration for Chanu. Unfortunately, he gets a reality check about the entrenchment of institutionalised racism in Britain when he is continually denied a much-coveted promotion despite years of loyal service to his company. This event also strengthens his abstract desire to return to Bangladesh in search of a more dignified life.

“This is the tragedy,” [says Chanu.] When you expect to be so-called integrated. But you will never get the same treatment. Never.”

Just as her language use reveals the cultural and linguistic diversity of immigrant life in London, Ali also shows how religious identity shapes the experiences of these communities. Nazneen’s and her family’s Muslim identity, already the cause of brewing tensions in their rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, provokes further discrimination as the existing undercurrent of Islamophobia only escalates in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In light of these episodes – Chanu’s failed attempts at upward social mobility, and rising instances of Islamophobia in public – it is unsurprising that the seemingly optimistic conclusion of Ali’s novel deliberately rings hollow. A year after Nazneen and her close friend Razia have started their own entrepreneurial venture, a tailoring business, Razia and Shahana take Nazneen to an ice-skating rink as a surprise. Nazneen is reluctant to enter the rink as she believes it is impossible to skate in a saree. In response, Razia says, “This is England… You can do whatever you like.” Ali ends the novel there leaving readers wondering whether that is indeed true.

Cite this: Bhagya, C. S. “Close reading of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Chelsea Haith

In this short essay we take a closer look at how Ellams’s verse integrates contemporary cultural references and larger classical and traditional frameworks. As we will see, his poems often function as a way of ‘writing back’, criticising patriarchal or male-dominated structures that are not only harmful to women, but, just as crucially, define men and masculinity in traumatising and violent ways.

In ‘Fuck / Tupac,’ the first poem in the collection The Actual, Ellams identifies connections across race in working-class struggle and gang warfare.

Fuck / Tupac

for dying early / for the fields of lavender and hawthorn in which I sat / overlooking Dublin City / though / as dusk wrapped the sky / it could have been any creaking constellation of traffic and tower blocks / from Compton to Clondalkin / blinking staccato madness / into the unspooling night / Fuck you / for forcing the criminal animal gnashing its teeth in piss-streaked alleys / collarless priests cruising in rented hatchbacks / Protestants and Catholics / like Bloods and Crips / brothers split along colour lines / fuelled by racist police / who came to break our skin

In the first lines, the reader is called to notice Ellams’s experience of dislocation in his adolescence in Dublin, heightened by the distance he feels from the city he sat ‘overlooking’ as well as the place he first emigrated from, that is, Jos in Nigeria. Ellams also highlights the similarities between the gangs of the 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles rap scene (the Bloods and Crips) and the violence of the religious and political ‘Troubles’ that divided Ireland and Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century (Protestants and Catholics). Tupac (also known as 2Pac and Makaveli) was a leading rapper, perhaps one of the most representative artists associated with early American West Coast hip hop (the name Makaveli references the linguistic genius of Italian Renaissance diplomat Machiavelli). Ellams laments the split that he identifies between ‘brothers’ in both contexts. ‘Brothers’ in this case are not defined by racial or fraternal connection, but by class and poverty: that is, young underprivileged men are made ‘brothers’ through their mutual wage-slavery or the bonds of unemployment, but are divided unnecessarily by race and violence.

The speaker in the poem laments Tupac’s tragic assassination at the age of twenty-five in gang warfare in LA. Tupac fell victim to the same attitudes of honour and pride in one’s masculinity and social power that fuelled the gang wars, and which he referenced and called out in his work. At the same time, Ellams points to his own struggle to come to terms with social divisions and the violence that proliferates from them, noting most significantly their universality, ‘from Compton to Clondalkin’. He reminds the reader that the ‘collarless priests’ of the Troubles have much in common with West Coast gangsters and share their desire for power and recognition. The term ‘brothers’ points both to the priests, as well as Christians more generally, and to black men who identify transnationally with one another’s experiences of racial violence. Yet at the same time they respond to these experiences in hypermasculine ways, often with tragic consequences – as in the death of Tupac.

It is significant that Ellams begins his provocatively entitled collection with this angry mourning for the loss to arts, culture and history that follows as a direct result of toxic masculinist violence. The work continues in this vein, highlighting his grief through the emotive ‘fuck’ that begins each poem. Ellams is uncompromising in expressing his views about the impact these social issues have had on his life and lives like his own. He mediates constantly between different cultures and places, drawing on multiple contexts to make himself heard.

Works cited

Armitstead, Claire, and Inua Ellams, “Interview: Inua Ellams: ‘In the UK, black men were thought of as animalistic’”, The Guardian online, published on 22 April 2019, accessed on 2 December 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/22/inua-ellams-poet-playwright-cultural-impresario

Jarrett-Macauley, Delia, “Inua Ellams – Critical Perspective,” British Council Literature, published in 2018, accessed on 2 December 2020 from https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/inua-ellams

Nwaozuzu, Uche-Chinemere, “Inua Ellams’ The 14th Tale and the Concept of the Outsider,” Nsukka Journal of the Humanities, vol. 24, no.2, 2016: pp. 81-87.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “Close reading of Inua Ellams’s ‘Fuck / Tupac’ from The Actual.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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Christopher J. Griffin

The focus of this commentary is on the first poem of Anthony Joseph’s third poetry collection, Bird Head Son (2009). Narrated anti-chronologically, Bird Head Son comprises a series of autobiographical poems that depict the first twenty-three years of Joseph’s life in Trinidad, where he was born. Throughout the collection, Joseph is concerned with the natural world, religion, carnival, and loneliness. These themes are engaged through a mythic, dream-scape conception of the Caribbean.

The first poem, ‘Bosch’s Vision’, begins on the day of Joseph’s departure from Trinidad to England in 1989. It narrates an apocalyptic vision of the continent that awaits him on the other side of the Atlantic.

Whilst there are at least five stanzas in the poem, it is unclear how many there are in total. This is due to the poem’s chaotic typography, that is, the layout of the text across the page. The poem is written in free-verse and so lacks a consistent metre, accentuating the sense of chaos. This is further compounded by the poem’s use of enjambment and how these lines are also indented to differing extents, further adding to the impression of an unpredictable vision unfolding through the poem:

                  with a dim groan in the afternoon.
         I saw my grandmother
                  embrace me
                           in her hand stitched dress
                  and wrench my soulcage open. (3)

Subsequently, the speaker experiences prophetic ‘vistas of an apocalyptic Europe’, where they hear ‘obscure tongues’, witness ‘the sky become peppered with woe’, and see a land in which ‘[t]he sun long gone and weeping’. This prophetic quality, both in style and content, reflects the title of the poem, ‘Bosch’s Vision’, a reference to the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516). Bosch is renowned for his often nightmarish and apocalyptic paintings which engage with religious concepts and narratives, as most famously seen in his The Garden of Earthly Delights. In choosing a European artist as the inspiration and title for the poem, Joseph appropriates Bosch’s visions of a biblical Hell and inserts, in its place, a European one, whose maritime climate and various, unknown languages are grave threats.

The poem’s emphatically Caribbean perspective is intensified by the speaker’s vision of the military in Europe: ‘[s]lack eyed soldiers were howling / in the wind’. This echoes the language of one of Joseph’s major influences, Kamau Brathwaite, who described how the poetry of the Caribbean falls outside of European senses of rhythm and metre with reference to hurricanes:

The hurricane that came through into the Caribbean every year began to howl in my ears and as I listened to that sound of another death I knew however that it wasn’t howling in pentameters… That is not pentameter. (Brathwaite 1992: 5)

Whilst Caribbean hurricanes do not howl in pentameter, the soldiers in the winds of Europe do. If not for the syntactic break in ‘[s]lack eyed soldiers were howling / in the wind’, the line would be in iambic pentameter. At the level of metre, therefore, Joseph evokes a conflict between European and Caribbean perspectives. Relatedly, in other works, Joseph has directly connected his need to write experimentally with a desire to avoid being ‘re-colonized’ by Britain (Joseph 1997: 18).

Rapidly, the poem moves into a more biblical but no less personal image: pairing the extraction of ‘oil’ in Trinidad with ‘The Devil’, ‘who chased the colour from the earth. / Who left sulphur where he spoke / like a jitney carburettor’. In Trinidad and Tobago, a jitney is ‘a small pickup truck with an enclosed cab’ (Winer 2009: 469). This mention of a vehicle marks an anxiety that is expressed with greater clarity later, when the speaker travels ‘to the airport’ to leave Trinidad. Indeed, immediately after the parallel is drawn between oil and the Devil, the speaker expresses ‘No doubt’ that it was the devil ‘Who crakt / the sky glass lid’ – that is, who first exposed the sky as limitless and made lands abroad accessible.

The following stanza highlights one of Joseph’s recurrent interests: the equivocal nature of language. The speaker implores: ‘Maman / Tell me again why I should leave this island / Tell me again that those cities exist’. ‘Maman’, in French, means ‘mother’ (Winer 2009: 561). France frequently occupied the colony of Trinidad and Tobago between 1666 and 1803 and greatly influenced the nation language spoken there. The speaker, then, is expressing a searching vulnerability, turning to their mother to confirm that England is a land of promise. Similarly, however, in line with the biblical undercurrent of the poem, ‘Maman’ can be aurally interpreted as ‘Mammon’ – one of the seven princes of Hell. Mammon represents promises of wealth and material gain, and Joseph has spoken about how writers in the Caribbean are compelled to leave in order to have a career as a writer. More than anything else, England represented access to books and educational opportunities. Here, Mammon is implored to hear the speaker’s anxious pleas and confirm that the European hell their soul has witnessed will bear these opportunities.

This sense of fearful apprehension intensifies near the end of ‘Bosch’s Vision’, at the level of form, as the speaker approaches the airport. The speaker’s relative comfort in Trinidad is implied through the equally indented and self-contained lines:

          Woodslaves ran and woodslaves waited.
          Lovers lay against the Samaan trees.
          Cattle grazed and bachacs burned
                     in matchbox discoteques. (4)

But the vision begins to trail off and the lines become shorter, before being broken by a new stanza:

                  But we were going to the airport
         and my brother in the backseat
                                             is him I ask: is me
                                             this happening to? (4)

The typography embodies the speaker’s voice: diminutive, askance, and crushed into the corner, expressive of anxiety.

Overall, ‘Bosch’s Vision’ expresses great fear and doubt about the possibilities that the European continent represents, specifically in relation to the climate, the language, and, implicitly, on how England may affect one’s roots in the Caribbean home and one’s ability to write in a manner true to that. All of this is conveyed through a fantastical blend of biblical imagery, multiple languages, and allusions to the impact of Empire on Trinidad and Tobago. 

Bibliography

Brathwaite, Kamau, ‘Caliban’s Guarden’, Wasafari 8:16, (1992), 2-6.

Joseph, Anthony, Teragaton (London: poisonenginepress, 1997).

—, Bird Head Son (London: Salt, 2009).

Winer, Lise, Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (Montreal: McGill & Queens University Press, 2009).

Cite this: Griffin, Christopher J. “A close-reading of Anthony Joseph’s ‘Bosch’s Vision’ from Bird Head Son (2009).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

The post A close-reading of Anthony Joseph’s ‘Bosch’s Vision’ from <em>Bird Head Son (2009)</em> appeared first on writers make worlds.

Daniele Nunziata

This commentary section features Raymond Antrobus’ poem ‘I Want the Confidence of’ from his collection The Perseverance. The poem explores the kinds of self-assurance the speaker would like to have but has been denied because of the discriminatory society in which he finds himself. He showcases how self-confidence in our individualistic modern world is a luxury that comes with social privilege. The poem asks tough questions about how a poet can maintain their integrity amidst pressures of inequalities around race, class, and disability.

The poem is audibly arresting, using repetitions of the title throughout (or variations of it) to stress in no uncertain terms what the poet ‘want[s]’. He uses the first-person to entreat the reader to listen. Similarly, the occasional deployment of the second-person further encourages active engagement with his ideas as the ‘you’ in the audience – or reading the book – is compelled to pay overdue attention to the overlooked ‘I’ of the speaker. This is all supported by memorable alliteration and sibilance, in lines like ‘I want the confidence of a coffee bean in the body,/ a surface that doesn’t need scratching’. These effects combined with anaphora (the repeated first words of several lines, including ‘of’) develop the poem into an uncompromising charter of demands of which the reader must take note. In a world where the speaker is usually ignored, his insistent voice becomes impossible to avoid.

His poetic charter begins with a call for the self-confidence of ‘Salvador Dali in a 1950s McDonald’s advert,/ of red gold and green ties/ on shanty town dapper dandies, of Cuba Gooding Jr’ from 1996 film, Jerry Maguire. This reflects his concern to maintain artistic integrity, emblematised by the Spanish painter’s surrender to commercialism by working for the American fast-food corporation. The alliterative d sounds in ‘Salvador Dali’, ‘McDonald’s advert’ and ‘dapper dandies’ give weight to the lines, making its articulation forceful and deliberate. The sonic connection between these words also represents lines of continuity from the past to the present: the impact of Dalí and McDonald’s in the early twentieth-century can still be heard and seen in, say, the colourful dress of ‘dapper dandies’ today.

Central to this commentary are thoughts about race. The emphasis on 1950s America, the birthplace of McDonald’s, draws attention to racial segregation before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This focus on historic racism foregrounds how Black and mixed-race people are still perceived, and perceive themselves, on all sides of the Atlantic. Similarly, the decision to not mention racism outright in this line – or anywhere else in the poem – indicates how it insidiously effects the internal lives and psyches of individuals. The television set beams images of race into individual homes, mimicking the way in which racist ideology enters the minds of people. The sound of the televised advert, however, is overpowered by the speaker’s own alliterative words.

The succeeding lines draw on the multiple ways in which transatlantic Black identities have been re-formed over the past half-century. The colours ‘red gold and green’ echo the pan-African colours based on the Ethiopian flag, while the reference to Gooding Jr. draws on the cinematic portrayal of Black lives by Hollywood, especially as he remains one of the few African-American actors to receive an Academy Award. Nonetheless, the line quoted from the film, ‘SHOW ME THE MONEY’, emphasises how capitalism continues to be the foundation on which people are treated and represented in many Western societies.

Racism is not simply a historic experience in the poem; it is one from which the speaker suffers personally. In particular, the account of ‘a glass ceiling in a restaurant’ he is visiting forms a link back to McDonald’s to hint at the racial inequalities that continue in similar, consumerist locations in the speaker’s own experience. The model of racial segregation as it existed in the US might no longer pertain, but it has been replaced with other forms of ‘glass ceiling[s]’ and social division which the speaker brings to the attention of those readers or listeners who might disregard them. The echoing sounds of ‘a polite pint’ and ‘the confidence of a coffee bean’ make dense and suffocating effects that link to the locations and the society in which the speaker lives. This further reflects his frustration at speaking repeatedly without being heard.

Later, an allusion to revering ‘Matthew the deaf footballer who couldn’t hear/ to pass the ball, but still ran the pitch’ – likely a reference to one of the few professional footballers who is also deaf, Matthew Eby – indicates how the speaker’s experiences of being treated unequally stem from multiple sources, including the ableism which is doubly experienced by people of colour with disabilities. The poem, therefore, powerfully reveals the intersections of discrimination in the modern world. Yet, the double meaning of how Matthew ‘ran the pitch’ – literally and as a symbol of his success – points to personal and professional achievement beyond the limits placed by society. Still, with the surname missing, it also raises the question as to how many of Antrobus’s readers or listeners have heard of Elby and his career? How does his fame compare with that of Dalí? The speaker invites further research into forgotten game-changers.

The latter part of the poem sees the speaker calling for some release from the problems in his life. He does not ‘want my confidence to lie;/ it has to mean helium balloons in any shape or colour’. The liberation he seeks has to be one which does not marginalise him because of his differences. It cannot ‘lie’ for the sake of monetary gain, as Dalí did. Allusions to ‘colour’, and to the way in which ‘helium’ can distort voices, remind readers of the racism and ableism which force people ‘to lie’ about their identities. While the poem chooses not to use a conventional rhyme scheme, the half-rhyme or similar endings of lines like ‘rubber’, ‘colour’, and ‘father’ – or ‘delay’ and ‘cafés’ – testifies to the speaker’s experimentation with different kinds of audibility which do not force his words into formal or ableist conventions.

Another interesting feature about the poem is its lack of reference to contemporary technology. On the one hand, this illustrates how, for all the changes humans have made in the past fifty years, many people remain stuck in a 1950s mentality. On the other hand, however, the poem expresses the hope that the innovations of tomorrow can, if used correctly, be tools of progressive change. The speaker wills himself to find the confidence to imagine this better future.

Cite this: Nunziata, Daniele. “Reflections on Raymond Antrobus’s ‘I Want the Confidence of.’” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2020, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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William Ghosh

We were in third form when we learnt the breadth
of the generation gap; and conferencing in concerned tones,
we lamented the waywardness of today’s youth, the impact

of television […]

                           Here was a feckless and weak generation;
a sad foundation upon which the school’s future was to be erected.
These were, as you would imagine, sad days for us.

Kwame Dawes, ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from Progeny of Air (1994)

Progeny of Air, Kwame Dawes’s first book of poems, won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 1994, when its author was thirty-two. Three of the four sections present scenes from the life of the poet-persona: from childhood (‘Singing Stories’), from adolescence (‘Hall of Fame’), and from young adulthood (‘Grace’). The other section, ‘Cabinet of Beggars’ describes the power-struggles in a Kingston gang.

Kwame is the son of Neville Dawes, the eminent Jamaican novelist and academic. He was born in Ghana, where his father was lecturing. But he was brought up in Jamaica and educated at Jamaica College: an august boys’ school – in the pattern of English public schools – whose alumni included the social theorist Stuart Hall and the Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. Manley, in fact, was prime minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980, so for almost all of Dawes’s time at secondary school.

Many of the poems in this book describe the institutions of male education in the Jamaica of the 1970s. The characters, legends, and topography of Jamaica College, namechecked in ‘The Old Zoology Labs (Jamaica College)’, are described in sometimes-loving, sometimes-bitter detail. Military formation, in the Army Cadets is also described (in ‘Bivouacked: Moneague 1977’ and ‘Head’). And there are uneasy parallels to be drawn between these two, middle-class institutions, and the gangland hierarchies of the ‘Cabinet of Beggars’. Some of the sexual politics and male bravado seem to be common to all three spaces.

‘The Third Former’s Burden’ is the concluding poem in the sequence of poems about childhood. The third form, in Jamaican schools, is for thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds: the equivalent of Year Nine in the British system and – similarly – the third year of secondary school. The third formers in this poem feel very mature and very superior to the new first form intake, and take it upon themselves to educate them. ‘Maybe a few blows,’ they think, ‘a few real rough moments of discipline / would straighten them out for good and salvage the school’s // waning dignity’.

The humour of the poem comes from the pretentious registers the students adopt. Sometimes they sound like Victorian English moralists: ‘Here was a feckless and weak generation’. At others, they adopt the faux sincerity of the politician: ‘These were, as you would imagine, sad days for us’. They sound most like thirteen-year-old boys when the prospect of a ‘a few blows’ is suggested (imagine the glee with which you might trill the ‘r’s in the line: ‘a few real rough moments of discipline’). A pulse of adolescent energy comes from the frequent internal rhymes and echoes (‘gap’, ‘impact’ or ‘generation’, ‘foundation’, ‘imagine’). The feverish energy of teenage boys will often have the potential to bubble over into violence.  For these boys, their schooling, and what they hear from their political leaders, both tacitly encourages this violence, and gives them a language for justifying it. 

The title of the poem alludes to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’: an imperialist poem exhorting (white) readers to ‘take up the White Man’s burden’ and help ‘civilize’ the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples’ abroad. Jamaica is a former British colony, and Kipling’s poems would have been standard texts in Jamaican colonial schools. One classic Jamaican novel, Myal by Erna Brodber (1988), begins with the mixed-race protagonist, Ella O’Grady, giving a recitation of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ to a visiting Anglican parson.

One point Dawes is making is that, though the British may have gone (Jamaica became independent in 1962, the year of the poet’s birth), the institutions they have left behind for education and socialisation continue to instil ideas about hierarchy and masculinity, and to valorise violence and corporal punishment, in ways that can be traced to the colonial period. The effects of this formation can be seen in the highest levels of Jamaican politics, Dawes suggests: ‘It should come as no wonder to the casual observer | why this school has produced so many great leaders | for this little nation: They taught us well, very well.’ His tone here is dead-pan, detached and ambiguous. Is it humorous, sardonic, exasperated, or ominous? 

Cite this: Ghosh, William. “Close reading of Kwame Dawes’s ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from Progeny of Air.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

The post Close reading of Kwame Dawes’s ‘The Third Former’s Burden’ from <em>Progeny of Air</em>, by William Ghosh appeared first on writers make worlds.

Chelsea Haith

The following extract is taken from pp. 86–88, Chapter 5, “Welcome to the Fold”, of Some Kind of Black (Little, Brown, 1996). 

No Justice – No Peace

How Many More Of Our Sisters Must Fall?

You are invited to the first open meeting of the Dapo Defence Campaign.

Speakers include:

Distinguished American professor Horace Overton,
Chris Collins, SWP,
and Dele, brother of police-victim Dapo.

 

6.00p.m. Monday, July 1^st, The White Rose Social Club,

Seven Sisters Road, N7.

X amount of people from various organisation had turned up at Dele’s door, but he had turned them away. However, an SWP-affiliated group had had the fortune to pass by the morning Dele’s resolve had changed.

“Just recount the incident. Tell it like it was and say what we can do for her now,” they had soothed, and Dele had finally nodded wearily.

Now it came to it, he didn’t really feel to talk today. But at least he was out of the house, and Dapo would probably have wanted him to do it.

The White Rose was a grimy red-brick Edwardian building with a cavernous, cold, central space. On his previous visits there he’d been dragged, kicking and screaming, to Nigerian community events: engagement and Christening dances, Businessman of the Year (import and export). And what with the forty-something women in traditional dress and tremendous, unapologetic, backsides bouncing up and down to highlife, he had felt something of a generation gap.

So the omens weren’t all that as he shuffled into the hall. As SWP apparatchik gave him the once-over. He was tardy, so she was testy, before she ushered him on to the podium.

Dele took a seat beside the speaker, an early thirties guy in black NHS spectacles. He was exhorting the one hundred and fifty-strong audience to trace the lines between the Dapo tragedy, the rise in racial attacks in the capital, and the threats posed to them all by a single Europe. This must be Chris Collins, the SWP’s great black hope.

The women shifted their buttocks periodically, and the men sat, legs splayed, arms folded, stony-faced. They had come for bloodand fire, not Maastricht. Dele searched for familiar faces, but got lost in a great sight of blackness. He felt brutally exposed on the podium, a virgin in front of this black gaze. Sure, he knew his way around certain flavours. But this was different. He had no crutch and this was serious shit. He hadn’t paid his dues here at all. His only legitimacy lay in his being the brother of an unconscious woman.

Published in 1996, Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black tapped into the zeitgeist of Black British writing of the closing years of the twentieth century. This novel reflects the preoccupations of many similar authors such as Bernadine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, and Andrea Levy (McLeod, 2013: 169). The varied Brixton vernaculars of Jamaican, Nigerian, and other Black British characters are mixed with standard English in both the dialogue and prose of the novel. Through this code-switching, Adebayo complicates the black identity of his protagonist Dele, resisting tropes of the victim-protagonist. James Procter notes that Dele’s identity is complicated beyond “[e]xploiting his ethnicity in order to take advantage of his white middle-class peers”. He is forced to consider his commitment to liberatory race politics in the aftermath of an experience of police brutality, which leaves his sister in a coma.

Dele grows up over the course of this Bildungsroman, though the political questions he faces throughout are never fully resolved. John McLeod notes that Black British writing in the 1990s “was often preoccupied with the construction of a new form of subjectivity which challenged racially exclusive and prejudicial notions of national identity and belonging” (169). Dele’s introspective interrogation of his location and sense of belonging, or lack thereof, within the black community begins in the above extract. The young man is asked to speak at a political event piggy-backing on his sister’s hospitalisation in order to promote political agendas within the Brixton community. At the “No Justice – No Peace” meeting Dele experiences a severe dislocation from the black British community, getting “lost in a great sight of blackness” (86).

This extract is taken from Chapter 5, entitled “Welcome to the fold”. In it, Dele is recovering from the torture he suffered while imprisoned in the back of the police van. He was arrested without due cause by Brixton police who had targeted his friend Concrete, whom they presumed to be involved in organised crime. During the arrest, Dele and Concrete are tortured while his sister Dapo is beaten. The police presume Dapo is in the grip of a cocaine high and slap her around to bring her to consciousness. This beating triggers a sickle cell crisis and Dapo falls into a coma.

Members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) convince Dele to speak at their event, absorbing his sister’s trauma-triggered coma into their political rhetoric. He has been resistant to becoming embroiled in the political agenda due to his middle-upper-class education and lifestyle back in Oxford. Once at the event, Dele finds himself dissecting the community, derisively noting the shapes of the middle-aged women’s bodies and recalling his own reluctance to attend Nigerian community events when younger. His derision reflects his changing attitudes rising from his education and the hybridity he must begin to negotiate between his Brixton upbringing and Oxford.

He notes the community’s unease with the political rhetoric of “the SWP’s great black hope” (87), signalling his scepticism about the politician’s message and its efficacy: “they had come for blood and fire, not Maastricht” (87). The title of the novel points to his discomfort. Dele identifies as “some kind of black” because of the contradictions he confronts, and these are also encapsulated in his relationships with women of different races. Dele begins to work through these core tensions on the podium of the rally that is ostensibly for his sister and feels “brutally exposed” (87).

McLeod writes of the late 1990s and early 2000s period of contemporary British fiction that “the insistence on dwelling in the UK and forging a robust black British identity, for both self and society, was of fundamental importance to the literary endeavours of black British writers who were often operating in a deeply prejudicial social milieu” (169). Adebayo’s work certainly dwells on what it is like to be black in the UK, but he engages in the conversation about identity with greater complexity, refusing to articulate any kind of homogeneous identity. Despite his misgivings about the politicisation of his sister’s disease and trauma-triggered coma, Dele understands the need for solidarity in the face of rising racial violence and police brutality, and this extract signals a political turn in the novel. From this point on Dele is “forced to assess the relationship between the liberatory role-playing in which he has been indulging and a more militant Black politics” (Procter, 2003: n.pg).

Sitting on the podium, Dele is uncomfortable in front of the community and feels like “a virgin in front of this black gaze” (87). The “black gaze” refers the reader to another thematic concern in Adebayo’s work in which he writes against any presumption of a monolithic black culture. Dele is able to distinguish the constituent groups: he “knew his way around certain flavours,” but feels unprepared and ignorant in the face of this “serious shit” (87). Adebayo uses vivid imagery to allude to the cultures of the myriad Black British identities in Brixton, as well as the distinctions between them. “Flavours” conjures the culinary cultures of Africa and the Caribbean, and the plural also implies the cultural differences between the groups.

The protagonist’s scepticism about the construction of a homogeneous community of black British people subtly intersects with a racial politics that demands group action and cohesion. Dele’s hybridity and blossoming politicisation are particularly marked in this section. While his diction implies his location in diverse cultures, he nonetheless casually references Maastricht in the context of the anti-European discourse of the rally. For Dele to be properly involved in politics he feels he must “pay his dues”, referring to his hitherto non-existent activism. This extract marks the moment at which Dele’s political convictions begin to shift and concretise as he develops a more robust sense of self in relation to the Black British communities of which he at the same time forms an integral part.

~

Works cited

Adebayo, Diran. Some Kind of Black. London: Little, Brown, 1996.

–––. My Once Upon a Time. London: Abacus, 2000.

Childs, Peter and James Green. Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Cunningham, John. “Of Wodehouse and Wood Green.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.johncunningham , 2001. Accessed 8 November 2018.

McLeod, John. “Transcontinental Shifts: Afrieurope and the Fiction of Bernardine Evaristo.” In Afroeuropean Configurations: Readings and Projects. Ed. Sabrina Brancato. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

Procter, James. Diran Adebayo. British Council: Literature. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/diran-adebayo , 2002. Accessed 8 November 2018.

Smith, Zadie. “This is how it feels to me,” in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan , 13 October 2001. Accessed 8 November 2018.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “Close reading of Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 13 April 2026.

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