Aminatta Forna gives a reading from her award-winning novel, The Memory of Love (2010), and discusses it with Prof. Ankhi Mukherjee. She talks about the psychology of war and healing after conflict, and about love, betrayal and complicity.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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Writing

Aminatta Forna’s works explore the historical, cultural, and emotional repercussions of societies that have experienced conflict. Her first three books – The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), Ancestor Stones (2006), and The Memory of Love (2010) – are set in Sierra Leone. The Devil that Danced on the Water recounts Forna’s search for the men that killed her father, who was wrongfully hanged in 1975 for treason against Sierra Leonean dictator Siaka Steven’s government. It offers an incisive and moving account of her father’s life and death, while bringing to light the historical background to the civil war that wracked the country from 1991 to 2002. Ancestor Stones tells the intertwined stories of four women, all cousins, whose different mothers were in a polygamous marriage with patriarch Gibril. Set in an unnamed West African country that closely resembles Sierra Leone, the novel is an exploration of family, history, and female agency. The Memory of Love is an intergenerational story of passionate obsession and betrayal, set in pre- and post-civil war Sierra Leone.

In her most recent novel, The Hired Man, her geographical focus shifts to Croatia, inviting parallels between how it and Sierra Leone have negotiated the aftermaths of their largely contemporaneous experiences of civil war. In her own words:

I wanted to move the action beyond the African continent and into the west, where I would invite readers to reconsider some of their assumptions about wars all over Africa.

Forna unsettles readers’ preconceptions, both by such acts of unexpected transnational comparison, and by telling the stories of those marginalised from public view. Her meticulously researched books often feature ordinary people buffeted by historical currents beyond their control, allowing readers to engage emotionally in individual lives while gaining perspective on a broad canvas of societal change.

—Graham Riach, 2017

Cite this: Riach, Graham. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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This extract comes from pp. 151–152 of Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love. Feel free to highlight any portion of the text to annotate the passage with your own thoughts.

Rubbish, I thought, though in fact he was not too far from the truth. The astronauts stepping into the craft, turning and waving, their weightless antics in space did indeed seem to correspond to the rhythm of the music. The same became true even of the programme hosts as they gestured and swivelled. The more I watched, the more it seemed so. After a few minutes I laughed out loud and turned to the fellow, but he had moved away. I watched for a few more minutes and laughed again. At some point I began to feel a little dizzy. I shook my head and looked at the picture again. Air. I needed air. I went out to the verandah, passing Ade, who asked me if I was all right. I brushed his hand away. I saw the back of Saffia. Did I mention to you her very resolute posture? Yes, quite unyielding, in fact. I turned and headed in the other direction, knocking against a chair, which caused a small amount of my drink to spill on to the back of the woman sitting in it. She shrieked and snapped her head around to glare at me. I mumbled an apology, but didn’t stop.

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Cite this: “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 14 February 2026.

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