Repeating or Renewing Island? Andrew Salkey and Philip Sherlock

Andrew Salkey wrote to connect his readers with Jamaican people and culture.

Philip Sherlock was committed to educating the Jamaican, from child to adult.

Last week I considered a poet, John Agard, who also wrote prose.  Today I’m going to look at two prose writers from Jamaica, who published works for children contemporaneously (between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, more or less) and who occasionally forayed into poetry: Andrew Salkey and Philip Sherlock.  The two men have many things in common; both were raised in Jamaica (Salkey was born in Panama but his Jamaican parents brought him back to Jamaica for schooling), educated in British colonial schools, went to England as young adults, and attended London University.  Both were interested in the education of young people and specifically in connecting children to their cultural roots.  Sherlock worked in education throughout his career, and eventually became Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies.  Salkey was known as a generous spirit who helped many Black writers and publishers through his promotion of them.  He worked for the seminal programme, “Caribbean Voices,” both as a presenter of his own work and seeking out the talent of others, he was an advisor to the Black British publishers Jessica and Eric Huntley, and he taught creative writing in America.

Anansi as top-hatted spider, illustrated by American artist Marcia Brown.

Both of them published versions of Anansi stories, and it is here that I want to start.  Anansi, half-spider and half-man, is a folklore figure from West Africa, the son of the sky god and a trickster; when Africans were sold into slavery and transported to the Americas by Europeans, Anansi came with them (although he became somewhat more domesticated in the Caribbean than he was in Africa).  Philip Sherlock was one of the first to publish the folk stories of the trickster figure for children through mainstream—that is to say, British and American—publishers.  His Anansi the Spider-Man, published by Macmillan and illustrated by the American illustrator Marcia Brown, first appeared in 1956, and some version of his Anansi tales have remained in print in America and Britain ever since.  I mention this because Sherlock was focused on the education of Jamaican children, but it is likely that more children outside of Jamaica than in it have seen Sherlock’s version of the tales.  Sherlock’s stories are, in keeping with both his (white British) cultural background and his interest in promoting education, in “standard” British English rather than patois.  Sherlock is absolutely to be credited for bringing attention and cultural capital to the folktales of Jamaica, but his depiction is certainly less verbally adventurous than those of Black Jamaican writers, including Andrew Salkey’s.  Compare Sherlock’s (prose) introduction to Anansi in his 1956 collection to Salkey’s poem, “Anancy,” found in Time for Poetry (1988) edited by Nahdjla Carasco Bailey.  Sherlock writes:

WHO WAS ANANSI?  He was a man and he was a spider.

When things went well he was a man, but when he was in great danger he                         became a spider, safe in his web high up on the ceiling. . . .

Anansi’s home was in the villages and forests of West Africa.  From there long                  years ago thousands of men and women came to the islands of the Caribbean.                      They brought with them the stories that they loved, the stories about clever Br’er                Anansi, and his friends Tiger and Crow and Moos-Moos and Kisander the cat. (1)

Sherlock’s description puts Africa (and Anansi, for that matter) in the past, and connects Anansi’s spider form with fear; but Salkey’s poem suggests otherwise.  The first stanza and the last stanza are connected by Anansi’s ability to constantly change—not out of fear, but out of preference.  “Anancy is a spider;/ Anancy is a man;/ Anancy’s West Indian/ And West African” Salkey writes in the first stanza.  In the last, he adds, “And always,/ Anancy changes/ From a spider into a man/ And from a man into a spider/ And back again/ At the drop of a sleepy eyelid” (87).  Salkey’s Anancy is present and always changing; Sherlock’s Anansi belongs to the fixed past.

Sherlock’s poem in Nahdjla Carasco Bailey’s Time for Poetry, a collection of poems for secondary students in the Caribbean.

This distinction is not merely a prose/poetry difference.  Another topic both men wrote about was the fishing communities of Jamaica.  This time, it is Sherlock who writes in poetry and Salkey in prose.  Sherlock’s “Jamaican Fisherman” (also collected in Time for Poetry) depicts an outsider viewing a lone fisherman on the beach.  Sherlock’s frequent use of the term “black” as a descriptor and his negative adjectives (wretched, broken) puts the poet in a position of privilege with regard to the fisherman.  Sherlock’s repetition of the fisherman’s “ancient” connections puts the fisherman’s wealth and status firmly in the past.

Cover illustration by Gerry Craig for Salkey’s Jonah Simpson.

Salkey, on the other hand, describes a very different fishing scene in his 1969 novel Jonah Simpson.

Jonah left the house very early Thursday morning and went down to the jetty to watch the fishing-boats coming in from the long night’s haul.  The fishermen looked tired but satisfied with their catch.  They were all younger than the men who had been in the Co-op shed the night before.  They were strong, muscular, stripped to the waist, and very confident in the way they stood and handled their small craft, bullying them into the shallow water near the jetty, and afterwards dragging them high up on to the beach.  Jonah kept out of the way, as the men began unloading the fish across a large sheet of canvas spread over the end of the jetty.  The women arrived soon afterwards with their basket and deep metal containers.  They chatted with the men and teased them about the very big fish they hadn’t had the luck to catch. (16)

Not a lonely fisherman in poverty, but a vibrant community; Salkey’s Jonah Simpson.

Here is not a lonely, broken, wretched black fisherman without any fish, but a community of fisher-folk, all busy, all strong, all working and laughing together.  The community, in Salkey’s case, is more crucial than the color of their skin.  Sherlock’s Jamaica is a place fixed in the past, in poverty, in fear and loneliness; Salkey’s is communal, of the present, strong and always changing.  These are just two examples of each man’s writing, and an exhaustive study would likely show more nuance in their views of their island home.  As depicted here, however, Sherlock’s Jamaica is a repeating island, characterized by (as Antonio Benítez-Rojo writes, in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective) “its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogeneity; its lack of historiography and historical continuity” (1).  Salkey’s Jamaica, on the other hand, holds the possibility for change, and makes the island part of the future rather than the past.

To Be Young Adult, Gifted and Black: BAME YA Literature Milestones, Part One

Last week, academic librarian and YA social justice activist Edi Campbell produced a list of milestones in American YA literature, beginning in 1965 with the founding of the Council for Interracial Books for Children (the CIBC) and ending (at the time of me writing this blog) with the 2017 establishment of the journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.  In between are a host of important book publications, special journal issues, awards, blogs and podcasts, many of which are linked within the document to websites.  You can find her list, 50 Years of Diversity in Young Adult Literature, here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PVuxIihW4_3gAab-CHT5W0RXH61F0HeD6ouy1yMFOac/edit.

Campbell’s list covers many different types of diversity (including racial, sexual, gender, and ability diversity) but Campbell did not want the list to be only useful to Americans.  She put out a call on Twitter for other scholars to add to the list, including—thanks for the shout-out, Edi!—me.  So what follows are some highlights for BAME Young Adult lit that I hope to add to her list (or at least run parallel with it).  I’ve started a bit earlier than Campbell’s 1965 point of origin, because the British pioneers in the field came in response to a changing Britain (particularly in response to the 1958 Notting Hill riots). It is heavily weighted to Afro-Caribbean authors/characters, because that is my specialty, but I have tried to widen the spectrum as well.  I’ve tried to indicate the author’s background where I can, and have stuck to authors who for at least part of their life lived and worked in the UK (thus, I’ve left off authors published in the UK like VS Reid and Rosa Guy).  Also, it’s important to note that Black Britons were referred to as “West Indians” if they (or their parents) were from the Caribbean until at least 1980, and that British Asians were often considered Black.  If you know of things that should be added to the list, please let me know—and add them to Campbell’s google document yourself.  A more extensive account of the importance of these texts can be found in my recent book, Children’s Publishing and Black Britain, 1965-2015 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

This week, I am publishing the timeline to 1980; this covers the period when Windrush generation writers began producing literature for the children of immigrants struggling to fit into and make sense of British society.  It also highlights the nascent and increasing political anger of the new Black Britons.  Next week, I’ll publish the timeline from 1981 onward.

Of course the teenager’s brother is part of the racist National Front–early teen soap opera where “race” is a factor.

1962: White British author Josephine Kamm publishes Out of Step (Heinemann), an early “problem” novel about a white teenager in love with a West Indian.

1963: The Newsom Report, also known as “Half Our Future,” focuses attention on secondary students in poor (“slum”) areas of Britain.  It is the first major education report to consider what was then called “coloured immigration.”

1964-1967: Andrew Salkey, the Windrush-era writer who had a prominent place in both the BBC radio programme, Caribbean Voices, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, becomes the first West Indian to publish children’s books with a major British publisher, his “disaster sequence” with Oxford University Press.

1966: New Beacon Books founded in London by Trinidadian activist John La Rose and his British partner Sarah White.  The publisher/bookstore would be a primary outlet for the Black British community.  Indian-born English writer, Morna Stuart, publishes Marassa and Midnight (Heinemann), about Haitian twins separated during the French Revolution.

1967: The Plowden Report argues that books in schools (both educational and mainstream) should be re-examined to root out “out of date attitudes toward foreigners, coloured people, and even coloured dolls” (London: HMSO, 1967: 71).

1968: Jessica and Eric Huntley start Bogle L’Ouverture Press, a Black British press that would publish poetry by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Valerie Bloom, and the later novels of Andrew Salkey.  In Birmingham, Enoch Powell suggests in his “Rivers of Blood” speech that if immigration—by which he meant “coloured” immigration—wasn’t stopped, blood would flow in the rivers of England.

1969: The George Padmore and Albertina Sylvester Black Supplementary Schools were started by John La Rose and others in the Finsbury Park area, although the schools were formally registered in 1973.  Supplementary schools, which originally started with the British Black Panthers in the mid-1960s, were designed to improve basic skills and teach Black history and culture to young Black Britons; the George Padmore school was specifically for young adults. (http://www.georgepadmoreinstitute.org/archive/collection/black-education-movement). This same year, the charity Book Trust secures Arts Council funding to allow it to develop new programmes for providing books to low-income families.

1971: University of Sussex doctoral student, Bernard Coard, publishes his pamphlet, How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System (New Beacon/Bogle L’Ouverture).  In it, he called for Black literature for Black British children.

1972: Community publisher Centerprise, based in the Hackney area of London, publishes Hackney Half-Term Adventure and the poems of Viven Usherwood, a young West Indian boy; these two books, along with communist teacher Chris Searle’s edited collection of poetry from his multiracial classroom, Stepney Words, would sell over 20,000 copies by 1977.

1974: The National Association for Multiracial Education (NAME) is founded in Britain.  White British author Robert Leeson’s novel about slavery, Maroon Boy (Collins), is published. White British author Jean MacGibbon publishes Hal (Heinemann), a novel about a friendship between a white boy recovering from a long illness and a lively West Indian girl.  This book would win the Other Award in 1975.

The voice of a generation of disaffected Black British youth in the 1970s.

1975: Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry collection, Dread Beat an’ Blood, is published by Bogle L’Ouverture.  The Children’s Rights Workshop, started by Rosemary Stones and Andrew Mann, create the Other Award to recognize books celebrating gender, racial and economic diversity in children’s books.  Horace Ové’s film “Pressure,” about the struggles of second generation Black British youth, debuts.  Petronella Breinburg’s Us Boys at Westcroft appears from Topliners.

Aidan Chambers, the editor of Macmillan’s imprint for teenagers Topliners, recruited Breinburg and Farrukh Dhondy to write for him.

1976: The Notting Hill Carnival erupts into riots when British police attempt to arrest a pickpocket.  Most of those subsequently arrested would be Black British teenagers.  British publisher Collins launches a prize for Multi-Ethnic Fiction; one of its early winners was Farrukh Dhondy for his collection, Come to Mecca—which includes a story based at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival.  Dhondy’s East End at Your Feet is published.  Black and Pakistani British youth make an unusual appearance in British fantasy, in Michael de Larrabeiti’s urban adventure Borribles trilogy, the first of which appears in 1976.

1978: Farrukh Dhondy’s Siege of Babylon is published in Macmillan’s Topliners series, a young adult series edited by Aidan Chambers.  White British author Jan Needle’s controversial My Mate Shofiq (Collins), about racism against Asian Britons in the north of England, is published.  The first in white British author Marjorie Darke’s historical series, The First of Midnight (Kestrel) appears; with the other books in the series, it follows Black Britons from the 18^th century to the present. Rock Against Racism, an anti-fascist, punk and reggae music organization, attracts thousands of Black and White British youth to anti-racist causes.

Darke was one of the first British writers to trace Black History in Britain back through the 18th Century.

1979: The National Committee on Racism in Children’s Books begins publication of a journal, Dragon’s Teeth, to review and comment on multicultural children’s literature.  The journal is edited by Black British librarian Dorothy Kuya.  White British activist Rosemary Stones becomes editor for the Children’s Book Bulletin “for news of progressive moves in children’s literature”.  The first issue has criteria and guidelines for evaluating books for racist attitudes.  The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) produces Our Lives, a collection of stories (many autobiographical) of immigrant teenagers.  White Briton Tony Drake’s Playing it Right (Collins) depicts a multiracial middle school cricket team, including West Indian and Pakistani British players.

1980: The anti-colonial Communist publisher Liberation begins publishing books for children and young adults under the Young World imprint. Andrew Salkey publishes his only novel for young people set in England, Danny Jones (Bogle L’Ouverture); the climax takes place during Notting Hill Carnival.

A Good Immigrant of another Time (But the Same Story)

Salkey’s Danny Jones thought leaving Britain might be the only solution. Illustration by Errol Lloyd.

This week, Nikesh Shukla’s edited collection, The Good Immigrant, appeared, a volume of 21 essays by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) writers about their experience in Britain. He edited the collection because, as he writes, “while I and the 20 other writers included in this book don’t want to just write about race, nor do we only write about race, it felt imperative, in the light of . . . the backwards attitude to immigration and refugees, the systemic racism that runs through this country, that we create this document” (“Editor’s Note”). Too many white Britons (and Americans, for that matter) see BAME Britons (or Americans) as bad immigrants—thieves of one kind or another, prompting those white Britons (or Americans) to “want their country (or their job or their girl/boyfriend or their place at university) back.” This attitude persists even when the writers are not, in fact, immigrants, but born and bred citizens. White people are entitled, but everyone else has to earn their rights, prove their worth.

Shukla’s Good Immigrant appeared to excellent reviews–and, hopefully to a more receptive audience than some Windrush Generation authors experienced in the 20th century.

This has all happened before. Multiple times.

The writer Andrew Salkey, who came to the UK from Jamaica as part of the Windrush Generation. Photo Caribbean Review of Books.

I could write (and have written) about many different examples, but I’m going to highlight just one today in this blog, the writer Andrew Salkey. Salkey came to Britain from Jamaica in the early 1950s, part of the Windrush Generation. The Windrush Generation encompasses migrants from all parts of the English-speaking Caribbean (as Sam Selvon pointed out in Lonely Londoners, white Britons had a habit of lumping all Caribbean people together and calling them, collectively, “Jamaicans” as if there were no other islands or political differences between them) who came to Britain between 1948 and the early 1960s because the UK had asked them to come to fill postwar labour shortages. Salkey, like the other migrants, was British—he had British citizenship as part of the colonial system—and he came to the “Mother Country” to work. He should have been seen as a model citizen. The colour of his skin, however, meant that Salkey had to earn respect through hard work.

And he did. He not only worked for Henry Swanzy’s BBC radio programme, Caribbean Voices, contributing stories and commentary and interviews, he worked for other parts of the BBC as well, including the African Service, the Pacific Service and the General Overseas Service. He got broadcasting jobs because he was extremely well-spoken (you can hear him speak in a documentary on Caribbean Voices, here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sbplt ) and—in terms of his own stories—he followed Swanzy’s dictates for what a good contributor should do. Philip Nanton, in his article “What does Mr Swanzy want?” (Caribbean Quarterly 46.1, 61-72) says that the answer to this question is simple: Henry Swanzy wanted local colour in work that was publishable by British publishers. That meant that the stories presented on the BBC had to be comprehensible (at least mostly) to a white audience, as well as giving them the ocean breezes, calypso, and other acceptable tropes of the Caribbean that white listeners expected. Most of the contributors, including Salkey, praised Swanzy for the work he did in editing their stories and poems to a “metropolitan standard” because they wanted to be published where it would matter—meaning London, not the Caribbean.

Salkey’s “disaster sequence” from Oxford University Press allowed him to present a broader picture of the Caribbean to children. Illustration by William Papas.

It was through Salkey’s work on Caribbean Voices that he caught the attention of Oxford University Press, who published Salkey’s “disaster sequence” for children, Hurricane, Drought, Earthquake and Riot. Like his Caribbean Voices work, these novels were set in the Caribbean and were full of local colour. But, because of his earlier success, he was able to do something different. These books showed that life in the Caribbean was not all calypso music and coconuts on the beach—the natural disasters that strike the area affect the economy and its ability to grow. Caribbean people were not all poor and rural (the books center on middle-class families in the capital city, Kingston). The last book in the sequence, Riot, shows labour unrest in Jamaica, subtly laying the blame for problems of continuing poverty and a breakdown of community on the colonial system. Salkey continued in these novels to be well-spoken (they are mostly written in “school” English, not patois) and provide a vivid picture of his “exotic” homeland. But his children’s work shows him starting to become a “bad” immigrant, or at least a “less good” one.

Salkey stopped publishing children’s books with Oxford after Riot, but he continued to write for children, and to support other Caribbean writers. He was one of the founding members, in 1966, of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (CAM), along with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite. By 1968 he was an editor and advisor to Jessica Huntley, a Guyanese migrant who had come to Britain ten years earlier and who had started Bogle L’Ouverture press with her husband Eric Huntley. Bogle L’Ouverture came out of Jessica Huntley’s desire to produce books for Black people, by Black people, in Britain. Salkey advised her on publishing work by Walter Rodney, Bernard Coard, and Linton Kwesi Johnson—all of whom were or became revolutionaries of one kind or another. He also offered Huntley his own work for children, literature that was very different from what he had produced for Oxford, much more overtly political. Joey Tyson (1974) is a fictionalized account of Walter Rodney’s expulsion from Jamaica from a child protagonist’s perspective; The River that Disappeared (1979) details American imperialistic attitudes and drug trafficking in the Caribbean (not the kind of local colour usually looked for in a Caribbean story for children), and Danny Jones (1980) discusses the difficulties of being Black and British in contemporary London. At the end of this last novel, the title character is pondering a “return” to Jamaica, the country of his parents’ origin, thinking it might be the “more hopeful” option than being hassled by the police in Britain just for being Black.

By the time that Danny Jones was published, Salkey had himself left Britain for an academic post in the US. He continued to write for and correspond with Jessica Huntley and many of the writers he had known in Britain, but American universities were happy to do what Britain at the time was not: hire Salkey to teach creative writing to university students. The US, unlike Britain, already had a tradition of African and African-American or Black Studies programmes, and even smaller places were eager to have a professor who could teach a class or two of Black Literature. Britain, on the other hand, has only just begun its first Black Studies programme at Birmingham City University this year.

In the last chapter of Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant, Musa Okwonga writes about how he spent his life in Britain on the one hand being “an unofficial ambassador for black people” (225) and on the other frequently “stop-searched by police, on one occasion merely for waiting by a bus stop” (225). Okwonga went to Eton and Oxford, but this was never enough: “we were still seen as guests, our social acceptance only conditional upon our very best behaviour” (231). Like Salkey, Okwonga finally had enough and left for somewhere he could feel welcome. By not extending that welcome, Britain is continuing—generation upon generation—to lose some of the people who could add to its great literary heritage.