To define a peopleâs past is to influence their future. The past is what constitutes the bulk of a peopleâs identity. It is therefore not surprising that one of the biggest trends in contemporary literature centres on the theme of identity. Can there be anything more intolerable than to be told you have no history to speak of and no civilisation, and then to have a new language and civilisation imposed on you? These are the conditions that led to the literary revolt in the literatures of Black people.
Black writers have a long history of âreclaiming narrativesâ, the theme of this yearâs Black History Month in the UK. The narratives of ex-slaves in Britain were the first attempts at a reclamation of their dignity. Chinua Achebeâs celebrated novel, Things Fall Apart, was one of the first major modern acts of a reclamation of a peopleâs soul. It was inspired by novels of empire which showed Africans in a degrading light. African literature of the 20th century was born of a need to counter the lies told about Africa. It was at first essentially a literature of revolt, reclamation, and restitution.
In my 2007 novel Starbook, which I rewrote as The Last Gift of the Master Artists, published in 2023, I set out to reclaim the narrative of my people, to show something of what they were like before Europeans arrived on their shores, just before the Middle Passage. The fact, not taught in schools and universities, is that Africa had its civilisations, its written languages, its epics, its great art, its religions, its architecture, its mythologies. But Europe put it across that Africa had no past and history worth speaking about. In the process Black people were denied humanity, denied agency, and denied historical reality.
Salman Rushdie called it the empire writing back when novelists, poets, and playwrights composed works repudiating the perceptions of the literature of empire. They were writers such as Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland, NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiongâo, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bessie Head and Edward Said. They hurled their fictions and poems and polemics against the monolithic implications of colonial narratives.
But it was more than just writing back. The colonial enterprise was one great act of erasing the reality of a whole peopleâs existences. Writing was an act of making their history and reality real.
The central task of writers of the colonial or the Black experience is to claim back their humanity. This profound urge runs through the literature of Africa and the diaspora, from the 18th century to the present day. And it will continue for decades to come. That same urge found in the books of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison can also be found in contemporary Black British works such as Andrea Levyâs Small Island, the poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jackie Kay, Bernardine Evaristoâs Girl, Woman, Other and Caleb Azumah Nelsonâs bestseller Open Water.
This urge is there in African American writers today who in work after work undertake the reclamation of their souls, taking it back from the white narrative that imprisons them in race and suffering and slavery. Lately we have seen it from Percival Everett, whether in Erasure or the Booker-shortlisted James, in which he retells Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved Jimâs perspective. Everett is the latest in a long line of authors retelling canonical white texts from the viewpoint of a Black character â Derek Walcott did it, for example, with The Odyssey, while Caryl Phillips did it with Othello. In James, Everett works out another kind of double consciousness, a subtle take on WEB Duboisâs thesis about the double way the Black person functions in a white world.
This process of reclamation has a pedigree of centuries. The Old Testament was a reclamation of the history of the Jewish people from decades of bondage in pharaonic Egypt. Virgil, ironically in Roman colonial times, was reclaiming history with the Aeneid. In this epic Virgil was saying that out of the defeat of the Trojans something even greater than the Greeks was born. Defeat was not final. The greatest proof of that survival was that they could tell their story, from their point of view.
All novels are covertly showing how the world is from a certain point of view, and the politics of empire pervades British fiction. In that sense literature is never innocent. It is always peddling or positing or defending a vision of how the world is. This is why literature ought to challenge the unspoken implications of its own worldview. Writers who have had their histories distorted, their cultures denigrated, need to also create a new aesthetic for their works. They need to posit other ways of being, of seeing, to show the richness and validity of other cultural and artistic possibilities.
It is not enough to write back. One must also write enduringly. We are forced to create counter-classics, works that do not supplant what is already there, but live alongside them, interrogating them, and offering the world intriguing alternatives.
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For too long literature has been defined narrowly by one set of people. But being human is a vast thing, and that very vastness will stretch and even re-imagine how the human experience can be expressed in literature.
There are many Black writers who are not just writing back, but writing in celebration, wildness and freedom that have nothing to do with colonialism and empire. Reacting to history is not all that Black writers are doing. There are writers who experiment, writers of fabulism, writers of new myths. Perhaps what is needed is going beyond the limited perception of what Black writers are doing, and learning to appreciate the immense scope of their literary freedom as much as their sense of historical responsibility.
It is worth remembering that this is a tradition that includes the linguistic pyrotechnics of Soyinka and the teasing mythologies of Morrison. The imagination and creativity of Black writers have already burst the bounds of historical reclamation into new worlds and stories. They constitute one of the great futures of literature.
The Last Gift of the Master Artists by Ben Okri (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, £9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
