I’m black so you don’t have to be…

When:
October 19, 2015 @ 7:00 pm
2015-10-19T19:00:00+01:00
2015-10-19T19:30:00+01:00
Where:
Kings Place (Hall Two)
90 York Way
Kings Cross, London N1 9AG
UK
Cost:
£9.50
Contact:
Geraldine D'amico
020 7520 1490

In this evening of readings, music and discussion, Pauline Black, Hannah Lowe and Colin Grant investigate whether it is possible or desirable to ‘think black’.

‘It was the ambition of every black man to be white,’ wrote the Jamaican author, Vivian Durham in the 1940s. Why? Because whiteness defined and interpreted their world. Black people came to resent this embarrassing state of affairs.

A few years ago when Colin Grant appeared on a BBC radio phone-in to discuss Negro with a Hat, his biography of the Black Nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, the first angry listener came on the line: he didn’t have a question for Grant but an urgent point to make. ‘I resent the fact,’ he fumed, ‘that the publishers got a white man to write a book about Marcus Garvey.’ ‘What makes you think I’m white?’ Grant asked. ‘Well you don’t sound black!’ answered the listener. Grant is black but didn’t feel in 2008 that he had to justify being so. But maybe it is necessary, if only to complicate the assumption that there is such a thing as an authentic black voice in speech or the written word.

In her memoir, Black by Design, the two-tone singer, Pauline Vickers signalled her blackness (to the disapproval of the white family who brought her up) when she changed her name to Pauline Black.

Hannah Lowe’s father Chic, was Chinese-AfroJamaican. His blond–haired, fair daughter could, if she so desired, deny her heritage and ‘pass’ for white. But that is not her ambition. Repeatedly in her poetry and now in her memoir, Long time No See, Hannah Lowe has pinned her flag to her father’s mast and given voice to his dramatic past. For Colin Grant’s part, he has actively become blacker with the passage of time, as reflected in his writing, in order, he says, that his children don’t have to be.

paulineblack.com | hannahlowe.org | colingrant.info