Abstract
Strictly speaking, the writers discussed below barely qualify for inclusion in this volume of The History of British Women’s Writing, since they were neither born nor necessarily settled in the British Isles, but were from British colonies and ex-colonies. Over time, they have been subsumed into our shared literary histories, but their arrivals were subject to the paradoxes of belonging and unbelonging that Homi Bhabha describes above. The very real divisions between indigenous women writers and those of a different nation, ethnicity, class, culture and linguistic tradition must be acknowledged, but as this chapter will demonstrate, women writers born in faraway continents had a transformative impact on the field of British literary studies. As we shall see, the women discussed below resist being labelled as migrant, immigrant, Diasporan or exiled; equally their work very often resists formal and genre categorisation. Coming from Africa, India, China and the Caribbean, they sought a space for creative development and an appropriate form to express what often had gone unexpressed. They were also searching for a publisher who would give their work a much wider audience. For many, their restless journeys to and from Britain may have provided the stimulus to write, but others were established authors anticipating contracts from British publishers trawling for new subjects for a post-war readership.
In another’s country that is also your own, your person divides, and in following the forked path, you encounter yourself in a double movement … once as stranger, and then as friend.1
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Notes
Homi Bhabha, ‘The Vernacular Cosmopolitan’ in Voices of the Crossing ed. by Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpents Tail, 2000), pp. 133–43 (p. 142).
Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners [1956] (Harlow Essex: Longman Caribbean Writers Series, 1985), p. 142.
Helen Kanitkar, ‘“Heaven Lies beneath her Feet?” Mother Figures in Selected Indo-Anglian Novels’, in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia ed. by Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), pp. 175–99 (p. 175).
Desai’s early publications in England include: Anita Desai, Voices in the City, etc. (London: Peter Owen, 1965);
Anita Desai, Fire on the Mountain (London: Heinemann, 1977);
Anita Desai, The Peacock Garden (London: Heinemann, 1979).
Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column [1961] (London: Virago, 1988), p. 283.
For a discussion of the political and social context of this novel and ‘the profoundly gendered ways in which nationalism formulates itself,’ see A. D. Needham ‘Multiple forms of (National) Belonging: Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column’, Modern Fiction Studies, 39:1(1993), 93–111.
Kamala Markandaya’s early publications in England include: Nectar in a Sieve (London: Putnam, 1954);
Kamala Markandaya Some Inner Fury (London: Putnam, 1955);
Kamala Markandaya A Handful of Rice (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966);
Kamala Markandaya The Nowhere Man (London: Allan Lane, 1973).
Han Suyin, A Many-Splendoured Thing [1952] (London: The Reprint Society,1954), p. 121.
Han Suyin, ‘Plenary Lecture’ in Asian Voices in English ed. by Mimi Chan and Roy Harris (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1991), pp. 14–21 (p. 21).
Gail Low ‘In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series’, Wasafiri, 37(2002), 31–35, 34.
Becky Clarke, ‘The African Writers Series: Celebrating Forty Years of Publishing Distinction’, Research in African Literatures, 34:2 (2003), 163–74, 169.
Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon, 1992), pp. 11–12.
Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen (London: Allison and Busby, 1974), p. 181.
See David Plante, Diffi cult Women A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983)
Diana Athill, Life Class: Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill (London: Granta Books, 2010).
Buchi Emecheta, ‘A Nigerian Writer Living in London’, Kunapipi, 4:1(1982), article 11, 114–23, 122.
Ron Ramdin, Reimaging Britain: 500 years of Black and Asian History (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p. 167.
Sandra Courtman, ‘“Lost Years”: The Occlusion of West Indian Women Writers in the Early Canon of Black British Writing’, in Diasporic Literature and Theory, Where Now? ed. by Mark Shackleton (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 57–86;
Courtman, ‘Not Good Enough or Not Man Enough? Beryl Gilroy as the Anomaly in the Evolving Black British Canon’ in A Black British Canon? ed. by Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies (Macmillan Palgrave, 2006), pp. 50–74.
Beryl Gilroy, Sunlight on Sweet Water (Leeds, Peepal Tree, 1994).
Louise Bennett, ‘Colonization in Reverse’, was first published in Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangsters 1966).
Louise Bennett, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse ed. by Paula Burnett (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 32.
Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (2nd edn, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. 68–9.
Una Marson, ‘Kinky Hair Blues’ [1986] in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse ed. by Paula Burnett (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 158.
Joyce Gladwell, Brown Face, Big Master, ed. Sandra Courtman (first published by Intervarsity Press, 1969; 2nd edn, Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean Classic Series, 2003). The introduction discusses the conditions which facilitated Gladwell’s rare autobiography being published in 1969.
Beryl Gilroy, ‘In Praise of Love and Children’, (Gilroy’s private collection of an unpublished paper, n.d.), Beryl Gilroy, In Praise of Love and Children (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1996).
Roxann Bradshaw, ‘Beryl Gilroy’s “Fact-Fiction”: Through the Lens of the “Quiet Old Lady”’, Callaloo, 25.2 (2002), 381–400, (394)
Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron (London: Jonathon Cape, 1962)
Paul Gilroy, ‘“Not a Story to Pass On”: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime’, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), p. 218.
Interview with Sylvia Wynter by Daryl Cumber Dance in his New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1992), pp. 275–282, (p. 277)
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Courtman, S. (2017). The Transcultural Tryst in Migration, Exile and Diaspora. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_12
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