Abena Busia Quotes

We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you taste the salty tears of our knowledge.

Always, always, always uplifting to see and hear you, Bernardine. It matters to some of us that you are out there in the world, so keep on your journey, and thank you so much.

For some of us, she is a person who is a trailblazer and a visionary who has helped put Black women writers – particularly those writing out of Britain – on the map. She is visionary, she is feisty, and she has an acute sense of the politics of being and the politics of representation. Yet in all of that, her wit and her wisdom have brought to consciousness the place of those of us Black people of African descent growing up in England – the way we negotiate our identities, the way we negotiate the politics of space, the way we interact intergenerationally and between ourselves [which] has been, for some of us, the food of life.

For we are not tortured anymore; we have seen beyond your lies and disguises, and we have mastered the language of words, we have mastered speech and know we have also seen ourselves raw and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed with blood on our own hands.

What makes a leader different is the different communication styles respecting different forms of leadership.

It’s interesting though. I had a similar experience very, very recently. I am working on an epic poem, in fact, of Black women all over the place, the spirit of a Black woman from what is now Ghana who is following her lost daughters in all these spaces and through time. And I was so excited to discover that book about Black Tudors, Black people in Tudor England.1 What excited me was looking at the timeline. I grew up in this little English country village outside Oxford which was part of the divorce settlement between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves ... (laughs)... documented! And I found enough material in this book on Black Tudors to decide that one of my little daughters is going to get lost in Standlake in Anne of Cleves’ manor house!

I am one of these obsessive people that find myself going back, going “Oh! Oh! Oh yes! That was that person’s classmate” and “Oh yes! It’s the same teacher.” Going through all of that and trying to understand. I wonder, what inspired you to create the book that way and what was the kernel that made you in a sense move out and flourish from?

There are a couple of people who have identified themselves [in the chat], including the person who invited us both here, Amina Mama, and I just want to read what Amina says because I think it’s important and it emphasises what you said when you introduced yourself and your origins. Amina has put up on the platform that she grew up between Nigeria and London, so the exactness of your portrayals hits her very deeply. And it is true that there was only Buchi Emecheta in those days, and [she’s] celebrating the fact that our daughters and mothers have you to read. So that was her comment.

A lot of work is being done by feminist because we have to think about breaking the glass ceilings and think about if the systems we have been living under will work for us what is different what to do.

Yes, it is liberating and so wonderful to find the historians supporting our imaginative lives.

And that’s important. I do want us to turn to your own writing, but I have to acknowledge that it is characteristic of you not only that you have been an activist but that you always acknowledge the people that you’ve been working with, and the importance of a collective voice and solidarity has always been part of your work which some of us really appreciate. I’m going to extrapolate something from that, that may or may not be true, and that is: I see that collec-tivity actually in the structure of your novels.

Thank you! That’s a wonderful concluding statement. As always, moti-vating us to be inspirational and think about our own lives. On that note, I would like to thank all of you who are out there in different parts of the world, those of you who are in this room, for being here. This has been a privilege.

Hello everybody and thank you for joining us, wherever in the world you’re joining us from. My name is Abena Busia. I am a Ghanaian, very proud to be so, a Ghanaian writer and poet, and currently Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil. I am very, very honoured today, however, to be part of this festival and to interview a friend of mine, an extraordinary woman herself who today is best known for co-winning the 2019 Booker Prize with her eighth book, Girl,Woman, Other, making her the first Black woman to win it. But for some of us, her reputation preceded that.

You cannot know how long we cried until we laughed over the broken pieces of our dreams.

Yes, and we will come back to that and the matter of your hidden histories. But I now want to ask a question about something that not many people think and talk about. And that is, what is a catholic grasp, if you like, of the place of Black writers in British society? I had the privilege of hearing you speak, five years ago, at [the] African Literature Association conference in Germany and I remember being struck by your keynote speech, about the way you could so clearly map the progress of Black writing, the recognition of Black writing and the issues that Black writers had taken on in the public space: naming the challenges and difficulties you face in the sense of not just what you wrote but that you wrote at all, that you existed at all. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit of that activist part of the collectivity before we return to the question of your personal creativity.