Abena Busia Quotes

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.

Dreamers remember their dreams when they are disturbed;And you shall not escape what we will make of the broken pieces of our lives.

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?

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!

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.

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.

Violence is both visible and invisible.

Her first non-fiction book, Manifesto, on never giving up, is to be published next month. And she has taken that wit and wisdom so many places, including, most crucially, the academy, where today she is professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London and vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It was a good piece because it creates the atmosphere and the vision. Carole is very interesting, of course, because she is the woman of disguises. The woman who has a secret that she needs to [or] feels she needs to keep quiet about in order to negotiate. I love her mother who is like, “I am a Nigerian and so are you, and we’re not going to get past this, so let’s...” The scenes with her mother and the ways in which the mother helps her re-find herself by dealing with, who is the person that you’re going to marry. I will ask you now about the structure of this particular book and the multiple voices, the twelve different voices, all of whom are connected – some intimately, some tangentially.