Abena Busia Quotes

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.

Historically leadership and the concept has always been the top down one most of us who do leadership training we do the bottom up leadership you don't impose structure you figure out organically who the people are.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Violence is both visible and invisible.

Well, you did it very well, I must confess . You do succeed in bringing us along. To the point where I am about to send your novel to somebody facing that dilemma. Because it’s not easy on either side. And to be honest, yours was the first thing I read that made it so clear how difficult it was, but at the same time humanised the process both from the point of view of the person transitioning as well as the point of view of the people receiving them. Her grandmother’s responses, the point where her grandmother says, “Look, love, I was born in the 1920s” or whatever it was, you know, “You do your thing but it’s too late for me, I’m a hundred, take it or leave it!” (APAB and BElaughing) “I love you anyway, you can come to the farm but that... I’ve got other things to fight!” Which was also very [much] to the point. Her grandmother had had different things to negotiate, generations of displacement, fatherlessness or in her case, a father who didn’t get it, and looking for her daughter for seventy years. So, again, the complexity of the stories that get bound up in this vision of “This is who we are and need to understand”.

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.

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