Violence is both visible and invisible. - Abena Busia

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, 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.

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.