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… - Abena Busia

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.

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

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.