Literature and Terror

Abstract

Wasafiri was born from a live, electric historical conjuncture in which an entire raft of hopes for the future crystallised. The first issue arrived in 1984 when the Thatcherites were flexing their muscles, exploring how far they could go. It was a period of sharp racial and social conflict, when neighbourhood after neighbourhood was ablaze in unending spirals of anger. Yet the very visibility of the repressive properties of the British state, experienced immediately in England’s black ghettos and filling the news media, generated an extraordinary upsurge in political and cultural creativity, whose afterlives run into our historical present. The coming of Wasafiri was dramatically of its time. It followed closely the founding convocation of The International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, formally inaugurated by C L R James. This first fair was held in the seemingly inauspicious locale of Euston Town Hall. But, long before, this had also been the scene of London’s first Caribbean Carnival in early 1959, created as the black migrant counter to the white riots which the previous year had poisoned London and Nottingham, and indeed the nation at large. Although the continuities between the two events may have slipped out of the prevailing currents of collective memory, they were nonetheless material. The Bookfair, notwithstanding its uniform municipal surroundings, was driven by a buzzy, convivial burst of collective energy. It was the result of the collaboration of the three publishing houses, Bogle-L’Ouverture, New Beacon and Race Today, carrying the luminous imprint of that maestro of black organisation from below, John La Rose. It first convened in April 1982, running on until 1995. By an unnerving twist of fate, its launch coincided with the outbreak of war with Argentina: a disorientating time when the inherited instincts of the old empire cut through into the present. In the teeth of the law-and-order state of early Thatcherism, countervailing conceptions of the world were realised and, in the field of symbolic life, legacies of European colonialism were turned inside out. A new common sense took shape. The conviction that writers from the former colonies, or their children in the metropole, possessed the imaginative wherewithal to ‘write back’; the desire to experiment with literary language and form, giving voice to those previously silenced; the bringing to life of a rich mix of a plurality of feminisms from whom a slate of spokeswomen emerged without a pale skin to be seen; the possibility that different continents could meet and converse and argue and organise (on the Euston Road, even): these were heady prospects. That new generations found themselves able to commit to the imperatives of a black aesthetic, not only in imaginative literature but in a broad arena of cultural practices, was a phenomenon experienced as a matter of startling, liberatory promise. The world was in the process of being turned upside down. There were many contrary forces which underwrote these various histories. The Bookfair comprised a single thread, if an invigorating one, in a larger, dazzling tapestry. In much the same way, over the long duration, Wasafiri has laboured hard to sustain and reimagine the aesthetic sensibilities which burst into the light of day at the moment of its founding. In the process it has laboured to creolise the old metropole. There are plenty of us who continue to dream of turning the world upside down. But we are not, and never have been, alone. Others, too, have been dreaming of extirpating from the world all that we treasure, and have striven hard to nurture this. In the UK and across the globe we find ourselves, again, on the defensive. The dispositions of power have been turning.