Books I Read By Black Authors During Lockdown

 by Tara Bell

Many cultural movements emerged over lockdown. One of which, the BLM movement, sparked protestation across society; it ranged from a surge of educative posts and petitions on social media, (or slightly more futile attempts at activism in Instagram hashtag trends), to public marches and protests. Most attempts at this were eye-opening and beneficial in educating others on the lives of black people, or current statistics to illustrate the oppression they endure in society. I think the act of posting facts/ stories/ descriptions to do with the BLM movement on social media is an effective way to educate people further on how they can further act or understand how to empathise and thus help the movement. 

I attempted to further educate myself by diverting my reading to that of black authors; I discovered the book Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo over lockdown. To show its quality, it won the 2019 Man Booker Prize (although this was a joint first place with Margaret Atwood – a slightly questionable choice given her surplus possession of awards already. Personally, I massively preferred it to The Testaments). Girl, Woman, Other followed the lives of 12 different characters, ranging from teenagers to an old woman in her 90s, all of their stories intertwining through the courses of their lives. It explored the divisions of race, class, sexuality and even sexual abuse throughout the novel’s characters. These certain minority groups written in comparison to majority groups were therefore animated and granted humanity, allowing the reader to understand and potentially empathise with groups in society which they may not have before understood, and so may have treated them wrongly or in a distorted way. This helps to reduce the divisions in society between certain groups, further granted by the exposition the Man Booker Prize allowed this book to have, such that it reached a larger range of people. 

The lack of exposure that black authors endure was pointed out by Evaristo herself, in Elizabeth Day’s ‘how to fail’ podcast, explaining that black authors and poets face discrimination in publishing, as ‘some of the other publishers, they barely publish writers of colour’. Specifically, ‘Faber, poetry publishing, has been in existence over 90 years, yet they have never published a black woman. They have only published one woman of colour… last year. They have only published 4 men of colour’ She puts this into context, saying that there are ‘quite a few writers of colour… they are so brilliant… so it is not as if we are not good enough’, leading Evaristo to question ‘is that institutional racism?’  
This book was written in the form of a ‘prose style poem’, laying out words on separate lines to further adorn depth to their meaning; there were little to no full stops in the entire book. This innovative style of writing I found added a certain beauty to the lives of the women presented in her book, potentially hinting to her indignation at black authors lack of exposure.

I also read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, after my Auntie told me to watch her Ted Talk about her life as a Nigerian woman; in this, she described how people at University were shocked she knew what an oven was, and other shocking stories. In Half of a Yellow Sun, she depicted the Nigerian war from the perspective of a houseboy; similarly to Evaristo, this animated some humanity onto a culture which people of western society may not understand or think about in too much depth. 

These books were emotive, authentic, and witty, whilst being simultaneously harrowing. They humanely depicted the lives of a group I was not wholly exposed to before, and I feel I can be somewhat more empathetic and understanding of other races and cultures now, and hope to further open the eyes of others on how one’s race can hinder their progress or treatment in society.