Is english we speaking: African/Caribbean dialogue
In a dialogue between writers of continental African and Caribbean descent, each of the contributors to this edition has a story to tell about how their eyes were opened to the unexpected nature of their sameness as well as the differences.
Edited by: Jane Bryce
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Snapshots taken along the way
Jane Bryce
"A presiding metaphor for writers from Africa and the Caribbean is acknowledgement of a spiritual world."
Writer and academic Jane Bryce on the space where Carbbean and African literatures exist in a cultural continuum.
A Fine Intuition
Billy Kahora
"Why African and Caribbean writing feel un-intuitive to each other."
Billy Kahora, a lecturer in creative writing at Bristol University, is hopeful that the decolonisation of the curriculum will lead to the study of significant African and Caribbean writers.
What is Africa to me?
Colin Grant
"The only Africans I met in Luton seemed like shipwrecked men against an older, obscured notion of Africa as a beacon of light."
Colin Grant on his limited understanding of Africa and African writing growing up in Luton in the 60s and 70s.
Who is ‘the other’ anyway?
Stewart Brown
"In the dialogue between African and Caribbean literature – who or what constitutes ‘the other’?"
Stewart Brown on life as a white man teaching and publishing NOW, a literary magazine, in the Caribbean in the 1970s before returning to Birmingham.
Travelling Lines
Funso Aiyejina
"You is from Africa! What do Africans think of us?"
Nigerian playwright, cultural critic and poet Funso Aiyejina asks, after 33 years in the Caribbean, 'How Nigerian am I?'
A West Indian in Africa
Philip Nanton
"Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was both masochistic and adventurous for a sea-level islander."
Academic and writer Philip Nanton describes his ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro as a small-island, sea-level Caribbean person.
Redemption is more than a song
Tendai Huchu
"As an African in Edinburgh, I was unaware of the bones of the Caribbean swept under gold-paved streets."-read by Burt Caesar
Tendai Huchu remembers the guided tour that opened his eyes to Edinburgh's huge wealth built on the profits of slavery.
Meeting the ogbanje
Claire Adam
"As a Caribbean child reading about Africa I remember the shock of recognition, ‘But – that’s just like us!’"
Novelist Claire Adam, who grew up in Port of Spain, Trinidad, reflects on African writers who have influenced her own work.
Together Apart
Robert Taylor
"I’m inspired and bewildered by the bizarre, complicated network of paths and walls, blockages and channels that sometimes and in some ways connect – and disconnect – Africa and the Caribbean."
Photographer Robert Taylor offers a series of fleeting reflections on some of the exquisite paradoxes that characterise the connections between Africa and the Caribbean.