Looking-glass Pages: A self-reflection on books, race and education

At my parent's house with a fraction of our book collection

My mother pushes the door open with her back and heaves five glossy bags through the front door.  The bags are navy blue with gold lettering and brim to bursting.  I already know what’s inside.  Not food.  Or clothes.  Things my 6 year old mind considers more essential.  Books.

"there are stories about little girls who look like me...with skin the colour of rich coco-tea and faces framed by halos of afros."

Amongst Roald Dahl’s realms and Ahlberg classics, there are stories about little girls who look like me.  The protagonists of ‘Half a Moon and One Whole Star’ and Alice Walker’s ‘To Hell with Dying’ have skin the colour of rich coco-tea and faces framed by halos of afros.  I read them again and again and they quickly become my favourites for reasons I have not yet grasped, leaving an indelible print upon my consciousness. They’re not about skin colour or having hair the texture of candyfloss; they speak of dreams, love, pancakes and rabbits and skip through the landscape of magical realism where my mind already resides.

The droll narratives on offer at my primary school library had little to do with my home learning.  I sped through trite tales of flush-cheeked white children in pinafores on picnics and country walks which bore no correlation to the cultural collisions of my domestic life: pop vs calypso, turmeric-spiced Sunday roasts and recounts of 1950’s racist London.  The language lacked the fluidity of ours which slips from patois to the queen’s English and the plots did not reflect the intricacy of my family history which is peppered with migration and domino-deaths yet interwoven with ardent spirituality.

One of our childhood favourites 'To Hell with Dying' by Alice Walker 

My parents knew it was time to send me to a better school when they discovered I was teaching my classmates how to read.  My form tutor spoke about the one-to-ones she had initiated proudly, as if I was a lucky volunteer who had found their calling.  I scurried through the next pages at private school in a haze of exams and navy blue, analysing literature with zest but not emotionally identifying with the hermetically-sealed worlds of novels like ‘The Go Between’ or ‘Mansfield Park’.  My attitude towards these ostracizing texts mirrored my account of nursery after the first day, “fun but I don’t want to go back there.” 

"bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall and Ralph Ellison offered up an angled looking-glass, helping me to understand my world more clearly in spaces where I did not feel like a tourist."

At university I finally found bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall and Ralph Ellison whose pages offered up an angled looking-glass, helping me to understand my world more clearly in spaces where I did not feel like a tourist.  Post-colonial London writers Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Louise Bennett and Hanif Kureishi who mapped their metaphors onto the city in polyglot renderings sparked something to bud in my gut that I was not yet able to articulate but felt like a fist unfurling itself.

The cacophony of education had drowned out my voice.  Bar several published articles and the odd reprimanded flamboyant email at work, I’d retired to being a broker, until 8 years later: still feeling like a jigsaw piece being rammed into the wrong part of the puzzle, I up and left for my parents native Jamaica. 

There, I listened more than I read, discovering Chronixx, Tarrus Riley, Mutaburaka and Tupac; Garveyists who punctuated their poems with beats.  In the midst of sunset silences and sticky nights, stories began tumbling out of me like books from those navy blue bags 30 years ago. 

I wrote about sisters who rode elephants and hovered with hummingbirds, cucumber sandwiches made with hard-dough bread, a woman who asks for reparations and the man who tells her no, a Jamaican in London whose heart is about to burst like a frozen pipe, rastas beating nyabinghi drums and characters whose first names are at war with their last.

"a story where the past interjects the present, where you cannot escape your culture any more easily than you can lose your shadow"  

And then I began to write a story about a little girl with a magical afro.  A story, like mine, where the past interjects the present, where fiction and real-life are interconnected, where you cannot escape your culture any more easily than you can lose your shadow and the protagonist happens to be a kinky-haired, brown-skinned daydreamer.  It is a tale which unpicks the politics, history, heroes and joy entangled within the tight coils of afro hair; a story I would have enjoyed had it toppled from one of those pregnant bags 30 years before.

'Sofia the Dreamer and her Magical Afro' is available to pre-order at www.gofundme.com/sofiathedreamer

My first day at a new school