I met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o at Carifesta V in Trinidad in 2019. He had been invited and I was tasked with looking after him for a while. I picked him up from his hotel, drove him to Carifesta and other events that were taking place. I was in awe.

I studied Ngũgĩ at university. I never thought I would meet him. Which was ridiculous when I think of all the writers and thinkers I've met since attending university.  But I never expected to meet this small giant of a man.

One day when I went to pick him up he had to eat before we left. We sat in the dining room and he had a plate of the most boring dry food brought to him. He chuckled and said that's what he had to eat. If I remember right, it was chicken, broccoli and potatoes. Dry! He passed me a fork and invited me to eat with him. From his plate. This man who I had held in so much esteem for years. I was eating from his plate with him. We talked literature and Africa and we laughed and I thought about my own father who had held the same sparkle in his eye and zest for life.

He asked for my novel and I signed it and carried it in the car when I dropped him off and to this day the book is still on my bookshelf because we forgot all about it with all the chat and workshops and presentations. But sometimes I take it off the shelf and look at what I wrote in it and smile, because I know he would have read it, but the fact that he asked for it and held it and discussed it with me is enough.

In 2024 I got to spend two weeks in the same capacity with Ngũgĩ's son, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ.  He had been invited to Trinidad by another giant of a man, Funso Aiyejina, who unfortunately died a couple of weeks before Mũkoma arrived. Once more I was in the presence of a great African writer and thinker and of course we got to talk about his father, the man. We read poetry with students and Mukoma played his harmonica, terribly, but with gusto. 

I am grateful to have had the chance to spend time with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and to eat from his plate.

His legacy will continue.
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I've been teaching a lot this year and I realise that I haven't been writing as much as I should. This is partly because I have so much work to read from students that I have to be in editor mode most of the time. But also partly because teaching takes a lot of energy. I have my set lessons, of course, after all these years it would be ridiculous if I didn't! But each group I teach will be different. And I teach organically, so the same material will be delivered in different ways depending on the cohort. I like it. It keeps the material alive and I get to add in and take away as I'm going along. 

One of my favourite groups to teach is for Midnight & Indigo (midnightandindigo.com). If you don't know them I recommend you look them up. A fantastic space for Black women writers to learn, to publish and to read about their own experiences without filters. The online classes on offer are phenomenal and cover a whole range of topics. A beautiful, safe, online space for us.

Another favourite is our writing retreats. The Write Space TT - you can find us on IG and FB. We have had two fantastic retreats in the beautiful Charlotteville, Tobago. The setting is absolutely ideal. The cottages are set in lush gardens and the sea is hitting the shore right in front of you. This year, we had rain from day one, but it didn't dampen anyone's creativity. In fact, we wrote more and bonded better as we were able to spend more time in each other's company.  The cottages are rudimentary to say the least. The bathrooms are probably my least favourite spaces. But the location is everything. I'm not sure we could recreate anywhere else, being able to lie in bed, allowing the waves to lull you to sleep, and then to step out the front door straight onto the beach with coffee in the morning. So we take the basic accommodation and appreciate all that is to offer around it. Even I found time to write a little while we were there, it's a magical space.

But I also have to be writing. Maybe teaching takes that away from me. I was told once that I had chosen teaching over writing, and yet I don't think I have. I chose teaching in order to pay my bills and be able to do something I love. But this coming year is for me and my writing. A sabbatical from work is giving me the space to do something with my two completed novels and finish my half a novel, and the two short stories that are half done! I am going to cherish the time to myself and my writing and I'm looking forward to what I can produce when I have to space to concentrate on me.

The following is a brief paper I gave at a roundtable discussion on Resistance and Resilience in our writing

As a writer I have always written against. Against what? Against the narratives of ‘other’ that I have been privy to in much of my reading life. Against the stereotypes of us, and by us I mean not them, and the views of what we can and cannot write about, what is and is not acceptable. This is the philosophy I use in my teaching. 
As writers from the Caribbean or Africa or Asia including those in the diaspora, or of any place that is not considered western, we have the chance to remove ourselves from the margins and take centre stage. The hybridization and creolization of our writing whether from here or the diaspora is a natural growth of colonization but is also an act of resistance against the same. 

I’m going to briefly summarise how I use both resistance and resilience in my writing, using my novel, A House With No Angels (AHWNA) as an example but also referring to other short stories I have written.
Scheingold (2010: 2) suggests the term 'novels of political estrangement' as a way of labelling a new genre of novel that looks past the big events of the century and concentrates on people, individuals whose lives have been shaped by what was happening, but who were largely unaware of any political influence. He states that 'the literary imagination has long been recognised as capturing the spirit and the soul of the times'. Writing resistance concentrates on 'the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who have simply averted their eyes...' (2). 

There are many ways that we use when writing resistance, and most times we don’t necessarily think about it, we are just telling the story that was wrapped up inside of us and needed to get out. However, the moment we realise a character on the page in all their ordinariness, in their fully rounded capacity, we are resisting a narrative that for hundreds of years was placed on us. Sometimes we approach it purposefully, other times it is a by-product of the story we are telling, but always it is necessary.

I approached my novel purposefully. I had the intention to disrupt and resist. Although it is set primarily in Manchester, in the UK, it is centred around the 5th Pan African Congress which was the catalyst for independence for many nations in the Caribbean and around the world. One of the first acts of resistance in AHWNA was Ade not narrating the world politics that were taking place during her first years in Manchester. She arrived in 1945, at the end of World War II, she attended political meetings, she was at the 5th Pan African Congress, and therefore, she should have been aware of what was happening on a grander scale. However, none of the big political happenings meant anything to her personally and it is a personal story that is being told. This sentiment refers back to Boyers (2005) and the premise that by the telling of individual stories the whole story can be narrated from a different and personal perspective. This gives way to resilience and resistance in their simplest forms. 

My novel is narrated by three women and the man at the centre of the novel does not have a voice. This was a conscious decision and part of my political stance at that time. I wrote about World War II from Ade's point of view when she was living in Nigeria and listening in at her father's meetings. At one point she tells her cousin that the whole world is at war, to which Funmi's response is laughter. This was not an attempt for me to ignore the atrocities that took place in the war, but to highlight that not all the world was aware of what was happening and what was taking place. Resistance against the grand narrative is what makes our work stand out.
Ade’s character is based on the women who took part in the Aba women’s riots of 1929, which gives a female, African view of colonisation. I attempted to incorporate the spirit of these women in the way that Ade takes over the house at the age of eighteen; in the way that she manages her affairs without relying on a man; the way in which she provides a home for the students who are the future. I wanted to show resilience, without using the trope of the strong black woman who does not need consideration. My resistance to that trope was to make Ade complete and complicated and flawed.

In placing Elizabeth into a period that reflects postcolonialism I had to derive a way in which to represent this on the page. For me, personally, in the early days there were difficulties with postcolonialism as a theory that, in its base form, attempted to categorise people from different nations and experiences of colonialism under one banner. I began with the struggles that I had encountered around the subject. Namely, the language used and its inaccessibility by the very people postcolonial theory represents. I considered the ways in which people were oppressed, marginalised and excluded and how this made me feel uncomfortable, both in reading about it and through personal experience growing up in the 70s as a second generation migrant. 

            With these emotions in place, Elizabeth began to emerge as a character who did not sit comfortably on the page. I used her language and repetitiveness to represent the difficulties presented by the language of postcolonial theory. I added layers to her character that were unpleasant, i.e., her self-obsessive thought patterns and self-pity, this was an attempt to look at postcolonialism from the perspective of the pre-colonised people on the margins, rather than theoretical postcolonialism. Her role within the wider story was to explore a moment in history that was in a state of flux. In particular, I was thinking about independence of a nation and the shape of that independence being a theoretical construct rather than an actuality. Therefore I placed her white father in Nigeria to highlight that actually, independence or not, Britain had still not released its hold over its empire.

What I am attempting to portray is how I chose to give voices to marginalised characters in the postcolonial sense, voices that could not and should not be silenced. It was with writerly awareness, born out of postcolonial studies, that I explored how my characters would develop on the page.

During my research, I attended Black British Feminist Conference was based around the Olive Morris Archives and the book Heart of the Race, (Bryan et al, 1974). Olive Morris was a Jamaican born, UK based activist. The conference went into details of what women of colour in London had accomplished in the 1970s through resistance to the brutality of institutionalised racism. My research also took in the film Pressure (Ové, 1976), produced around this time, which offers a version of the experience of second generation Caribbean people in London during the 1970s. It was a well-crafted film, co-written by Sam Selvon. However, the female protagonist within the film was portrayed as highly sexualised in relation to the male characters. After she had given a rousing political performance at a meeting she was beaten by the police and when released was imagined by and shown naked in bed with a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. This showed how the women who were making such a bid for freedom and equality were not taken seriously, including by the black men who were in a position to promote the fight at that time. I wanted Elizabeth to reflect some of the inequality that was evident for women over this period. Elizabeth is an act of resistance against theoretical postcolonialism and patriarchy.
Kutes, is a third generation migrant and appears not to be restricted by the politics of womanhood or colonisation. She is born into a political era that has seen the 1982 race riots, right wing politics and strong immigration laws. She has no yearning for 'home' because she is Black British. She is home. However, as her story progresses she becomes aware of political inconsistencies within her world and turns to her mother and grandmother for guidance, acknowledging that they were 'into politics innit'.

For Kutes I have used immigration as a baseline political stance. This is a theme that has run full circle within the novel from Ade and Peter and the 1940s to the present day. What I wanted to present with Kutes is the way in which young black people in cosmopolitan cities within the UK can often forget that they are 'black', partly because of the equality legislation that has attempted to absorb issues of difference into the political system, and thereby reduce the fight of the people. Third and fourth generation black British youngsters for a short time felt equal with their peers despite continued media evidence of race hate crimes. Of course, this is now a moot point with the necessary resurgence of movements that have taken place over the past few years that have become a global call for both resistance and resilience. 

With this character of Kutes, outside of the political realm, I used language as a form of resistance. This is something that every writer has at their disposal. Language and the way in which it can lift itself from the page whether in pidgin, creole or the hybrid of teenage skaz. Claiming our own vernacular on the page without apology is a weapon that we can use that centralises, claims, locates and identifies. 
I have never approached a story or poem that I have needed to write without a strong sense of ‘writing a wrong’. My first published short story, The Dance, pushes against the forced deportation of young people who were child asylum seekers, but when reaching the age of 18 were fighting not to be expelled from the UK. My latest short story looks at ageism, colourism and the act of dying. A chapter in my current novel deals with the Windrush scandal that is taking place in the UK, and gives a voice to the people that are overlooked by governments, institutions, schools and families. 

There is always a space to write resistance, to write ourselves into the narrative. In literature it is this writing of ourselves and exploring the strength that is in our past and our histories that enables us to write our future. It is in our words that we will find the strength, resilience and sustainability to survive this world we live in, both locally and globally.

Refs:
BOYERS, R. (2005). The dictator's dictation: the politics of novels and novelists. New York, Columbia University Press. 
BRYAN, B., DADZIE, S., & SCAFE, S. (1985). The heart of the race: Black women's lives in Britain. London, Virago.
OVÉ, H., BUCKLER, R., SELVON, S., NORVILLE, H., JAMES, O., SINGUINEAU, F., & LIJERTWOOD, L. (2004). Pressure. London, British Film Institute.
SCHEINGOLD, S. A. (2010). The political novel: re-imagining the twentieth century. New York, Continuum.
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Yesterday, I changed my profile picture on Facebook to one of me at my book launch. I look happy and proud. And on one level I am. This book is an achievement. The launch was a dream come true. And yet I’ve been unable to write about it until now.
Each time I’ve been asked about my launch and how it went, I immediately start talking about something else that happened that week. Something that was so traumatizing and painful it completely overshadowed my launch and made it feel insignificant. Conversations went like this:
          'How was your book launch?'
          'Yeah, it was ok, but that same week we buried my son’s best friend, Faye and that overshadowed everything. She was only 29. She was killed in Nigeria by a random shooting. It shouldn’t have happened. She shouldn’t have been in that place at that time, but she was and now she’s gone and we buried her that week of my launch.'
           'Ok, sorry to hear that. Bye.'

Faye was an enormous part of our lives, had been since she was a teenager. She was my son’s twin. They did nothing without consulting each other. No matter where each of them was in the world they were together. No matter what they had to do they discussed it and planned it together. When they were younger, at any given time I could arrive home from work and find Faye sitting on the sofa or traipsing up or down stairs. Faye was part of our lives because she was part of Simon’s life.

But I also have my own memories of her. My favourite mug. I bought it when I was with her in London. We were walking through the rain to go and meet Simon and I saw this mug in the window. ‘Hippyshit’. I had to get it and we went in and laughed at all the tasteless tat in the shop. My favourite necklace that I rarely take off, Faye bought for me in Kurdistan for my birthday. Discussing my novel with her in the kitchen in Manchester while I was doing my PhD and her giving sound advice and strong opinions of what women represent and how they should be represented. Faye in the camp for internally displaced people in Soran where she taught English and we played with the younger children.

Faye in a terrible leopard print fur coat, channeling Bet Lynch from Coronation Street at a Thanksgiving dinner in D2, our accommodation in Kurdistan. Faye covered in mud when I went to pick them up from a Global Gathering Festival. Faye sitting on the doorstep smoking a roll up at 6:00 am chatting at a million miles an hour because she was too wired to sleep. Faye telling me a family secret and me getting all excited because it would make a great story, and Faye laughing while Simon was disgusted that I could even consider it because that was Faye’s real life. Faye kneeling down on the floor in our office in Kurdistan marking exam papers. Standing up when I introduced her to a colleague and giving the most disgusted look and ‘ugh’ sound when he refused to shake her hand because of his religion.

Faye Skyping me from Kosovo when she was being made Head of the English department and us laughing at the kitsch little house she was living in that was reminiscent of old ladies and even older cats. Faye in a Kurdish dress made from bright pink material we found in the bazaar. We’re out on a picnic for Newroz, with Sarwa’s family, eating dolma, and dancing. She sits on a rock, regal, while Simon sits lower down and we call them the Kurdish Posh & Becks. The last message on Facebook when Faye said she’d pre-ordered my novel and I answered ‘Love you, Moonfayce.’

Faye was killed on Good Friday, 19 April 2019 and life can never be the same again. Grief is relentless. But what I do know is that in her last five years Faye lived her best life. There is no doubt that there should have been more living, more bests, more memories, more of Faye. We should have had time for her to dissect my book and give me her bluntly honest feedback, for her to come and sit on my patio in Trinidad and drink rum, for her to come and experience carnival and play pretty mas, because she definitely would have done that.

My book launch was amazing and that was the week we buried Faye Mooney.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/21/british-woman-faye-mooney-killed-kidnappers-nigeria

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