Deterritorialization, Black British Writers, and the Case of Ben Okri

Abstract

The quest for definition, beginning with the logocentric histories of the West, has always been engaged through politics of exclusion. Such politics marked Kadija George Sesay’s argument at a Black British Writers Conference held at Howard University. In mapping the works of black British writers, she excluded Ben Okri and vigorously discussed Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara. Unlike Okri, Evaristo was born in England. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that Sesay’s definition—exclusion and inclusion—may have been founded on her degree of familiarity with these writers, and, as such, suggests what I choose to call eclectic hermeneutics, selective reading, which is the bete noire of the politics of exclusion. This exclusion, which, of course, follows the protocol of representation, operates at two levels. It is a form of “repression operated as a sentence to disappear”; it is also “an affirmation of non-existence, and, by implication, an admission that there is nothing to say about such, nothing to see, and nothing to know”1 about Okri as black British writing. The protocol of representation that Sesay uses to identify black British writers who are born in England—that is, signifying on a black cultural ethos—is common in the writings of other black emigres in Britain, including Okri. Although she seems to say that British-born black writers do not use the protocol to enact their longing to go home, there is in their pragmatic labels, however, an enactment of their consciousness of their home, of their participation in celebrating, like other black writers in England, their provenance and identity.