Not Good Enough or Not Man Enough? Beryl Gilroy as the Anomaly in the Evolving ‘Black British Canon’

Abstract

As a Guyanese writer, Beryl Gilroy may be considered anomalous because, during the period of the 1960s and 1970s when she first began to seek publication, black women writers were largely invisible both in Britain and in her native Caribbean. The ‘Anomaly’ in the title of this essay is a descriptive term used by Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing to explain the forces which ‘work against women writers who dare to write’.2 In this chapter, I shall be arguing that Beryl Gilroy’s work has suffered because of what Russ describes as the, ‘isolation of the work from the tradition to which it belongs and its consequent presentation as anomalous’.3 The tradition from which Gilroy appears to be isolated was a significant body of work that was published in Britain by anglophone Caribbean writers, almost exclusively male, who made their reputations in the 1950s and 1960s. This blossoming corpus would lead Sam Selvon, in 1994, to comment on, ‘the wonderment and accolade that greeted the boom of Caribbean literature and art in Britain in the early fifties’.4 Writers, like Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, V.S. Naipaul and Edward Kamau Braithwaite arguably defined a tradition of Anglo-Caribbean-British literature for themselves and for the generations of writers who followed.