Abstract
The aim of this paper is to offer a thematic study of Black British Literature. The analysis covers the way in which Black British writers have dealt with the issues of childhood, old age, history, return to the homeland, identity, language, and hybridity. Each of those questions is exemplified with a number of poems that show one or some of the perspectives from which they can be considered. The overall study thus constitutes a revision of an integral part of contemporary English Literature that works at destabilizing the idea that “pure” cultural identities exist and that homogeneous national literary traditions are possible.
Highlights
As a literary critic with an interest in comparative approaches, my own position as regards the literature produced by British writers of African, Afro-Caribbean, and South-Asian descent is that their texts share many important features, both formal and thematic
The aim of this paper is to offer a thematic study of Black British Literature
The aim of this paper is not to add any further fuel to the controversy that already exists as regards the label “Black British,” but to offer a limited study on the themes that dominate Black British Literature, as well as to provide the audience with some analyses of how those themes are dealt with in the works of several Black British poets
Summary
One important concern in Black British Literature is childhood and, in particular, the problems that the black young Britons have to face. In “The Way We Were” (2000), Maureen Roberts, a Grenadian and British poet, offers an interesting example of how the theme of childhood may be dealt with in poetry Her poem, of a narrative kind, is a sad recounting of some of the injustices she had to endure as a child after she and her family settled in Britain. Basing their literary materials on the fact that after a period of years in Britain many immigrants have attempted to go back to their countries of origin and that at least a number of them have gone back, writers with an interest in old age have often focused on the longing of the old immigrant to return to his/her homeland, a prospect that becomes harder and harder to carry out as time goes by and the economic hardships that are frequently coupled with old age further separate them from the land of their dreams When their goals are achieved, the act of going back home does not always coincide with the old immigrant’s memories or expectations. We see how Nichols depicts the situation of old black immigrants as a hopeless one: they are alone (their silence indicates they do not share much intimacy), cold, mourning their lost youth and idealizing their lost country
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