Mixed Race Studies

Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9 Issue 3 November 2015
pages 433-448
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv003

Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to an English mother of Irish descent and a Nigerian father, who had immigrated to the UK. She has been actively publishing since the release of her first book of poetry, Island of Abraham (1994). She has published six other works since: the semiautobiographical Lara (1997); The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel in verse, based in Roman Londinium; Soul Tourists (2005), a hybrid of poetry and prose that explores the spectral black history of Europe; Blonde Roots (2008), a satirical novel that inverts the historical realities of the transatlantic slave trade; Hello Mum (2010), an epistolary novella that explores a fourteen-year-old boy’s sense of disenfranchisement and the consequent lure of gang culture; and, most recently, Mr. Loverman (2013), the story of a closeted homosexual Trinidadian-British Londoner, who must confront the damage perpetuated by his own silences. Evaristo has served as coeditor of two literary anthologies: NW15 (Granta/British Council, 2007) and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). As editor, she has been instrumental in both mentoring and promoting the visibility of black British writers. In 2010, she guest-edited an issue of Wasafiri, entitled Black Britain: Beyond Definition, that celebrates contemporary black writing in the UK. Her 2012 guest-edited volume of the UK’s leading poetry journal Poetry Review, entitled Offending Frequencies, features more poets of color than any previous single issue. In September of 2014, she investigated the publishing industry’s attitude toward women of color as guest editor of Mslexia. She currently works as a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, where, in 2011, she instituted the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for radio: The Emperor’s Babe for BBC 1 (2012) and Hello Mum for BBC 4 (2012). She was elected Fellow of the…

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The “Telling Part”: Reimagining Racial Recognition in Jackie Kay’s Adoptee Search Narratives

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9, Issue 2 (July 2015)
pages 277-296
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpu041

Pamela Fox, Professor of English
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

This article examines Jackie Kay’s earliest and renowned autobiographical poetic text, The Adoption Papers (1991), in relation to her latest narrative memoir, Red Dust Road (2010), and in the context of racial recognition theories recently revived in transracial adoption (TRA) discourse, as well as in transnational adoptee versions of TRA search narratives. Investigating the tropes of mirrors and bodily markings recurring in both texts, the article also draws on literary theories of recognition to enrich our understanding of Kay’s unique and dual intervention into TRA debates around notions of kinship, as well as autobiographical narrative models that fully reject or embrace a longing for racialized epistemic and narrative wholeness. Kay periodically preserves yet ultimately reimagines the myriad tensions of seeking and practicing racial recognition by constituting it as a distinct but momentary kind of vision. Her practice of life writing highlights reading (both literal and interpretive) as a crucial component of self-construction that continually mediates between individual and group identities. She presents the adoptive self as a freeing constellation of shifting affiliations, but as the product of intertwined Western and diasporic histories and relations, her texts also bear the marks of longing for a singular legible “home,” a stable “I.”

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