There Is a Force Stronger Than the Sea

Contemporary Black literature in the UK would not be possible without the Black literary arts movements and organizations, both locally and abroad, that have been refuges for the Black writer. These groups, like Cave Canem and Malika’s Kitchen, along with the Black Arts Movement, resist the idea that to be accepted or tolerated in the literary canon, we have to prove our worth and legitimacy on terms imposed by the canon, and not our own.

The dilemma of the Black artist was made plain by Langston Hughes in his well-known essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mould of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

The essay was published in The Nation in 1926, the same year Hughes published his first book. It still holds for contemporary Black artists, as we grapple with two notions of artistic freedom. The first is freedom from—freedom from censorship, political interference, or institutional suppression. This type of freedom is often protected by law and anchored in human rights frameworks. It’s about legal and social safety, like a poet being able to write political work without fear of arrest. The second is freedom to—the freedom to create, express, and experiment without limitations. This version depends less on law and more on access: to resources, platforms, audiences, and supportive communities. While the first protects the artist from restriction, the second empowers the artist through opportunity. Together, they define the conditions necessary for making and sharing art and, by extension, shaping culture. A poet may be legally free to write, but without funding, publishing access, or an audience, that freedom is limited. Take Miriam Makeba under apartheid: she lacked freedom from state repression and was exiled. But even in exile, her freedom to express relied on international platforms and support networks. True artistic freedom needs both: the removal of barriers and the creation of pathways.

The Black British poet often experiences an othering of identity. Take for example those who might have migrated from Commonwealth nations to Britain in anticipation of a warm welcome from the mother country after absorbing years of colonial education. Instead, poets like Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Buchi Emecheta, and Grace Nichols were met with racist immigration laws and discrimination in housing, employment, and education. Such experiences were not unique to the UK—they galvanized the civil rights movement in America that sought to forge racial equality as a way of attaining communal and individual well-being for African Americans. They also led to decolonial movements across the globe. In June of 1962, when many African countries were gaining independence, Hughes attended the first and only major international gathering of writers and critics of African literature on the African continent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Also in attendance were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Kofi Awoonor, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Okot p’Bitek. Their main line of inquiry looked into the legacy of colonialism on the African writer.

In the UK as in much of the Anglophone world, artistic freedom often requires publishing opportunities, which up until recently were mostly absent for Black poets. In 2005, Bernardine Evaristo published the Freed Verse report highlighting the fact that less than one percent of books published by UK poetry presses were written by poets who are Black, Asian, or minority ethnicities (BAME, as we say in the UK). This report was one of several catalysts for The Complete Works Poetry, a mentoring and development program for poets of color in the UK. The project nurtured Black poets who went on to win many prestigious awards, such as Malika Booker, Roger Robinson, Inua Ellams, Kayo Chingonyi, Raymond Antrobus, and Warsan Shire.

I am a Ugandan poet based in London. My success, survival, and staying power, if you will, have been due to being the beneficiary of many pivotal art movements and organizations, including the Black Arts Movement, Cave Canem, The Complete Works, and Malika’s Kitchen, among others. This condition of both being alien to the homeland you have left behind and the fatherland you adopt is not unique to me. Our homelands are not truly ours. They have been shaped into colonies of the West—reduced to economic breadbaskets for distant powers. And for us in the diaspora living in Britain, we constantly have to fill out forms that remind us we are other, code for “you are not one of us.” So where does this leave us? It leaves us with a responsibility: to create and recognize our own communities, to reclaim what was fractured, and to reimagine belonging on our own terms.

In gathering the poets for this folio, I focused on those whose work speaks to the diasporic experience across the Commonwealth and the UK. I selected voices that reflect a range of generational, cultural, and linguistic perspectives in order to represent a diverse spectrum of poetic traditions that have shaped, and continue to shape, Black British literature. This folio, even in its fullness, is merely a gateway into a rich world of talent waiting to be explored.