Month: February 2019

Homegoing calls out African complicity in slavery and offers healing

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Last year I visited Elmina Castle, a slave fortress on the coast of Ghana. It’s a beautiful white-washed building, very similar in style to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fortress where Yaa Gyasi sets key pieces of action in Homegoing. The castles are two of about 40 such structures that were built along the Ghanaian coastline by Europeans. They were trading posts that became holding prisons for millions of West African slaves who were then shipped off to the Caribbean, the US and South America. The structures are huge. They dominate the coastline. Markets and towns would have grown up around them, like the town of Elmina that sprouted up around Elmina castle. It is impossible that the locals did not know what the primary trade from these castles was. Did it trouble them? Why was the trade in African bodies accepted? Gyasi takes us aside, sits us down, and says, ‘let me a paint you a picture, let me show you how the system worked.’

Talia Hibbert is giving Black women happy endings (and publishers a lesson in business)

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“When I was younger, I wrote stories with white heroines. I thought, ‘If I want to be published, this is what I’ll have to do. No one wants to read about black people.’” Romance writer Talia Hibbert is talking about her protagonists. Specifically, about the effort it took to stop imagining them as thin, white women and write characters who looked like her. “I grew up reading all these romances that I loved and they were so important, but they were also the kind of books that said, ‘His hand looked so dark against her pearlescent blah, blah, blah.’” She rolls her eyes and smiles.

19 Black Books out in 2019

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Have you written your reading list for 2019, yet? No? What are you waiting for? Let me lend a hand. Whether you’re a fervent fantasy fan, longing for some literary, hungry for a historical or crazy about crime, there’s a 2019 book out there for you. Here are 19 books by Black authors coming out this year. (Click the book jackets to buy or pre-order) 1. OMGs – Alexandra Sheppard Helen has just moved to North London with her dorky dad and self-absorbed older siblings. Her stress levels are off the charts as she tries to juggle new friends, a big crush and the secret fact that she’s half mortal and half Greek God. 3 January 2. New Daughters of Africa – Margaret Busby 25 years after Margaret Busby’s landmark anthology, Daughters of Africa, this new companion volume brings together the work of over 200 women writers of African descent. It showcases key figures and popular contemporaries, as well as overlooked historical authors and today’s new and emerging writers. Amongst the contributors are: Chimamanda Ngozi …