Why is it still rare to see a black British woman with literary influence?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/rare-black-british-woman-literary-influence

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I came of age in the 1980s at a time when black British women were almost invisible in the literary landscape. "Having a voice" and "speaking out" were buzzwords in the community of young writers to which I belonged. Fresh out of drama school, I had no desire to fulfil the usual stereotypes on offer: nurse, cleaner, prostitute and prisoner. Instead, I co‑founded Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women. My first play was an autobiographical verse drama called Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite – you get the drift … Labelled "radical" and "separatist", we were just being resourceful. My early writings were soaked in melancholy and produced late at night while I drowned myself in my favourite cocktail of whisky and Drambuie and chain-smoked Marlboro Reds. Needless to say, in the cold light of morning, a lot of it was dross. Angry and hurt at my marginalised status, I rejected the English canon on which I'd been raised. I turned instead to the wave of brilliant African-American poets and prose stylists then hitting these shores: Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Michelle Cliff, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison. Their writings placed black women centre stage and inspired me to do the same.

Unfortunately, the American imports didn't open up the publishing industry here to our homegrown writings. Publishers told us outright that there was "no market" for our work. We responded by producing our own anthologies with names such as Charting the Journey, Watchers and Seekers and one I co-edited, Black Women Talk Poetry. In the editors' introduction to this we declared: "As black women we experience oppression due to our race, sex, class and sexuality on a daily basis and this is reflected in every area of our lives." If it all seems a bit over the top today, this early outrage was the engine that powered us.

By the late 1990s a significant number of black British women, such as Joanna Traynor, Millie Murray, Jenny McLeod and Nicola Williams, were publishing novels. This coincided with Britain's rebranding itself as Cool Britannia, and "multiculti" literature became fashionable for a while. Unfortunately, as I was aware even then, fashions pass. With few exceptions, such as Andrea Levy and Malorie Blackman, most of those writers are no longer around.

My latest novel, Mr Loverman, is about Barrington "Barry" Walker, a Caribbean Londoner who is 74, married and a closet homosexual. A tragicomedy, it tracks his coming out, family relationships and tangled love life. Old black men are rarely present in British fiction, let alone a wisecracking septuagenarian still the lover of his childhood friend after 60 years. Old black women rarely get a look-in either. In Mr Loverman, Barry's wife Carmel provides a counternarrative that shows the impact of his deceptions on her life.

Homosexuality is not a completely new terrain for me. In the novel, Barry's oldest daughter goes through a gay period, as I did in the 1980s. Mr Loverman is clearly not about me, but it does allow me to make fun of my younger self. Barry is resolutely un-PC and when he describes his daughter, it could have been me: "One day she was a moody but nonetheless feminine girl dressed all flowery; next, she was all rats' tails and African wraps; then she swiftly mutated into this war-veteran hobo character."

These days the word radical is almost synonymous with terrorism. Busy congratulating ourselves on being "post-racial", we mask the fact that racism at every level is alive and well. When the feminist writer Caitlin Moran said of the completely white cast of the hit US drama Girls that she "literally couldn't give a shit about it", as the Guardian reported last year, at least we knew where we stood. It's another reminder that if we don't speak up for ourselves, who will?

The grassroots arts movement of the 1980s involved plenty of excesses and in-fighting – and that's a whole other story. But we created a springboard. Ignored by everyone else, we validated ourselves, our experiences, our perspectives. I may not be the complete outsider I once was, but, even when I appear to be inside the citadel, I find myself in a tiny black minority.

So there is still work to do. Three decades on, black women are still rarely in positions of power. We remain the creatives and not the career makers. We are chosen but do not choose, and the elite networks of power continue to perpetuate themselves.

Unfortunately, the outspoken lobbying and kamikaze arts activism of the 1980s has been succeeded by polite acceptance and muted protest. And clicking "Like" on someone's Facebook page really doesn't change anything.

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