When I began writing The Dancing Face (first published in 1997 by HarperCollins and re-published by Penguin in the series Black Britain Writing Back selected Bernardine Evaristo), I was resident writer at the South Bank Centre in London. At the time I was still taken up with exploring the possibilities of my private detective Sam Dean, the vehicle which took me around the alleyways of black British life and history. I had discovered Sam almost by accident. As I toyed with the plot of my first novel, Blood Rights, I was struggling to establish a strategy which would make it clear that the racist exclusion and bullying I had experienced was an integral part of the landscape I was describing. In other words, it was an ordinary and unexceptional part of the British life I knew, which one had to navigate as a matter of course. My detective, Sam, was a perfect bridge between the inner lives of my characters and the environment in which they lived. Like the classic private eye in the new industrial landscapes of earlier years he toured the city discovering and confronting new forms of corruption and criminality, which both reflected and contradicted his own beliefs.
By the time of The Dancing Face a lot had changed. I had started, then abandoned writing the novel, partly because I’d begun working on the Windrush project, partly because the inner lives I had been trying to explore had themselves been altered, morphing into a new shape and a new relationship with a surrounding landscape which was itself changing. I had been preoccupied with memory and with ideas of developing identity, but in the meantime events had bypassed the process. Sam Dean was no longer the answer to my problems.
On the other hand, I couldn’t ignore the changes which were dictating the lives and identities of people in my environment. Almost everyone I knew could trace their origins back to the Caribbean or Africa, or India, or China, or Scotland or Ireland or Wales, or somewhere in Europe. Even the historically everyday ‘English’ were preoccupied with same question – (who am I now?). There was, of course, something endlessly provocative about London, a city of determined unity and disunity, within which belonging implied the same unresting battle for self determination.
I was trying (desperately) to start the novel again when I ran into Steve, an old friend. He was working, he said, for an African millionaire who controlled a shipping firm and wielded immense political influence in Nigeria. This was intriguing because while we both knew as many Africans as Caribbeans, the Africans I had known tended to be lawyers, doctors or some kind of academic; and while it was true that millionaire businessmen were beginning to emerge from West Africa, they weren’t the sort of people you expected to bump into down Brixton Market. For the next hour Steve told me stories about his boss. Only the day before, he said, someone in their office had made a mistake, causing the disappearance of a ship in the Indian ocean. The boss had turned up in a fury. “If this had happened in Nigeria,” he yelled. “I would have had you killed.”
That night I said goodbye to Steve, went home and started writing The Dancing Face.
The Dancing Face is published by Penguin – 4th February 1921 – in the series Black Britain Writing Back selected Bernardine Evaristo.
Publisher’s site: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/320876/the-dancing-face/9780241482674.html
Profusion: http://www.profusion.org.uk
