I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be by Colin Grant

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

YOU cannae shove yur Granny aff a bus; there were times I wished I could. The occasional derogatory references to the house purchasing power of Pakistanis (the maternal one) and the prowess of African-American athletes (the paternal one) were not atypical of their time. Many Scots born before the First World War were, let’s be generous, unenlightened. Xenophobia was common, racial equality wasn’t.

Which brings us to Colin Grant’s tangy memoir – eight interdigitating stories based around his own family’s experience of exile. Grant’s parents are of the Windrush generation. His title comes from a phrase used by his Uncle Castus who Grant thinks did much of the heavy lifting as regards integration: Castus was Black "so you could do all of those white things. I’m Black so you don’t have to be. It’s a full time occupation." Could Grant "pass" as non-Black, ie: live in Britain without being constantly made aware of colour?

Grant’s family is from Jamaica. His mother Ethlyn is lovingly described, a middle-class woman whose family had a maid and a cook back home. Her move to Luton was traumatic with money too tight to mention. Grant’s father (nicknamed Bageye) was a tyrant, an intimidating, demanding "devil" of a man who could be physically abusive; theirs was a loveless marriage. Ethlyn dreams of return, scans the Kingston property pages. Her return trip with Grant is both poignant and amusingly told but ends in the disappointing realisation that you can never go home. What was there to fear? Grant concludes: an encounter with her former self.

As with the joy of Scots patter we chew on Grant’s language, his use of Jamaican patois. We learn words like Sweetback (a smooth dude), Saga Boy (a playboy), and pickney (children). We learn with recognition that the patios, the patter, "thickened when they wanted to be raw and direct". And too there’s the constant irritation when people say "pardon" after everything that comes out of your mouth. Are the listeners truly having difficulty about what you say or what you are? Are Blacks – as one lecturer, a provocateur, asks Grant and his fellow medical students – "schooled in paranoia"? Are they in England, as his father Bageye suggests, "under surveillance by the neighbours and society at large"? Is Great Britain "a nation of curtain-twitchers"?  

Grant is reminded of his own frailties and comes under pressure to fulfill parental expectations by going to medical school. In turn this leads him to a better understanding of Herman, a sad schizophrenic who begs on the streets of Whitechapel. At the other end of the social scale his older sister Selma gets a job with Charles Saatchi as a contemporary art buyer. Grant, in due course, goes his own way and gets a job with the World Service of the BBC. But even after entry into this bastion of white privilege he’s not free from harassment. He’s "invited" to a disciplinary hearing after making a joke. His manager takes offence and later, in a line that will resonate powerfully with Scots, is described as having a "chip on your shoulder". Didn’t Nadine Dorries use this slur only the other week?

By pointing out that he’s being "othered" at work Grant incurs the wrath of the higher-ups. Plus ça change. He says to an older white mentor that he’s tired of "being thought of as Black". Tired of being "othered". He’s suspicious of his elder brother who settles into "a kind of performance of West Indianness". As he grows older Grant says he expected to become "more and more invisible", for his colour to be "not so dominant". The dream was to "disappear into British society and go about your business unmolested".

Instead the culture (in another line that may resonate with Scots troubled by the curt dismissal of our vote to remain in Europe) "forced me in the other direction: I had become blacker". But Scots can’t make serious equivalences with the Black British experience; after all we’re only beginning to deal with our own complicity in slavery. I’m Black So You Don’t Have To Be is as bittersweet as a tangelo. It’s a reminder that the West Indian experience in Britain – Grenfell Tower et al – has been rougher than rough. Grant’s exuberant family story reflects their rude triumphs and tragic reverses. Tougher than tough.