IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain
ed by Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay
Hamish Hamilton, £9.99, 462pp
Buy it at BOL

Only a decade ago, publishers appeared to favour the first-generation migrant’s backward glance at “exotic” landscapes - the Rushdies and Okris - over those writers who were black and British but whose territory was closer to home. Since the mid-1990s, that bias has been eroded, with a wave of fiction-writers joining the poets of stage and page who were so crucial in the 1980s to the revival of British poetry.

There are many possible reasons for the belated entry of major publishers into this growing area of British creativity. The commercial successes of ventures such as X Press, launched with Victor Headley’s bestselling Yardie, helped overturn lazy assumptions about which books sold and who their readers were. The Saga Prize for unpublished first novels by people of African descent gave a fillip, launching the careers of Diran Adebayo and Joanna Traynor. And while visibly successful writers breed aspirant ones, a demographic factor may also be at work: half a century after the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, the pioneers’ children and grandchildren have a relative ease of presence, bringing increased confidence to pursue the precarious vocation of writing.

This anthology of almost 100 contributors testifies both to the proliferation of aspiring British writers of African descent and to a growing willingness to tap that talent. Its title, IC3, is police shorthand for black (IC1, 2 and 4 being code - with scant regard for science or geography - for “Caucasian”, “Mediterranean” and “Asian” respectively).

In his introduction, Courttia Newland solemnly argues that IC3 is the only collective term for Britons of African descent, since “black British” is “political and refers to Africans, Asians, West Indians, Americans and sometimes even Chinese”. He could rather glory in the fertile irony of the title: its promise of a subversive and heterogeneous creativity that flies by the nets of rigid expectations, thumbing its nose at the powers that seek to define and rule.

Sadly, the promise of the title is only partially fulfilled. Ambitious in size and scope, the book is divided into three sections, each encompassing poetry, essays, stories and memoirs. Headed “Settlers”, “Explorers” and “Crusaders”, the three parts are said loosely to reflect first, second and third generations, although since this is an anthology of “almost exclusively brand-new black writing”, those who seek a sampler of the Windrush generation’s literary greats might turn instead to Onyekachi Wambu’s Empire Windrush: 50 Years of Writing about Black Britain (Gollancz, 1998).

Not only is the writing new, but many of the names are too. Some more established poets, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay, Patience Agbabi and Jackie Kay, are represented by previously published work. Other relatively prominent writers are featured, including Ferdinand Dennis, Buchi Emecheta, Benjamin Zephaniah and Bernardine Evaristo, and some contributors - such as Floella Benjamin - are well known, but not necessarily as writers. But this is largely a compilation of lesser-known names - with a marked absence of such heavy hitters of the second or third generation as Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar or Andrea Levy.

There are some excellent short stories, including Patrick Wilmot’s quirkily humorous “The Train to Walthamstow”, in which Ronnie the Rat observes the “human infestation” of King’s Cross, and “MOT Time”, in which Hope Massiah movingly charts an estranged daughter’s discovery that her young step-mother is pregnant, while Allister Harry’s “T e Headmas er’s Off ce” (sic) sees a man return to school to confront past demons.

Among memoirs, Joanna Traynor stands out for her buoyant verve and voice, as does Margaret Busby, whose light touch whets the appetite for her forthcoming memoirs. Musician Labi Siffre’s meditative essay, “Choosing the Stick They Beat You With”, searingly contrasts his boyhood discovery of gay sexuality with how he came to an awareness - imposed by others - of being black.

While the decision to classify a piece of prose as “memoir” or “essay” seems at times puzzlingly arbitrary, some of the most engaging writing is non-fiction that takes off from a personal passion. Colin Babb’s “Cricket, Lovely Cricket” describes the importance of West Indian victories for him as a south London boy, delineating shifting identities through sporting affiliations, while Kevin Le Gendre’s “Father of Freeform”, on unsung British jazz pioneer Joe Harriott, indicts invisibility and erasure through enthusiasm.

There are fine poems from Linton Kwesi Johnson (the ironic “If I Woz A Tap-Natch Poet”), Jackie Kay, Dorothea Smartt and Uju Asika. Yet, for consistency of quality, I would sooner recommend The Fire People: A Collection of Contemporary Black British Poets (Payback, 1998), edited by Lemn Sissay.

For while there are gems here, the quality is troublingly uneven. IC3, according to Newland, presents “an amazing amalgamation of all the talents Black British writing has to offer”, without regard to “the writer’s politics, gender, age or even class”. But it is not clear what the criteria for inclusion are. Was the intention to showcase the best of literary talent or to chronicle a changing community and its concerns?

Perhaps understandably, given the pressure to produce a “landmark” Penguin volume, IC3 seeks to do it all. Essays and articles sit uneasily with the creative writing; once again, my preferred recommendation for a discursive anthology would lie elsewhere, with Black British Culture and Society (Routledge, 2000), edited by Kwesi Owusu. Moreover, some of the writing that directly, rather than obliquely, explores identity is neither new nor well expressed.

Sesay makes a sound point in her introduction about literary forerunners paving the way for younger authors. But one is at times left wondering about the reading habits of some of these aspiring writers. There is a whole essay constructed around the argument that while black Britons riot, they do not demonstrate on a national scale, which makes no mention of the Black People’s Day of Action in response to the 1981 New Cross fire - about which Linton Kwesi Johnson has written poems.

Perhaps such lapses are symptomatic of the national amnesia about Britain’s black history that deprives both black and white Britons of part of their heritage. But an unawareness of literary forebears can only limit the claim of these writers to being “new”.