The Black and White Museum, 15 short stories written over five decades, confirms Ferdinand Dennis as a flâneur and urban philosopher exploring territory he first began to map in his now classic novels.
The epic Duppy Conqueror (1998), astutely republished by Small Axes last year, broke ground as a Black British answer to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Spanning two centuries, the odyssey moves from Paradise, Jamaica, via Liverpool and the London blitz to the fictitious ex-colony of Kinja in west Africa. It combines plantation gothic, a reluctant hero’s mythological quest, and an ancestral curse, setting out to redeem the painful collective journey from the postwar Caribbean amid an inheritance of enslavement and familial rupture. Dennis came to England from Jamaica, aged eight, in 1964. For a second generation under pressure in Britain’s inner cities, his novel lays claim to rich global ancestries, as well as a modern Africa of skyscrapers and arts scenes.
His coming-of-age debut, The Sleepless Summer (1989), is no less a classic. Amid the heatwave and police “heat” of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, the part-autobiographical school-leaver, on a gap year with a difference, learns his own history from Rastafarians and Garveyites, but also not to see in black and white. Nourished by Dennis’s travelogue Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988), its fictional cameos – such as a monologue from a sacked machinist – give deeper insight into the anger behind Britain’s 1981 uprisings than reams of commission reports.
In The Black and White Museum, ghetto blasters, bus conductors, mobile phones and shiny apartments “like stacked shipping containers” mark some of its largely London sketches as period pieces, others as 21st century. Extending the terrain of Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, the narratives glide from Holland Park villas and Park Lane hotels to Hackney barbershops and “kiosks selling Nigerian food, Ethiopian coffee, Jamaican jerk chicken” in Newington Green. Characters range from an exiled African prince and a Lithuanian laundress to a Venezuelan art lover bonding with a Jamaican over a shared love of Neruda’s poetry. One key image is of a youth on the top deck of a No 36 bus, wiping the steamed-up window to command a view, “like a ship’s porthole”.
The darkly satirical title story, written more than 20 years ago, is both of its time and timely. At an east London emporium, the kaftan-clad Papa Legba touts a “Middle Passage Week-End” for visitors of all races to spend 48 hours stacked in a fetid basement’s mock slave ship, pitched about mechanically and fed “foul-smelling, grub-infested gruel” amid iron chains “encrusted with dried blood”. Some experience trauma, others catharsis, sparking arguments about forgiveness and reparations – and a vogue for rival sports shoes named “Plantation” and “Runaway”. The burlesque was inspired, the author notes in a preface, by his living in a “south-west English city with a strong slave-trading past” (presumably Bristol), having to cope with the “ubiquitous and oppressive reminders of its history”. Its targets go beyond the chains beneath Britain’s former slaving ports to the commodification of black urban style as it moves from pavement to catwalk.
Dennis’s music-filled second novel, The Last Blues Dance (1996), was a valedictory tribute to the West Indian pioneers who dreamed of return. In the stories here, it is the second generation weighing up the vexed meaning of home with a sense of time running out. In Only for a While a woman’s “dream of Caribbean retirement turned as sour as curdled milk”, the islanders ostracising her as the “English lady”. Yet mounting friction with her son in London confirms her sense of being nowhere at home. In The Unfinished Tapestry, a woman is torn between retirement in Jamaica, where she might “smell the fragrance of ripe mangoes, feel the warm breeze blowing off the sea”, and the “laughter and cries of the children … the scent of the newly born great-great-grandchild whom she had cradled in her arms”. That mental shift, to home being where one’s children and grandchildren are, applies also to friendship. Among old friends, “with music playing and alcohol flowing, washed by their fruity laughter”, one retiree feels “if not at home, then certainly nearing home”.
In Turning White, an unexpected upside to ageing is discovered by a man appalled by his thinning silver strands. Almost overnight, he ceases to be viewed by some white Londoners as a “feral” threat, avoided by crossing the street. The title acquires a double meaning as he becomes worthy, to his puzzlement, of common courtesies. Among refreshing first-person voices is the indignant protagonist of The Dinner Lady, censured for sacking a religious convert who refuses to handle pork: “Me, whose parents used to tell us about race prejudice when they first came to England, you know, all that no dogs, no Irish, no blacks nonsense – me anti-Muslims?”
Wendell Clarke, a poet whose “muse had deserted him”, attends an old schoolfriend’s wake in Nine Night, written for this collection. Ribbed about using fancy words, he is materially poorer than the other mourners, whose “working lives as telephone engineers, car mechanics and builders were drawing to a close”. Yet their respect, and being reminded of a playground fight when he “stumbled into the library and found peace in its silence”, is an upbeat affirmation of the path he chose.
“In my mid-50s, my regrets are an important part of who I am,” one character declares. Yet, as befits these elegiac snapshots with their subtle epiphanies, his later resolve to declare his passion, long after the moment has been missed, liberates him from regret, to love again.
• The Black and White Museum by Ferdinand Dennis is published by HopeRoad (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
