{"id":4107,"date":"2021-01-26T08:37:59","date_gmt":"2021-01-26T08:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=4107"},"modified":"2021-01-26T08:41:36","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T08:41:36","slug":"publishing-brought-to-book-by-busby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/01\/26\/publishing-brought-to-book-by-busby\/","title":{"rendered":"PUBLISHING BROUGHT TO BOOK BY BUSBY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

PUBLISHING BROUGHT TO BOOK BY BUSBY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick reads a report by Aida Edemariam<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Aida EDErmariam<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

photo 1<\/strong> The Guardian journalist Aida Edermariam recounts a revealing story that Margaret Busby tells, about the first novel she published. A friend of the family had bumped into a former US serviceman called Sam Greenlee  who said he had written a novel, rejected by 40 American publishers, a satirical thriller about the first African American man hired by the CIA but given a very visible non-job (the point being it was only to improve the CIA\u2019s image). The man kept his head down, learned about guerrilla warfare, then quit to become a freedom fighter in Chicago. Busby took on the book, borrowing money so Greenlee could stay in London while his novel was edited and, when it was about to be published, in 1969, she sent it to The Observer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper refused it \u2013 it didn\u2019t extract fiction and certainly not \u00b4black power\u00b4 novels. Busby sent it back, insisting the paper was wrong. It ran an extract, and The Spook Who Sat By the Door was subsequently translated into six languages and turned into a film. When the film, opened in 1973, newspapers wondered if it would start race warfare, though The New York Times called it a \u00b4parable of institutional racism.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It closed early under FBI pressure, and was not reissued until 2004, then, nearly a decade later, added to the National Film Registry at Library of Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Busby, now in her seventies, tells the story, perhaps, partly to marvel at how naive she was in her youth, but she also allows the story to point out how so little has changed. Her account also tells you much about Busby herself: her persistence; her appreciation of a quiet character who turns out to be radically subversive; her instinct that a thriller could carry a serious political argument as easily as a polemic; and, yes, her bravery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years before she published Greenlee, Busby had become not only Britain\u2019s youngest publisher, but also its first black female one (John la Rose, who established New Beacon Books in 1966, was Britain\u2019s first black publisher) ; quickly followed, in 1969, by Jessica Huntley, of Bogle-L\u2019Ouverture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Margaret Busby went on to run a publishing company for 20 years, and in that period also was able to edit two door-stopping, ground-breaking anthologies; she worked as a reviewer, scriptwriter, lyricist, radio and TV presenter, activist and mentor \u2013 and has been chair of judges for the Booker prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4[She] helped change the landscape of both UK publishing and arts coverage and so many black British artists owe her a debt. I know I do,\u00b4 wrote Zadie Smith last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Ghana, Margaret Busby has a strong presence \u2013 nicely captured in three pictures of her in the National Portrait Gallery \u2013 that is somehow both serious and mischievous. She comes from a family of doctors and lawyers. Her father, the son of a tailor, won a scholarship to study medicine, first in Trinidad then Edinburgh and Dublin. He practised in London before serving in the Ghanaian countryside; a blue plaque now commemorates his pre-NHS commitment to the poor people of Walthamstow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Busby herself has served Ghana since 1999, as a safohen<\/em> (captain) of Bentsir No 1 Asafo Company of Oguaa Traditional Area, Cape Coast \u2013 the first of seven traditional warrior groups established to protect the area. (She is expected to drop everything and go there if she is needed.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She still has vivid memories of childhood spent in the Ghanaian countryside, the lighting of lanterns in the evening, the protests that led into the fight for independence and, given what she has gone on to achieve, perhaps the most important memory of all is that of learning to read, through a combination of Nelson Royal Readers that she remembers were \u00b4what every colonial child read, where every subject was about Britain\u00b4 and her father\u2019s medical books. As  pre-teenager Margaret was sent to school in England, with her parents remaining behind, scrimping and saving, her mother limiting herself to one dress, worn in the day and hung up to dry overnight \u2013 to pay for the education of Margaret, her brother George and her sister Eileen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The school was enlightened, by the standards of the time; children came from all over the world and diversity was such that Margaret (below<\/strong>) can still laughingly recall how she quickly learned \u00b4to count in Farsi, swear in Mandarin and sing in Spanish,\u00b4 Outside school, however, she was \u00b4very conscious of being different. I got used to being thought of as one of the little African girls. I was never me<\/em>.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Margaret Busby<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The poems she published in the school magazine were about children called Percival and seashores she had never seen, but she remembers, in the very early sixties, coming across a literary magazine with the South African writer and journalist Noni Jabavu on the cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4She represented a sort of role model,\u00b4 Margaret remembers. \u00b4By the time I started publishing in 1967, I knew it was possible.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was not enough money to get the young Busby home for the holidays, so she was sent to a farm in Sussex run by Verily Anderson, a writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4That was where I had my first editorial experience: helping Verily type her books.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At university in London, Busby studied English, edited the college literary magazine and published poems in the New African.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, at a party, Busby met Clive Allison, a young Oxford undergraduate. By the end of the evening they had decided to set up a publishing company together when they finished their degrees. Both took day jobs at other publishers, setting up office in the evenings and weekends in the Soho flat of a friend of Allison\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly, there was very little money in the venture. Busby\u2019s then husband, Lionel Grigson (\u00b4We lived in Notting Hill \u2013 that was the only place we could afford. Can you imagine?\u00b4), was a jazz musician. As jazz didn\u2019t really pay either, she presented programmes on BBC radio and TV programmes for the Central Office of Information; she has over the years produced films and written abridgements of books by, among others, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Walter Mosley and Henry Louis Gates; her jazz lyrics were recorded by Grigson (who later established the jazz department at the Guildhall School of Music) and the singer Norma Winstone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allison & Busby published people \u00b4because we felt we wanted to, because they were important to us, or we felt they were going to be important to anybody else. We were not constrained by any conventions,  we just had to make them work. We published songs to sing in the bath! Printed on waterproof paper. And we published a lot of \u00b4black\u00b4 books. Not because it was a black company, but because it was something that interested me.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their zeal and eclecticism saw them publish everyone from James Ellroy to Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Michael Horowitz, Buchi Emecheta, Hunter S Thompson, the sonnets of Michelangelo and the fantastically successful The Worst Witch series, by Jill Murphy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I read Aida Edemariam\u00b4s article, I was almost constantly bemused by how Margaret Busby could have been so involved with writers I had been reading since I was a teenager, many of who I had revisited with a relish when studying English literature and language at the University of Leeds thirty five years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned from Aida\u00b4s informed essay that Margaret Busby and Allison also published Roy Heath (who won the Guardian fiction prize in 1978) and Nobel nominee Nuruddin Farah, and \u00b4took a chance\u00b4 on African American writers, such as Ishmael Reed. Others,  like CLR James and George Lamming, were virtually out of print, so she set out to \u201crescue [them] from oblivion\u00b4 by reprinting them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey is an editor-at-large at Canongate, and says she finds it inspiring that Busby \u00b4at a very early age, recognised who and what she was. She was somebody who makes<\/em> culture. And she set about doing it and hasn\u2019t stopped. Regardless of the social difficulties.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it was not always easy. The writers were fine, but \u00b4everybody from the window cleaner to the bank manager\u00b4, Busby has recently told an interviewer, \u00b4assumed I was just there to make the tea. The window cleaner used to say: \u2018Can you get your boss to pay me?\u2019 I\u2019d say: \u2018Yeah, he\u2019s next door.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or it was assumed she was sleeping with Allison, even though she was married to someone else. Looking back at the press cuttings about her, as she put it last year: \u00b4I was being treated as some sort of freak \u2013 \u2018the girl from Ghana goes into publishing\u2019 \u2013 as if they were saying: \u2018Black girl can read.\u2019 That was the society we were part of and what I was used to, so I just got on with what I was doing\u00b4  which, it turns out, was most of the editorial heavy lifting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The partnership ended in 1987, when Allison & Busby was bought out by WH Allen in 1987, and the partnership ended. The purchasing publisher retained Allison but somehow failed to find a job for Busby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Anything I am now, I have done on my own since then,\u00b4 she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For three years she was editorial director of Earthscan (publishing books about nature and climate), and has been freelance ever since, working on her anthologies and dramatisations, reviewing, including for The Guardian, and founding, in the 1980s, with Huntley and Lennie Goodings of Virago, a group called Greater Access to Publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Margaret Busby<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Even whilst doing all this she has also gone along quietly making connections, mentoring writers and editors, and helping people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she realised that more than 90% of Wikipedia editors were male, (as I read that I thought, also of Wiki\u00b4s reputation for factual inaccuracy) she began writing anonymous entries for overlooked women, trying to redress the bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1992, she published an anthology, Daughters of Africa, which contains examples of writing by women of African descent from ancient Egypt to the present. She found many parts of the collation on her own bookshelves and drew from a lifetime of searching for things she was not taught at boarding school or during her degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4In those days,\u00b4 she says, \u00b4if anyone talked about black women writers, you would think there were just three of them, maybe four: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, maybe Maya Angelou or Terry McMillan.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Aida Edemariam  sharply points out that these days that list tends to be Morrison, Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.) Daughters of Africa is a rebuttal of over a thousand pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writers across the world have reason to be grateful to Margaret Busby. Allfrey, who credits her with making her feel \u00b4possible\u00b4 just by existing, has written of a Francophone Ivorian author who had been struggling to write because she felt only \u00b4Lagos urban\u00b4 novels counted; when someone gave her Daughters Of Africa, she said it set her free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Busby\u2019s eight hundred page follow-up, New Daughters Of Africa, was published in the last year or so. It begins in the 19th century, but duplicates nothing from the first. Many pieces were written specifically for Busby, all without payment; the money generated by the book will pay for a \u00a320,000 MA bursary \u2013 the Margaret Busby New Daughters Of Africa award \u2013 at Soas University of London, for a female African student.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In January, the Publishers Association announced that only 13% of people who participated in its diversity survey of the industry\u2019s workforce identified as black, Asian or minority ethnic. The numbers who went to private school were three times the national average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Busby, who has achieved so much, still feels impatient. \u00b4Every decade there\u2019s another survey. We don\u2019t need to keep doing the same survey; we need to think what are we going to do about it.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd there is, more than ever, a need for clear thinking and balanced reporting on the issues it has raised and Sidetracks & Detours has posted several pieces and comments on these pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until reading the Guardian\u00b4s uplifting article on Margaret Busby, though, I had not been aware that after the death of George Floyd, 100 writers banded together to form the Black Writers\u2019 Guild. Its first act was to send an eight-point letter to the biggest publishers in the UK, demanding, among other things, an audit of black authors and black staff and more black commissioning editors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Busby\u2019s sister had recently died so she was unable to be involved  but what she would also have stressed was \u00b4as much as asking \u2018them\u2019 to do things for us, we need to talk more with each other, [about] what we do for ourselves\u00b4. She would like it not to be \u00b4this us and them thing as if they are the publishers and we are the writers begging them to take us on or promote us, or whatever. Well, I want us to be the publishers as well. And I want more people to be on both sides.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For several months, in the wake of the Floyd killing, the books industry almost every day hailed the signing of a new black author; Macmillan US signed a 21-year-old Londoner\u2019s first novel for $1m. Busby wishes them well, but is cautious. \u00b4What we\u2019re seeing now is traditional industry choosing what they think should be published. It\u2019s not people within the industry who are African or black British, or whatever, choosing what they want.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The risk is what Adichie, in the 2009 Ted Talk, called the power of the single story, in which only one thing is known about another culture and all stories are expected to conform. Adichie suggested this is a problem only heightened when it comes to Africa, which is often treated as a country rather than a continent containing more than fifty countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4If you have a book by an African writer who wants to write about computers, and doesn\u2019t mention villages, or tribalism, can you call them an African writer? Probably not, if you\u2019re an English editor. It\u2019s not African enough!\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same applies to black people being required to discuss race. So what if, for instance, Reni Eddo-Lodge, whose Why I\u2019m No Longer Talking To White People About Race became the first book by a black British author to top the bestseller charts, wanted to follow it up with a biography of Churchill? If an editor was thinking of taking on Eddo-Lodge on Churchill \u2013 would he be allowed to? What is expected of a black writer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every bestseller impels a rush to jump on the bandwagon, but it is especially risky for minorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u00b4I remember Toni Morrison saying that if she took on a black writer, she\u2019d have to make sure that writer was successful, because otherwise the view would be that black writers don\u2019t sell,\u00b4 says Margaret Busby.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4And I think what is dangerous about the current situation, that they get this new young, coming-of-age story by x, y or z, and then, if that doesn\u2019t succeed, everything else is blighted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope that people are examining their beliefs and thinking: \u2018Where are the people from a different class background, ethnicity or a different part of the country?\u2019 I think there are publishers who have been publishing diverse work, without making a song and dance about it. Taking books on because they\u2019re good, not because they\u2019re trying to fill some quota.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And don\u2019t get Margaret started on the term BAME. \u00b4I hate that term! I am central to my own world \u2013 as you are to yours.\u00b4  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is especially fierce about the detrimental effects of that kind of terminology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4There was a time when I was only given books by black writers to review. I\u2019ve shot myself in the foot by saying: \u2018Well, I actually read white writers as well.\u2019 So then you know they\u2019re not going to ask you to do any black writers, because they\u2019re too embarrassed. And they still don\u2019t ask you to do white writers, so you end up doing nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
a sign of change?<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The assumption is that it\u2019s got to be a black writer or a black subject or else I\u2019m not qualified. It\u2019s so limiting! A lot of black people, especially those brought up in this country, it\u2019s not that they know only about black culture. I know about Chaucer and Milton and Moli\u00e8re as well \u2013 you know twice as much, not half as much.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publishing world is perhaps still of white-noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4I can still go to literary parties where I\u2019m the only black person,\u00b4 Margaret Busby tells us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4So what are we going to do? It\u2019s not just about saying: \u2018Well, we\u2019ll let one in to sit by the door so people can see, so nobody,\u00b4 she laughs slightly  \u00b4can accuse us of being un-diverse. But what next?\u00b4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A lot of black people, especially those brought up in this country, it\u2019s not that they know only about black culture. I know about Chaucer and Milton and Moli\u00e8re as well \u2013 you know twice as much, not half as much.\u00b4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4115,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4107\/revisions\/4115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}