ABSTRACT
Hanif Kureishi and Buchi Emecheta are frequently grouped together under the umbrella ‘Black British Writers’. What these easy words are apt to obscure, however, are two very distinct sets of influences. In terms of biographical background, certainly, there is a significant contrast. Whilst Kureishi grew up in south-east England, Emecheta’s childhood was spent in south-eastern Nigeria. Kureishi’s mother was a white middle-class English housewife. Emecheta’s mother escaped life as an Igbo slave. In her autobiography, Head Above Water (1986), Emecheta pays tribute to her mother, in a way that, through its very extremity, highlights the potential importance of this cultural background in considering the writer’s work:
My mother, Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta Emecheta, that laughing, loudvoiced, six-foot-tall, black glossy slave girl, who as a child suckled the breasts of her dead mother; my mother who lost her parents when the nerve gas exploded in Europe, a gas that killed thousands of innocent Africans who knew nothing about the Western First World War; my laughing mother, who forgave a brother that sold her to a relative in Onitsha so that he could use the money to buy ichafo siliki – silk head ties for his coming-of-age dance. My mother, who probably loved me in her own way, but never expressed it; my mother, that slave girl who had the courage to free herself and return to her people in Ibusa, and still stooped and allowed the culture of her people to reenslave her, and then permitted Christianity to tighten the knot of enslavement.
