![]() We responded by producing our own anthologies with names such as Charting the Journey, Watchers and Seekers and one I co-edited, Black Women Talk Poetry. Publishers told us outright that there was "no market" for our work. Unfortunately, the American imports didn't open up the publishing industry here to our homegrown writings. Their writings placed black women centre stage and inspired me to do the same. ![]() ![]() I turned instead to the wave of brilliant African-American poets and prose stylists then hitting these shores: Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Michelle Cliff, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison. Angry and hurt at my marginalised status, I rejected the English canon on which I'd been raised. Needless to say, in the cold light of morning, a lot of it was dross. My early writings were soaked in melancholy and produced late at night while I drowned myself in my favourite cocktail of whisky and Drambuie and chain-smoked Marlboro Reds. My first play was an autobiographical verse drama called Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite – you get the drift … Labelled "radical" and "separatist", we were just being resourceful. ![]() ![]() Instead, I co‑founded Britain's first black women's theatre company, Theatre of Black Women. Fresh out of drama school, I had no desire to fulfil the usual stereotypes on offer: nurse, cleaner, prostitute and prisoner. "Having a voice" and "speaking out" were buzzwords in the community of young writers to which I belonged. I came of age in the 1980s at a time when black British women were almost invisible in the literary landscape. ![]()
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