Evaristo, Bernardine 1959-

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Evaristo, Bernardine 1959-

PERSONAL:

Born 1959, in London, England; daughter of Julius Taiwo Obayomi and Jacqueline Mary Evaristo. Education: Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, diploma, 1982.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England. Agent—Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown Group, Haymarket House, 28/29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP, England. E-mail—bernardine_evaristo@hotmail.com.

CAREER:

Writer, poet, novelist, and playwright. Formerly worked as an actress; Theatre of Black Women, London, England, cofounder, with Patricia St. Hilaire and Paulette Randall, 1982. Writer-in-residence at Barnard College/Columbia University, Georgetown University, University of the Western Cape (South Africa), and University of East Anglia. Touring author for British Council, including to Nigeria, 2006.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Literature, Royal Society of Arts, Poetry Society of Great Britain (acting chair, 2003-04).

AWARDS, HONORS:

EMMA Best Novel Award, 1999, for Lara; Arts Council Writers Award, 2000; Book of the Year designations from London Daily Telegraph, Independent, and New Statesman, for Lara, The Emperor's Babe, and Soul Tourists; NESTA fellowship award, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Island of Abraham (poetry), Peepal Tree (Leeds, England), 1993.

Lara (verse novel), Angela Royal Publishing (Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England), 1997, revised edition, Bloodaxe Books, 2009.

The Emperor's Babe (verse novel), Penguin (London, England), 2001, Viking Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Soul Tourists (verse novel), Penguin (London, England), 2005.

(Editor, with Maggie Gee) NW15: The Anthology of New Writing, Granta/British Council (London, England), 2007.

Blonde Roots (prose novels), Penguin (London, England), 2008, Riverhead/Penguin (New York, NY), 2009.

Author of radio dramas, including Moving Through, produced by Royal Court Theatre, 1982; and Madame Bitterfly and the Stockwell Diva, produced for BBC Radio, 2003. Work represented in anthologies, including Bittersweet Poetry Anthology, Empire Windrush: Fifty Years of Writing about Black Britain, IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and Step into the Future. Contributor to periodicals, including London Guardian, Times, Independent on Sunday, Financial Times, and Bomb.

SIDELIGHTS:

After publishing a traditional volume of poems in Island of Abraham, Bernardine Evaristo has gained recognition in her native England as the author of fictional works that merge poetry and fiction. Her novels-in-verse Lara and The Emperor's Babe reflect their author's multiracial and multicultural heritage and her interest in examining the traditional prisms through which we define culture and race. "Evaristo's work belongs to a progression in black British writing … that has followed its acceptance into mainstream literature," related Diana Evans in a profile of the author for London's Independent. In the New Statesman, Sara Waji honed Evans's broad assessment, writing that "audacious genre-bending, in-yer-face wit and masterly retellings of underwritten corners of history are the hallmarks of Evaristo's work."

Noting that the author's "choice to write novels composed of poems … detaches her from the bulk of black British writing," Evans observed that in Evaristo's semiautobiographical Lara, her "free-flowing experimental verse cast the characters in a kind of bright shadow." The novel's eponymous, London-based heroine is, like Evaristo, the daughter of a black man from Nigeria and a white Englishwoman. The novel details the lives of both parents and their ancestors, then moves on to Lara's coming of age in England. "The material can be volatile: the horror of forced journeys from West Africa to Brazil and then back to West Africa, the pains of a sometimes dysfunctional family life, the trauma of being a mixed-race woman, the agony of sometimes abusive sexual relationships, and the wrenching dilemma of trying to discover home in language and a sense of physical space," related Kwame Dawes in World Literature Today. Writing that Evaristo avoids excessive emotionality through her "delicate management of sentiment," Dawes added that Lara "is able to recover a voice and a sense of connection via a sifting through of the myths of her multiple histories," ultimately "find[ing] them articulated in a rational and believable manner in the British landscape." Praising the author's "vivid description of place and time" and her "ability to capture the nuances of language in the dialogue of her characters," Dawes deemed Lara "a triumph of imaginative writing" and "a wonderful story, well told."

Also a novel in verse, The Emperor's Babe deals with a young woman, Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants living in Londinium (as London was then known) in the third century A.D., when Britain was a colony of the Roman Empire. At age eleven, Zuleika marries an older, wealthy Roman senator, Lucius Aurelius Felix, who takes care of her material needs but not her sexual and emotional ones. With Felix often absent attending to business matters, the young wife finds pleasure in the Londinium nightlife, which Evaristo portrays as having a hip, modern sensibility: the wealthy wear togas bearing names of fashion designers such as Gucci and Armani, and musicians play jazz fusion tunes. When Roman Emperor Septimius Severus comes to the lively city, Zuleika embarks on a passionate love affair with him—an affair that must end when Severus goes to war. A Publishers Weekly reviewer observed that while the novel's "thin plot" serves primarily as "an excuse for Evaristo to stretch her poetic muscles," the author does so well, using both wordplay and satire in "bringing [her] … difficult and treacherous conceit to fruition." In The Emperor's Babe, the critic continued, Evaristo exhibits both "a fertile mind and a playful spirit." In the London Times, Erica Wagner described the novel as "overflowing with energy and originality," its setting "made vivid by its mix of accurate detail … and anachronism." In a similar vein, Eric McHenry wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Evaristo's setting is "a rich farrago of historical fact and outrageous fancy, teeming with slaves, socialites and drag queens." Wagner dubbed The Emperor's Babe "smart, imaginative and readable," while a Kirkus Reviews contributor closed a review of the work by noting: "Truly crazy, lots of fun, and more than slightly perverse: this reads like an episode of Sex and the City written by Ovid."

As Jane Housham noted in the Guardian, "Prose is the base soil out of which sprout fast-growing shoots of poetry" in Soul Tourists, Evaristo's third full-length work of fiction. Following a winding path through Europe and into the Middle East, the novel focuses on Jessie and Stanley as their paths intersect and their physical relationship propels them inexorably into a flawed relationship. For staid investment banker Stanley Williams, a man of Caribbean descent who has shaped a safe world through his middle-class conformity, the impulsive and older-while-immature chanteuse Jessie acts as a catalyst, and his world expands through his conversations with the ghosts of unique individuals, from Hannibal the Great and French Queen Marie Thérèse to William Shakespeare and Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin, whom Evaristo places along his path. While Tom Gotti contended in his London Times review that these dialogues with the dead seem sometimes disconnected from the story's main trajectory, he nonetheless praised the novel, describing Soul Tourist as "an inspired mixture of prose, blank verse and haiku … containing moments of lucid imagery and sex-charged comedy." In the Daily Telegraph, Lloyd Evans deemed it a "strange, sprawling, erudite and sometimes maddening" work from "a writer of brilliance," while Housham accorded Soul Tourists an enthusiastic recommendation, calling the novel "freewheeling, genre-busting, exuberant and sexy."

With Blonde Roots, Evaristo accomplished her longtime goal of creating a fictional work composed wholly of prose. Again mining history—in this case the history of the transatlantic slave trade—Blonde Roots draws readers into an alternative past in which populations have been resituated and black Aphrikan slavers kidnap white children from England for use as slaves in the New World. For Doris Scagglethorpe, her part in this history begins when she is captured by Chief Bwana while playing outside on her family's cabbage farm and soon finds herself on a slave ship sailing to the New World, Amarika. Now named Omorenomwara, the girl finds herself in Londono, the capital city of Great Ambossa, where to be white denotes ignorance, savagery, ugliness, and servitude. She endures a harsh mistress as well as hard work in the sugarcane fields, until she is befriended by an older white slave named Ye Meme and begins to believe that she may see her beloved England once more.

Calling Blonde Roots Evaristo's "boldest step to date," Evans added in her Independent review that the novel serves as "a powerful gesture of fearless thematic ownership by one of the UK's most unusual and challenging writers." In the London Times, Joan Smith was equally impressed, writing that this "astonishing" work of fiction "takes one of the great horrors of history and turns it on its head." According to Waji, Evaristo's "inversion of African and European roles is literally skin-deep," as the book asks "not so much ‘What if Africans had enslaved Europeans?’ as ‘What if Europeans had black skin?’" For Guardian critic Helen Oyeyemi, Blonde Roots treats readers to "a nicely uncomfortable emotional limbo" in which the author "defuses the issue of one race's dominance over another to more clearly delineate the idea that our identities are composed of what we know, need and love."

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Evaristo contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:

I was born in London, England, to a Nigerian father and white English mother, and these basic facts of geography and cultural inheritance have been a huge influence on my writing. I also have blood roots in Brazil, Ireland, and Germany, a family history that has slowly unraveled over the years.

The London I grew up in during the '60s and '70s is quite different from the multiracial capital city of today which has a population of eight million people and where 300 languages are spoken. Sit on top of a red, double-decker bus in most parts of this city and one can expect to hear languages from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, Australasia, South America, and the Caribbean. This is what I love about London, that it is such a melting pot of people from all over the world, and that while it is no utopia, and not without the social issues and inequities which affect any big city, there is a level of coexistence and integration between people which is positive and healthy.

As a child my experience of this city was limited to the neighbourhood I grew up in, a dull, garrison town called Woolwich in one of south London's outlying suburbs. Woolwich borders the River Thames and is famous for the Royal Arsenal armaments factory which obscures the view of the river. It had little to commend it as a child and with hindsight I now think that living in a boring place and having, as I did, an uneventful childhood, was one of the ingredients that made me a reader first and then writer, where I could make anything happen: You will live. You will die. You will go to war. You will marry a person of my choosing. You will be full of self-loathing. You will have no idea what a jerk you are. I was forced into the world of my imagination. These days I think that a little boredom can be a good thing. When I think of all the technological stimulation available to children today I wonder who the writers of the future will be. (Blog novels, I guess.) The teenagers I know text or phone each other within minutes of going their separate ways after school. When they travel—by foot or vehicle—they listen to music or are engrossed in their Play Stations. Once at home there is the TV, DVDs, computer games, and the Internet to connect to their friends on networking sites or to bring the world at large into their homes. If I had had all this available to me as a child I would not have needed to exercise that muscle called the imagination. I would have been too busy being stimulated. I doubt I would be a writer today.

The Woolwich of my childhood was also very white, not exclusively, but the black population was tiny. In fact Britain was much more white than it is today. Today there's an "ethnic minority" population of nearly five million people out of a total population of sixty million. Out of this about one million are of Black African or Black Caribbean descent. In London, however, about a third of the population is from an "ethnic minority"—this is where we have converged. London has featured strongly in my writing and in my life. The city is its own microuniverse and is quite distinct from Britain's other major cities and certainly very different from rural Britain, where, as with the countryside generally, time moves more slowly and there's less influence from other cultures and more resistance to change.

In Britain of the '60s and '70s, black people were still few and far between, great swathes of the country were white, and in the cities black people tended to live in certain districts where they had initially congregated. Familiarity and safety were to be found in numbers. My father, Julius Taiwo Obayomi Evaristo, was part of the first mass migration of African and Caribbean

people to Britain after the Second World War. They came at the invitation of the British Government, primarily to fill the gap in the labour force. He arrived in Britain aboard The Apapa, a ship from Nigeria in 1949—young, strong, hopeful, an amateur boxer, eager to embrace the Motherland he'd grown up to believe was utopia. Nigeria was part of the omnipotent British Empire back then, the largest empire the world has ever known which, at its greatest extent, controlled a third of this humongous world of ours.

The British Empire brilliantly executed its master plan by exploiting its subjects and territories to the economic benefit of Britain. Those who grew up in its colonies, such as my father, were taught by teachers from England who painted a rather rosy picture of the imperial centre. In fact the colonial powers had so little regard for the "native" subjects in their colonies around the world that they didn't bother to teach them

about their own indigenous cultures. My father knew more about snow and the rolling green fields of the English countryside, which he'd never seen, than about the topography of his own country. He knew all about the English Kings and Queens and nothing about the history of his own tribe, the Yoruba people, or his own country, Nigeria. He was taught to be a Christian and knew nothing about the Yoruba religion of his own society, which was dismissed by the colonial powers as evil witchcraft called "voodoo."

When he arrived in Britain my father was shocked by the cold weather; the general grubbiness of the port city of Liverpool where he landed, and the capital city London, where he settled; and at the sight of seeing dirty, poor white people. Surely not, he thought? His naive young self had been led to believe that everyone was rich and happy in England, a land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with gold. Telling me his first impressions some forty years later, I could still hear the surprise in his voice. The reality was that the country was postwar, under reconstruction, and the majority of people were working class and struggling.

Nor was my father prepared for the widespread racism of 1950s England. He had thought he'd be welcomed with open arms as a Son of the Empire. Instead the opposite happened. As a black man he was despised, feared, and bore the brunt of centuries' worth of racist indoctrination about the inferior genetic make-up and cultural defects of Africans. Landlords would proudly display "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs" signs in their windows. I am proud to say that my father was a fighter and that when he encountered racism, he stood up for himself; and if anyone went for him, he raised his fists and gave as good as he got.

My father had an older half-brother, John, living in Liverpool, who provided sanctuary for a while, but he soon settled in London where the action was, living in the growing black enclave of Brixton and moving with a crowd of fellow young Nigerians who wore sharp suits and liked to dance. He had initially come to study, but I think his social life got in the way and he never got 'round to it. He became a welder. He also became known as Danny, rather than Taiwo, the name by which he was called back home. Name changing is a familiar rite of passage for immigrants who want to fit into a society intolerant of difference.

When I look at photographs of my father from the early '50s, before he married, before he had eight children to support on little money, he seems so incredibly young, his cheeks plumped up, his face open, his eyes full of life, his posture that of a young man ready to savour the world.

Most of the Africans who came to Britain at that time were male; African women came later. These men often found white wives, as did my father who met my mother, Jacqueline Mary Brinkworth, at the Catholic Overseas Club near Victoria Station.

My verse novel Lara is all about my family history and although it is a blend of fact and fiction, much of it is based on what I already knew about my family

and what I researched. I filled in the gaps. Creating character from family history is an interesting project—bringing alive people who had lived but whom I never knew. I took liberties, but that is the nature of being a creative writer. It's called artistic licence and we get away with it. Luckily, a lot of the characters are no longer alive.

The starting point for Lara was my parents' courtship and marriage in '50s London. I interviewed both my parents at length for the book, recording their reminiscences and transcribing them. My mother was most forthcoming about her own history and enjoyed telling me everything I wanted to know. My father was less revealing but I don't think he was deliberately withholding information, it was that he wasn't used to plundering his past. This is how they met:

Ellen relished tales,
along with tea and buttered toast, of the
Overseas Club,
Victoria, brimming with foreign students of the
darker
variety and before long her twitching antennae
led her
to the jumping church hall where she jitterbugged
to rock 'n' roll, did the quick step to swing,
while Taiwo
from his discreet observation post by the door,
beamed
at the homely type in polka dot dress, a shy,
dimpled smile
and knew she was the girl he would take for a
wife.

My maternal grandmother's reaction to my parents' courtship and imminent marriage was hostile. Actually hostile is an understatement; hysteria is a more apposite word. My grandmother, Ellen Margaret Brinkworth, had been born in 1905 into poverty in London and hoisted herself up to become the proud owner of a new semidetached house in one of London's new suburbs, Abbey Wood. These suburbs sprang up in the countryside surrounding London in the 1930s, extending the city. Like her mother, she too was a dressmaker, and she was a snob, fancying herself middle class and therefore above the lower orders from which she had removed herself. How, exactly, when her husband, Leslie, was a milkman, is beyond me. As a teenager my grandmother had:

Imagined balls and finery, envied the porcelain
doll's
hands of the la-di-dahs who came for fittings,
rejected
her station in life and aspired to a husband, a
child, a home
in the suburbs, and entry to the middle classes.

My grandmother could not believe that her only child, into whom she had poured her dreams "like syrup on treacle tart," was going to ruin everything by marrying someone one gene up from an ape: an African. And most importantly, in her curtain-twitching, small-minded, suburban neighbourhood—what on earth would the neighbours think?

As my grandmother, fictionalised as Peggy, says to my mother (Ellen) in Lara:

Do you think I'm going to let you ruin your life
by marrying … a darkie … a nigger-man?
You silly girl!
I have sacrificed my whole life for you. How
cruel
How can you do this to me, your own mother!
Peggy gulped a scream down, balled fist to open
mouth,
a Greek tragic-mask, then fled the room, bawling.

My grandmother's younger sister Connie, who was a school teacher and my mother's favourite aunt, had been her surrogate mother when she was evacuated to the countryside in Norfolk during the Second World War. My mother and Connie had a very loving relationship. Connie was married to Eric who was an exiled German Jew, and, more importantly, a doctor. He became a symbol of the family's entry into the middle classes and was held in reverential respect by the family. In Lara, Peggy (my grandmother) describes the impact when the family were introduced to him,

You should've seen Ma when she met him. She
almost fell
on her knees and kissed his hand like he was
the Pope.
A doctor in the family! Well, we're all hoping.

Amid all the hysteria, Eric took my mother into his study and impressed upon her the fact that her future half-caste children would inherit the weaknesses of both races and that they would have psychological problems like the American Negroes.

When my parents married in 1955, Connie and Eric cut my mother off completely. They only spoke twice (once at my grandmother's funeral) in the subsequent forty-six years before Connie died in 2001. I grew up with this tragic story hanging over me: that members of my mother's family were so appalled at her interracial marriage they treated her as if she was dead.

My task as a novelist was to try and understand why Connie and Eric behaved as they did. I described it like this in Lara, writing that they wanted to "fit into suburbia like red bricks, / crazy paving relations would have made them stand out."

When, as a teenager, I heard that my siblings and I were considered doomed to a genetic inferiority before we were born, it made my blood boil, as did my mother's obvious pain at being rejected. The twist to this story is that Eric, who is now a sprightly nonagenarian, and I have become friends since Connie's death. He offered friendship and, out of curiosity, I took it. I find this very lucid, strong-minded individual fascinating, especially as I love history, and Eric, who was born in 1903 and arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933, has almost lived an entire century. We go for tea at Selfridges department store on Oxford Street and argue amicably about everything. He's even found himself a very nice sixty-something-year-old Swiss girlfriend with whom he goes on Caribbean cruises. Prior to that he had an even-younger Moroccan girlfriend, which I found intriguing. The past has been healed. For he and I, at least.

So I wanted to write a book about that significant moment in my personal family history which was also an important part of British social history, when Africans were coming to Britain in considerable numbers, marrying white English women, and producing mixed-race children. As far as I knew, no one had written about it in fiction and I felt it was an important story to tell. In my parents' case, they stayed married for thirty-three years, in spite of the fact that the odds were stacked against them. In reality most of these interracial unions did not last and a lot of mixed-race children ended up in homes or were raised by their single, white mothers.

As the writing of Lara progressed, so too did the narrative, way beyond my original intentions. This is the magic of writing: that I never know where a story is going to lead me so that by the time it's finished I've surprised even myself. I sit down to write and somehow the story emerges through the act of writing because a lot of the story sure ain't in my head before I put pen to paper. By the time Lara was completed, it spanned 150 years, seven generations, and three continents of my family history, including my own childhood. It tracked both sides of my parents' ancestry—on my father's side to his father, Gregorio, and imagined grandfather Baba, who were part of the migration of freed slaves from Brazil in the nineteenth century to the west coast of Africa—in their case the Brazilian Quarter of Lagos in Nigeria where my father grew up. I also explored my father's colonial Nigerian childhood and his arrival in Britain. On my mother's side, there was her childhood in 1930s London, and evacuation to the countryside during the Second World War, and her own mother's childhood in north London at the turn of the twentieth century.

More recently I've also added new material for the book's republication in 2009. I've written about my maternal great-great-grandfather, Louis Wilkening, who arrived in London from Hamburg, Germany, circa 1868. My mother always knew, vaguely, that there was a German ancestor somewhere on her father's side, and a couple of years ago I was able to track him down via the amazing public records Web site www.ancestry.co.uk. I trawled Births, Deaths, and Marriages, the National Census, and was also able to find his naturalization documents as well as his will, all valuable sources of information. I was able to build up a picture of this "Master Baker" who had settled in Woolwich nearly a hundred years before I was born, had a large family and successful business, but was broken by anti-German persecution in Britain during the First World War, dying in 1920, a year after it ended:

I am a man, not a nation, Louis was given to
say,
when he spoke, which, when the heart of his
beloved
Gladys stopped, was a rare cause for celebration.
He took to playing Wagner so loud the neighbours
complained, but he didn't give a damn about
them,
playing Ride of the Valkyries over and over
again.

I've also added my maternal great-great-grandmother's story to the book (Emma). She was Irish, Catholic, came from Birr in County Offaly, and, with my great-grandmother Mary Jane, settled in London in the late 1800s. The British treatment of the Irish is well documented. Like black people they were considered a subspecies of the human race, more akin to beasts and monkeys, and treated accordingly. Indeed they were known as "white Negroes." And so to add this strand of my family history to the novel, with my Irish ancestors arriving in London and encountering blatant prejudice, was to broaden this particular strand of the book so that the immigrant experience of Britain was about a wider range of foreigners pursuing dreams or seeking to survive in the host country, but encountering hostility and discrimination.

Lara is a book very close to my heart. I love history and I love my own family history. I enjoy uncovering or reimagining that which is hidden away and feel

quite forlorn that so many secrets will be forever buried with my ancestors. I'm very greedy, I want to know it all. I only discovered my Brazilian ancestry when I was a young adult and grilling my father for any snippets of information about his past. He let slip about his Brazilian father as if it was of no great importance, but to me it was an essential part of the mosaic of which I am a small part. I like to know where I come from.

In a short span of ten years my mother produced four boys and four girls. I was the fourth. She was devoutly Roman Catholic and didn't believe in contraception. She was also an only child who had always dreamed of having lots of children. Eight children in Britain in those days constituted a massive family. Most families consisted of anything from one to four children. Five was pushing it. Eight was just plain flagrant! When my oldest sister was born the rift between my mother and grandmother was healed. My grandmother, who had cursed my cherry red-outfitted mother on her wedding day with the charming words "Marry in red, wish you were dead!," did an about-turn:

A fizzy-eyed beauty with Ovaltine skin, Juliana
our eldest, instantly stitched the fetid wound
diseasing
my parents and Nana, who, on seeing this
caramel delight
was instantly mollified, fell uncontrollably in
love with her.
No thick-lipped Negroid child was this but a
paler hybrid,
and Nana, who'd expected a Taiwo replica,
worshipped her.

Not so with my father. He and my grandmother never forgave each other and while there was a lifelong ceasefire, they never spent any time with each other. Every Saturday my mother would take two of her children to visit my grandmother in the house she grew up in Abbey Wood, a short bus ride away. I enjoyed these trips when I was young, mainly because my grandmother lived in a cosy little semidetached house with carpets and ornaments and nice furniture. She had a proper little garden too, with flowers and a rockery, and she fed us cute little sandwiches and cakes, and gave us sweets and a few treasured pennies as pocket money. When we were older we took it in turns mowing her lawn and weeding her garden for fifty pence. My grandmother was about four foot ten inches tall and petite, with peachy skin which never lined even in old age. She wore her grey bob hair cut and had a limp from when she had broken her hip. She was always smartly turned out in one of her own designs and the idea of wearing trousers would have been abhorrent to her. She was always lovely to us kids and I felt loved by her, but it was only as an adult that I became aware that there were no photographs of us, her only grandchildren, in her house, except one of my eldest sister when she was a tiny tot.

As we grew older we'd take it in turns to visit Nana alone and do her garden, always having tea with her afterwards. Everything in her world was precise and proper and I'd be careful not to stain her cream broderie anglaise tablecloth, break her engraved crockery, or use her silver cutlery incorrectly. As for conversation? "They chatted politely but nothing was said." I never once had an easy conversation with my grandmother, our worlds were too far apart and neither of us knew how to reach out over the chasm:

When Lara crossed the portal into No. 31 she
stepped
out of her personality as if ditching muddy
boots,
slipped into the tiny bone bodice of an eighteenth
century lady, inhaled, and tightly laced up."

Once, when I was in my twenties, I told my grandmother that I wanted to visit Nigeria.

"What do you want to go there for, dear?" she replied. "You'll come back looking like a nigger."

My mother told her off when I reported back. So while I don't doubt that my grandmother loved her grandchildren, she was ashamed of us or at least she never reconciled herself to our mixed-race heritage.

My mother was a schoolteacher who resumed teaching when her youngest were of age to go to school. First she taught at Plumcroft Primary School (five-to-eleven-year-olds), and later at Eaglesfield School, a big boys' comprehensive (eleven-to-eighteen-year-olds). Some of us children attended Notre Dame Convent primary school next door, which was hugely convenient, tumbling out of one gate and into another, although we were still often late for school.

My parents were poor and struggled to support their growing brood of children on only my father's pay as a welder. My father worked hard, came home tired, and helped my mother with us kids. Our household had none of the luxuries we take for granted today such as a washing machine, fridge, central heating, or even a bath. As small children we were washed in the kitchen sink. My mother never stopped working either. How she managed it, without any external support, is remarkable. My mother is a lovely, kind, gentle woman who has amazing fortitude. I can't even imagine having one child, let alone raising eight. Both my parents were about five foot five inches. My mother had short brown hair and was plump. My father kept his slim, muscly build almost until his dying day in 2001. He always looked fifteen years younger than his age and had the tiniest waist. We children are generally tall. My brothers are all six-footers and I'm five foot nine inches. Whenever I am out with my mother I don't think people imagine she's my mother for a second. When I took my grandmother to church when I was a teenager, I imagined people thought I must be her nurse.

My grandmother made clothes and blankets for us, but she rarely visited our house. My mother's school friends were all scattered around the world at this stage and as my parents didn't really mix with the neighbours, she was well and truly on her own. As was I, or so it felt, although in reality I was surrounded by my siblings. We tended to pair off according to age and gender and my pairing was with my younger sister. We shared an attic bedroom for some fifteen years and didn't get on. We hardly ever spoke to each other and as I was the eldest I made sure I decorated the bedroom according to my taste. One of us was always racing down four flights of stairs to complain, usually crying, to our mother about something the other one had done or said. I must have been a complete pain in the arse in my selfish, stroppy teens when I got into acting and began to read aloud every night from poetry, such as Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur or plays such as Under Milkwood, loving the sound of my own overenunciating voice and ignoring my sister's pleas to shut up. Once we'd left home and didn't have to live together, my sister and I began to develop a good relationship.

As a child I loved reading and it was, I believe, the genesis of my career as a writer. Writers are invariably

readers first. Reading was an adventure, an escape, it was stimulation and entertainment; above all it was companionship. Whatever the reality of my mundane life, when I opened the pages of a novel I was transported somewhere else. Our house wasn't bookish, far from it. There were about twenty books in a tiny bookcase and that was the extent of the family library. My mother loved reading but had no time to indulge. I don't think my father ever read a novel in his life, although he was an avid newspaper reader, of the left-wing tabloid the Daily Mirror and the more salacious Sunday tabloid News of the World. Later, as he got involved in socialist politics, he also read the Morning Star, which was the organ of the Communist Party, and the Socialist Worker.

Every Saturday I would walk to Woolwich town centre to the public library and loan a book or two. Lara, my persona in the novel, says,

Books enlarged my world, I ate, shat and
f**ked them,
words seduced me: xenophobia, melancholia,
oscillation,
osmosis, metamorphosis, mulatto, etymology,
fellatio.

I read the usual children's books but I don't really remember them other than Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, which was one of the few books I actually owned. Perhaps this was because once I'd read them they disappeared back to the library so there was no visual reminder that a certain book had once entered my consciousness and entertained me for a few days. I dread to think what the affect will be of e-books when they gain momentum. I cannot imagine life without my bookshelves crammed full of proper, hard-copy books, books which I've read, dipped into for research, or put on the waiting list. Some books sit on the waiting list for years calling me to be read, and when I do I am often surprised at how wonderful a book is, such as Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I often scan my bookshelves when I need to reference certain books, picking up favourite old books and remembering the pleasure they once gave me.

I enjoyed school, attending Eltham Hill Girls Grammar School for seven years. For most of my time there I was one of only a handful of girls of colour, but in spite of this I experienced almost no direct racism. Perhaps this was because I was mixed-race and therefore a more acceptable colour; perhaps this was because the good girls of Eltham were far too genteel to fling out crude, verbal insults; perhaps it was because I was a strong personality and people just didn't mess; perhaps it was because as one of only a few girls of visible difference, we just blended in and got away with it. Perhaps it was because of all of the above. I raise this as an issue because the more racially mixed London schools at that time were suffering from a heavy dose of racist conflict and black and Asian pupils tended to be picked on by staff and students alike. Members of my family endured this too. But somehow it eluded me. I did feel like an outsider, though. How could I not? I looked different and there was no validation of my blackness in society at large.

As Lara says, "Home. I searched but could not find myself, / not on the screen, billboards, books, magazines, / and first and last not in the mirror, my demon, my love / which faded my brownness into a Bardot likeness."

I became aware much later in life that I also tended to befriend people who, like me, didn't quite fit in. One of my best childhood friends was of Iraqi and English parentage and another was of Greek and English. My first boyfriend was of Hungarian-Jewish and English parentage, and my second boyfriend grew up in South Africa. Even today most of my friends have some kind of mixed-cultural heritage. I guess we tend to gravitate toward one another.

Another major formative influence happened when I was twelve years old. I joined Greenwich Young People's Theatre (GYPT), which was run from a disused church, and which I subsequently attended every Friday night for four years. My father was a strict man, so strict in fact that throughout my childhood he rarely let us leave the house to do normal things like play in the street outside or in the park and certainly not hang out with school friends. Home sometimes felt like a prison. And in the absence of surplus income for family holidays, I would spend all summer at home, rarely venturing out of the house on my own except to the shops or library.

My father's reason for keeping us on a tight leash was that he didn't want us getting into trouble, which is understandable, when one considers how victimized black people were in '70s Britain, especially young black males who were routinely stopped by the police on the notorious SUS Law, the informal name for the stop-and-search powers of the police. Still, my father's attitude was extreme, probably because the England he encountered as a young man was indeed a very hostile one. For us children, it meant hours spent at home feeling claustrophobic and getting on each other's nerves.

My father ruled us like a military dictator; he was fierce, quick to temper, and we were scared of him. I never once had a proper conversation with him. His means of communication with us was in the form of a reprimand for some misdemeanour or another. It was only as an adult that I learned to talk to him without my heart thumping inside my chest. When we were naughty he would hit us on the hand with a wooden spoon, and later, as we got older, he'd use a leather belt which was kept hanging by the kitchen window for that purpose. Hitting or beating children was not that prevalent in '70s Britain where the liberalism of the '60s had relaxed parental discipline. As a Nigerian man, however, his methods of punishment were actually quite lenient. As a child in Nigeria, as punishment he had had to bend over, put his right forefinger on the ground, raise his left leg behind him in a straight line, and stay motionless. Heck, we got off lightly.

My father's presence hung over my childhood like a storm cloud. As a teenager, if I wanted to go out with my friends from school I would have to ask him three weeks in advance, be grilled on the possible outing, and usually listen to a lecture about children misbehaving for an hour before hearing him say the dreaded word—NO. It was easier not to ask. My mother wanted to give us more freedom, and this was the major tussle in their intercultural marriage: how to raise their children.

As usual, with the wisdom of hindsight, I can see how difficult it would have been to control so many children so that we did not go astray. He did the best that he could do, and I did learn to care for him and communicate with him in later life, but not all of us survived the repressive atmosphere of those years.

The youth theatre changed my life. It was around the corner from where I lived and my father decided it was full of nice, well-behaved kids and therefore a safe place to go. He gave his assent. It was where I learnt to express myself, rather than just read the written creativity of others in books. I played theatre games (I am a tree!), acted in plays, and I loved the ensemble, community nature of the youth theatre, which was so accepting of difference. I was the only black girl at the youth theatre, but that didn't matter one iota. I was at home.

With my thespian appetite whetted, my school years were spent getting involved in drama. I had an inspiring drama teacher, Peter Cook, who gave me some meaty roles to play in the school plays. I then went to drama school, trained to be an actress, and ran my own theatre company for several years. The company was called, rather literally, Theatre of Black Women, and it was formed by myself and two drama school friends, Patricia St. Hilaire and Paulette Randall. We founded it because there was so little work for black women in theatre in 1982, when we graduated, and the work that was available was often marginal and stereotypical. I really didn't want to play a nurse, prostitute, or criminal, thank you very much. It was also Britain's first black women's theatre company and of that I am proud.

So the whole focus of my teenage years was spent stepping into someone else's shoes on stage—a fictional character's shoes—pretending to be someone else. It's what I do now, only these days I get to play God and create the characters myself. It was the next stage, after reading, in my development as the writer I would one day become. This connection between acting and writing has become more evident to me over the years, especially because my own work involves a lot of first-person narratives which are very lifelike and dramatic and which attempt to capture the nuance and colloquialism of speech. The process of building and understanding character for the page is less physical than when doing the same thing for performance, but it involves a concentration of emotional energy and an imaginative capacity to think beyond myself and into the heart, mind, and soul of another human being. It's always a challenge to bring a character to life, and I get such a buzz when they leap off the page and start to talk to me. They do, honest.

Writing Lara was a cathartic experience. In investigating my family history I was discovering where I had come from, who my people were; the later German and Irish additions have simply made the mosaic richer. I had grown up in a white society thousands of miles away from my father's Nigerian culture and he had passed little of his culture onto his children. We knew no Yoruba words, nothing of his tribe's traditions or history. As a young adult growing into my blackness I felt a huge gap in my understanding of the part of me that came from him. Lara took me to Nigeria for the first time, and to Brazil; it took me into my parents' memory and histories, and through research into the cultural history of several nations. It also took me into my own past through the tale of Lara, based on myself, and her journey to self-awareness and acceptance of her mixed heritage. As a teenager she says,

I longed for an image
a story, to speak me, describe me, birth me
whole.
Living in my skin, I was, but which one?"

Growing up I knew nothing about my father's culture or food, not a single word of his Yoruba language or traditions. The society I did know about, my British, London, suburban one, was not one where I felt safe. Our windows were always being smashed in by local hoodlums and to his dying day my father slept with a hammer by the side of his bed. I knew that I did not slot easily into the land of my birth, my home country, the only one I knew, but did not have the vocabulary to articulate it. As a young adult I wondered if there was a place for me elsewhere.

By the end of the book Lara is sailing down the Amazon River in Brazil, a wealth of family history behind her, and she has this epiphany: "I watch the jungle fill me up as the boat slices through / melted chocolate, its engine, my heart, synchronised. / We move on into solitude, my thoughts become free / of the chaos of the city, uncensored, the river calms me. / I become my parents, my ancestors, my gods."

All of my books to date in some way connect Africa to Europe and the past to the present. They are a manifestation of my own cultural mix and complexity coupled with my desire to write out the histories which I feel deserve attention. In the '80s I read a nonfiction book called Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer, which blew my mind. The book charts the history of black people on these isles beginning with a legion of African Moors who had been stationed at Hadrian's Wall in the north of the country around 300 A.D. To think that Africans had been living in Britain so long ago made my jaw drop. The book also looks at the significant presence of black people in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards. This wasn't a history which was taught in British schools. It still isn't. Britain believed, and to a certain extent still does, that black people only arrived on these shores in the twentieth century, most notably with my father's postwar generation. This other history, which goes so much deeper into the making of this nation, just isn't part of national consciousness … yet. I recently wrote a prose piece about all the people who have settled in Britain from abroad over two millennia. It ended thus: "Poverty, war, famine, persecution, religion, enslavement, dreams. We were exiles, asylum seekers, economic migrants, forced labourers, conquerors, refugees. We married the locals and had their children so that a little bit of us was left in each and every one of us. We are all boat people, after all. It's in our DNA."

In 2001 I published The Emperor's Babe, a verse novel about a black girl called Zuleika, of Sudanese parents, who grows up in Roman London (Londinium) 1,800 years ago. It was published about sixteen years after I first heard about Africans in Roman London. During that period the idea of doing something creatively with this little-known history had been percolating. In 1999 I was offered a writer's residency at the Museum of London, which has a fantastic Roman gallery with life-sized recreations of shops, living areas, and so forth. I remember wandering around the gallery and realising that I wanted to place a black female in Roman Britain as my way of bringing to light this ancient history.

Zuleika, the "babe" of the novel, was born and the entire novel is told in her voice. Married at eleven years of age by her father to a rich Roman three times her age, she recreates Roman London through her eyes as she grows up in the city. Her best pals are her childhood friend Alba, whose sexual mores are modelled on Samantha from Sex and the City, and Venus, a drag queen who runs a drag bar called Mount Venus down by the docks. Zuleika eventually falls in love with the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, who was a real historical figure and an African from Libya who ruled the Roman Empire for forty years. The Emperor's Babe is not about race, per se, because the Romans did not practice discrimination against people on grounds of their colour, but the basic tenet underpinning the novel is a challenge to the traditional belief that Britain was white until recently. The novel is also very anachronistic, so that although it is set in ancient times it also references and slots in aspects of our modern-day society, viewing the past through the lens of the

present. Zuleika's voice, too, is that of a very modern miss. She is feisty, witty, passionate, and she can be a bit of a bitch. I didn't want the reader to see history as something remote, fuddy-duddy, inaccessible, and irrelevant. I wanted them to connect to the story I had to tell as if it were almost happening now. Here is Zuleika describing Severus when he takes her to the gladiator games:

Severus strode towards the arched
triumphal entrance, his purple Armani toga
flowing behind him like wings,
his back straight, wide, unbreakable;
powerful thigh muscles flexed over chunky
scarred knees,
black lace-up booties crunched on gravel
and I thought, you, my darling arrogant
bastard, are just too damn sexy
for my face, ta-rah-tid!
Nothing would ever get in his way, no one
could oppose him and survive.

Travel has been a big part of my adult life. As a teenager I had been to Norway with the youth theatre during the gloriously hot summer of 1976. I'd loved the beautiful green countryside and fjords. I'd also been on a day trip to France. In my GAP year I'd saved my pennies and spent a month hitching around France and the island of Corsica with a backpack. After I left college I had a lover in Amsterdam whom I used to visit whenever I could, and I went on tour to Holland and Germany with Theatre of Black Women. Then, in 1985, I visited Kenya on my first trip to Africa, to attend the U.N. Decade for Women Conference. This was the biggie. My first time on African soil. I remember standing in the centre of the capital Nairobi in shock at seeing only black faces around me. I had only ever been to countries where black people were in the minority. What an eye opener it was for my twenty-five-year-old self to finally blend in to my environment. Well, almost. I also travelled to Egypt and Madagascar during that time and began to write poems drawing on my travels. These appeared in my poetry collection Island of Abraham which was published in 1994. Unfortunately, by the time the book was out I felt quite removed from the poems contained therein, all of which were written in my twenties and I was by then thirty-four. I felt I'd moved on and matured as a writer as by this time I was immersed in writing Lara, which I thought a much more exciting piece of work. I have never wanted this poetry book to be people's introduction to my work. The collection draws on my interest in African history and travels to Africa. Here's an excerpt from "Simple Scribe:"

"I am a simple scribe

looking out at the night Nile

surveying the lights

dabbling on the banks

where the Bedouins stay."

In the second half of the '80s I spent a lot of time travelling across Europe by car, summering on the Greek island of Crete. I was working in theatre, living cheaply and saving my money to travel. My possessions could be stuffed into a few black plastic bags. I so enjoyed the freedom of the road, never quite knowing where I would land up and what would happen. The child who felt imprisoned in the big house in Woolwich had found her freedom, and boy did she love it.

For about two years, from 1988 to 1989, I lived in Spain and Turkey where my friend and I camped by a lagoon for over nine months. We had an idea that we would drive overland to Australia, catching ships where necessary. Driving from London to India wasn't such a barmy idea, as there used to be a Magic Bus which did just that, but to go beyond India was somewhat nutty. However, as the fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie was in full swing, our gateway via Iran was closed to all British citizens. In any event, we somehow managed to blag visas from the Iraqi High Commission in Turkey, so that we could drive down through Iraq to Kuwait, which we did. Once there, however, we discovered passenger ships had stopped sailing to India years before due to the first Gulf War. Forward planning was not our strong point, but having an adventure was, and our naivete—or to put it plainly, stupidity—meant doing things that more sensible travellers would shy away from. A short time later Iraq invaded Kuwait, and it was only then I realised that we had had a narrow escape.

My 2005 novel-with-verse, Soul Tourist, which fuses prose, poetry, and script-like forms, drew on this journey for inspiration. The novel is set in 1988 and is about a mismatched couple. There's Stanley, a banker of Jamaican parentage, and Jessie, a singer and comedienne of Ghanaian parentage. She sweeps him off his feet and together they travel across Europe in her rusty old banger of a car, a Lada Niva. The journey they go on is pretty much the one I took, but that's where autobiography ends. The characters are fictional. Along the way, their relationship develops and ultimately deteriorates.

But I wanted the novel to be about more than a couple's trip across Europe. I wanted to write about the black history of Europe, extending my palette eastward. I had by this stage read many books about this subject matter—the individuals and movements of black people in Europe going back deep into history—and I wanted to work creatively with this. So I concocted the idea that Stanley has a latent ability to see ghosts, which is realised through his encounter with Jessie, and so en route he meets eleven ghosts of colour from European history who impact on him and the story. The ghosts I came up with included Lucy Negro, a "Negro" courtesan from the late 1600s whom I reimagine as Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets; the Chevalier de St. George, the son of a slave and a French nobleman, who became one of France's most accomplished composers and swordsmen in the 1800s; Louise Marie, rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of the wife of the French king Louis IV, and her black dwarf, Nabo; Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence, who was mixed-race; and Pushkin, known as the father of Russian literature, whose great-grandfather was African.

Soul Tourists was an experiment. I never intended to create a new form with it, a novel-with-verse, but it didn't work when I attempted to write it as a prose novel, all 90,000 words. It only came alive when I transformed it by mixing in other genres, and in the final novel of 50,000 words I had extracted the essence of the story and discarded all that was superfluous. I might take, say, thirty pages of a conversation and interaction between Jessie and Stanley and turn it into the much-more-succinct form of a script, which is sometimes dialogue and sometimes an expression of thoughts that are not vocalized. Here they are in Italy, having breakfast in an outdoors café:

S: She leans forward and uses her arms to lever her breasts, which pop up from her low-cut T-shirt like two veined rugby balls. The waiter's eyes nearly fall out, which I suspect is her intention.

J: He's got to see I'm desired by others.

S: It's that croissant-spitting time again. My beloved's eating habits have long since ceased to be endearing.

J: Sometimes when I'm eating, he looks so irritated, like I shouldn't be enjoying myself. Not my fault he's not a foodie.

S: I look at the sky, so does she. I rub my nose, she does too. We're reached the stage in our relationship where we subconsciously mirror each other. I thought we'd broken it, but (I cough, a moment later, she coughs) we're still merging.

One of the most unexpected aspects of being a writer is that it has continued to afford me many new travel experiences in my professional life. With the publication of Lara I began to tour abroad as a writer, often for the British Council, which, among other things, promotes British arts internationally. Since 1997 I've been on over sixty tours on six continents. These trips range from one-night gigs at conferences or festivals in, for example, Italy or Sweden, to two-week tours in New Zealand or Malaysia, to much longer writers' residencies in, for example, South Africa, where I taught at the University of the Western Cape, or at various universities in America, including Georgetown in Washington, DC, and at Barnard College in New York City. I loved living in New York for a term; it's my second-favourite city after London. I'm usually booked to run creative writing workshops, to read from my books and talk about them, and to give papers or take part in discussions about literature.

I could never have imagined that so much travel would have been integral to my writing career all those years ago when I began the process of spending thousands of hours sitting down to write poems and create stories with words. Writing was sedentary, lonely and private, wasn't it? I would never have imagined that it would take me to Iceland, where I saw the natural geysers spouting water so high into the air, or Jamaica, where I read at the wonderful Calabash Festival which takes place under a tent on the coast; or to the closed societies of Saudi Arabia and Libya where I ran the first-ever creative-writing workshops for women for the British Council.

Whether one tours abroad or not, to be a writer in these times requires an engagement with some level of performance. Most of the poets in the UK have to go on reading tours in order to promote their books as this is usually their only means of getting the book out there. To tour as a poet is to make sure that your writing does not disappear without trace. Novelists also tour widely, especially around the publication of a new book. Although I stopped acting in theatre in 1986, I am so grateful that my acting has enabled me to "play" many of the characters I have created, especially when I read in the characters' voices, such as the many very different people in Lara, or in the voice of Zuleika in The Emperor's Babe, or those of Jessie and Stanley from Soul Tourists. And I'm so grateful that while I might often be nervous about having to face an audience of complete strangers to read from my work—with no idea of how I will be received—my anxiety doesn't show. In theatre you never show fear. You style it out. You exude confidence.

My most recent novel, Blonde Roots, marks a departure for me. It's a novel without verse! Yep, there's not single line of poetry in it. I finally managed to do what I'd been trying to do for years. When I initially wrote Lara, it was a prose novel of some 200 pages. It didn't work. My background was as a poet and playwright and I found the sheer enormity of writing so many words daunting and confusing. I transformed the story into poetry and it became a verse novel wherein I could indulge my love of language, imagery, and concision. The Emperor's Babe began life as a few poems and grew into a verse novel. Once again, the form wasn't intended, but the character of Zuleika grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go until I'd written her life story. As I've said, Soul Tourists was originally prose, but because the language was dead on the page, the book only came to life when I transformed it into other genres.

I feel that Blonde Roots is, finally, the prose novel I always wanted to write. It may be prose, but I pay the same attention to language, to rhythm and sound, sense detail and imagery, as I do with poetry, and it's concise with no superfluity.

In keeping with my greater project of exploring history and its contemporary relevance to today, Blonde Roots is about the transatlantic slave trade—with a difference. In this novel I make Africans the masters and Europeans the slaves, and I have to say that at times I had a lot of fun with it. In the parallel universe of the novel, the map of the world has been changed. Europa is located where Africa now sits. Africa is located where Europe now sits. Britain is now an African country called the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa and its capital city is called Londolo. The Caribbean is called the West Japanese Islands because Chinua Chukwameka, an Ambossan explorer, mistook it for Japan and the name stuck.

I wanted to invert this particular slave trade so that people would look at it afresh; that through asking the question "What if?" they would gain a new understanding of this aspect of western history. At a fundamental level, I hope the novel challenges received notions of savagery and civilisation because if we take a clear-eyed look at the respective histories of Europe and Africa, the former cannot assume the moral high ground over the latter. Blonde Roots is about a woman called Doris, who is kidnapped from Europa as a child and enslaved in the New World by the Ambossans. She yearns to escape and return to the family she left behind.

The Ambossans called us tribes but we were many nations, each with our own language and funny old customs, like the Border Landers, whose men wore tartan skirts with no knickers underneath.
The Ambossans also called Europa the Grey Continent, on account of the skies always being overcast.
But oh, how I longed for the incessant drizzle and harsh wind slapping my ears.
How I longed for my snug winter woollies and sturdy wooden clogs.
How I longed for Mum's warm dripping sandwiches and thick pumpkin broth.
How I longed for fire crackling in the hearth and our family sing-song around it.
How I longed for the far northern district from whence I was taken.
How I longed for England.
How I longed for home.

As a writer, I always want to do things differently. I'm not interested in following in anyone's footsteps or being considered part of a particular school of writing, although it's unavoidable in a culture which likes lumping artists together. As a writer who is black I'm usually boxed with other black writers so I'm usually called a Black British Writer and lumped under the academic heading "post-colonial." My work is noted for its originality, which I find immensely rewarding in itself. It certainly hasn't brought me great financial rewards (as yet—ever hopeful!), although it has won me awards and honours. I write because I have to, because I love it, because I want to make a unique contribution to the world, because I have so much I want to say and explore. I also write because I'm a middle child and heck, yes, I love the attention.

I was born into dualities. My mother was white, my father was black. My mother was English, my father was Nigerian. My mother was passive, my father was assertive. My mother was religious, my father was not. My mother was a white-collar worker, my father was a blue-collar worker. Both my parents were politically left wing and I remember joining them on anti-Nazi and antiracism demonstrations in the West End of London during my teenage years. There was a strong sense of fighting against injustice in our house and both my parents were active in politics. My mother was the trade union representative at her school for many years, and my father became a local councillor in our borough of Greenwich, devoting many hours to looking after the people in his district. I grew up Catholic, attended mass every Sunday from age five to fifteen, and then left the Church. I grew up with a political awareness that one should fight for what one believes is right. I don't do this in the political sphere but I feel that through my writing I am exploring areas I think are important to address—that I am making a difference. At the same time I am fulfilling my creative urge. I love being a writer, knowing that when I sit down to write a book words will flow, and that after two or more years a novel will be produced. This is my contribution.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Daily Telepgraph (London, England), July 2, 2005, Lloyd Evans, review of SoulTourists.

Guardian (London, England), June 16, 2001, Peter Forbes, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 9; July 8, 2006, Jane Housham, review of Soul Tourists, p. 19; August 2, 2008, Helen Oyeyemi, review of Blonde Roots, p. 12.

Independent, June 2, 2001, Diana Evans, "Welcome to Swinging Londinium," Features section, p. 9; July 29, 2005, Peter Forbes, review of Soul Tourists, p. 24; August 1, 2008, Diana Evans, review of BlondeRoots.

Independent on Sunday, July 10, 2005, Kevin Le Gendre, review of Soul Tourists, p. 22.

Journal of CommonwealthLiterature, spring, 2006, Karen Hooper, interview with Evaristo, pp. 3-6.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2002, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 207.

Library Journal, April 15, 2002, Roger A. Berger, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 125.

New Statesman, August 4, 2008, Sara Waji, review of Blonde Roots, p. 51.

New York Times, May 3, 2002, Richard Eder, "From Slum Sister to Emperor's Lover, All in A.D. 211," p. E47.

New York Times Book Review, July 28, 2002, Eric McHenry, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 11.

Observer, August 24, 2008, Stephanie Merritt, review of BlondeRoots.

Obsidian III, fall-winter, 2004, Sofia Muñoz Valdivieso, interview with Evaristo, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly, February 25, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 38.

Times (London, England), June 6, 2001, Erica Wagner, "Ancient and Modern"; June 13, 2001, Melissa Katsoulis, "Hanging Out with the It-Girl of Lon- dinium"; June 24, 2005, Tom Gotti, "Travels with Ghost," p. 22; July 25, 2008, Joan Smith, review of Blonde Roots.

World Literature Today, spring, 1998, Kwame Dawes, review of Lara, pp. 378-379; winter, 2002, Bruce King, review of The Emperor's Babe, p. 147.