I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be: A Memoir in Eight Lives

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A memoir told through a series of intimate portraits, which build into a poignant, insightful and unforgettable testimony of West Indian British experience 'A natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read' Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER 'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a maverick and small-time ganja dealer with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of the black British experience. Written with the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be is an unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

Reviews

A memoir told through [Grant's] interaction with his family and others, but presented in impeccable prose and woven together with all the tensions and humour of the best fiction. A hugely enjoyable read. Get it now. -- Roger Robinson, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning author of A PORTABLE PARADISE
This outstanding memoir contains a beautiful tenderness and a courageous realness. Vibrant, poignant and brutally frank, it is rooted in authenticity and wisdom, the details of a world well-observed. Grant's work here is powerful, evocative, empowered and forthright. -- Salena Godden, author of MRS DEATH MISSES DEATH
An important and timely book for an increasingly diverse and diffuse set of communities, a reminder of those questions of home and belonging, an invitation to parse them. * Guardian *
Thoughtfully and meticulously constructed... a refined yet unflinching book. * Sunday Times *
Related to the question of "Are you really black enough" is the question "Are you really British enough"... Grant's most revealing work... this compelling and poignant book gives a convincing answer to the first question: that there is more than one way to be black. * New Statesman *

Author Bio

Colin Grant is an author, historian and critic. He has written acclaimed biographies of the Wailers and of Marcus Garvey. Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. His most recent book, Homecoming- Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. He is director of WritersMosaic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.