New Daughters of Africa — a new anthology of a groundbreaking book

The world has changed since the early 1990s. Political economies have morphed, social orders have shifted, and the pantheon of great writers has expanded. However, with the exception of a few internationally renowned authors, black women writers remain woefully under-represented. For this reason, and more, Margaret Busby’s New Daughters of Africa, a companion volume to her earlier anthology, Daughters of Africa (1992) is an important contribution.

Busby is well suited to such a project. She is a daughter of Africa, and a mother of diasporic African literature, in the broadest sense. She became the UK’s youngest publisher, and the first black woman in such a position, when she co-founded Allison & Busby in 1967, and she has spent the entirety of her professional life as an active member of literary communities on the African continent and in the Americas. In this remarkable collection, she reminds us of the historic and continued value of forging connections across the boundaries of nation states.

Anthologies can read as mere assortment or collection. But their function, particularly when well composed — as is the case with this book — can be much more deliberate. Busby’s choice to organise the writers by generation, rather than region or date of publication, has a powerful effect. From the 18th century to the present, the location of black women across borders — yet always in the winds of political, economic and social orders — emerges. Questions of freedom, autonomy, family, race and social transformation present themselves in generational waves. Thus, with more than 200 contributors, this anthology is also a social and cultural world history.

This is a rare case in which writers from the US do not overwhelm the category of “black writers”. But neither does Busby disregard the significance of African-American authors. Rather, she places them in a global community and a vast tradition. Likewise, she questions any static or uncomplicated understanding of blackness, and challenges the marginalisation of black women in our understanding of modernity. Hence, one cannot read this anthology and ever think that their lives were not important, even essential, to understanding global history.

In recent years, as a result of generations of social and political struggle, greater attention has been paid to the lot of black women. However, their interior lives continue to be neglected. New Daughters of Africa reminds us that black women writers have not simply been moved about by history, but have been thinkers and artists in the thick of things. Aja Monet, one of the poets of the Black Lives Matter generation, who writes about love and intimacy as a primary aspect of freedom fighting, is on these pages, along with the renowned Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi.

There is a historical component, but the collection also offers fascinating insights into the present. While Carolyn Cooper, born in the 1950s, writes about online dating, Anaïs Duplan, a writer born in the 1990s, writes about a contemporary painting that riffs on classic portraiture. There is a dance through generations as well as a confrontation with the current pastiche of globalisation. Perhaps the most potent motif in the collection is the dual sense of displacement and yearning, both for home and for escape.

Busby includes the work of widely acclaimed writers such as Toni Morrison, Buchi Emecheta and Edwidge Danticat. But she also includes the words of lesser known but similarly talented writers. To put the lesser known and the widely known writers in communion with one another is to refuse the tendency of the publishing world to exceptionalise black writers. In this way, Busby opens the door wide and allows her readers to witness the conversations that have occurred between black women writers, conversations about culture, love, inheritance and more, without mediation from the powerful institutions of publishing and academia. The effect is marvellous.

This new anthology has an increased urgency. We live in an age when old forms of bigotry are being revived

It is also necessary. Daughters of Africa was groundbreaking for bringing the tradition of black women writers to the fore. This new anthology has an increased urgency. We live in an age when old forms of bigotry are being revived. We also live at a time when there are increasing demands on our attention. It is easy to note only the splashiest debut, or a single voice that speaks for many marginalised people. Busby invites us to slow down, to read through a tradition that will lead us to fall in love with beautiful and insightful writers we might not otherwise encounter, and to be open to a wide variety of forms, themes and authors.

I have found myself returning to a phrase of one of the writers in the anthology who was new to me. In her 1993 essay “The Autobiography of an Idea”, Arthenia Bates Millican wrote: “I have kissed the darkness hello. And as I move, I search through that darkness for the most brilliant fight.” This is the calling, and the beauty, of both the old and the new daughters of Africa.

New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing, by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby, Myriad Publishers, RRP£30, 840 pages

Imani Perry is professor of African-American studies at Princeton University 

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Letter in response to this article:

Hansberry, another daughter of Africa / From Beth G Raps, Eagle Rock, VA, US