Just been to hospital for sleep studies. They were going to keep me over night (the clue is in the title apparently) but fortunately it isn’t happening and I have been given some apparatus to use at home that will monitor my sleep pattern and makes me look like a cross between buzz lightyear and a ghostbuster. At the moment I sleep on average about five hours a night and I am up early writing. Still the day does not have enough hours. But I love what I do and I do what I love. However, to do good work one must also do good rest. Take that to the bank.
2pm. A friend and colleague Karen Gebay a producer for BBC who works in Manchester
and whom I have known now for about 19 years is putting together a fascinating
documentary to be toured around England. It is footage of black folks who came to England in the fifties. The dignity of the interviewees tells me something incredibly
sad. Where did that dignity go? And why?
Ofcourse it is still here. But if I look to my television screens now it is difficult to see myself represented with such high minded dignity. We are an “issue” here and we, in a binary way, are forced to relate to the “issue”. Thank god for artists – the spirits. The ones who hold no truck with this! Agghhh.
Anyway I am doing the voice over for the documentary at the BBC. There is a car purring away outside and on the way out of my apartment I meet my neighbour who works for the world service. It’s good to see her. She is a Scot and has a suitcase and is off to India
so its perfect timing. She jumps in the car and I give her a lift to that wonderful building that is The World Service at Bush House in The Aldwych. She works at the BBC.I tell her of the book Beasts of No Nation. And she is immediately onto getting it. It’s about
a child soldier and I think it is astounding and so does Salman Rushdie.
The car speeds through London to Weston House. I put down the recording of the voice-over for this historical archive footage and I am on my way home when who should I see in Islington but Margaret Busby – she of Busby and Allison – one of the greatest
pioneering Black women in British publishing. She dives in the car and we’re off to hackney. It’s the anniversary of Allison and Busby and she has archive in files of her first press. It’s a spirited conversation – she’s a spirited woman, who never seems to age. I am kind of honoured to have spent that half hour with her.
http://www.africanwritersabroad.org.uk/Events/Margaret%20Busby.htm
On his behest I give the BBC driver the details of the book Beasts Of No Nation as he is from Sierra Leone and has experience of child soldiers which neither of us go into. I step out of the car. I have one hour before I travel to South London. The art is me, the archive is what Margaret showed me and the anarchy is inside the child soldiers head – the one who narrates the entire book.