Between Starshine and Clay by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

Author:Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Footnote Press

HER WORLD, OUR WORLD

In 2004, fifty writers of Caribbean, Asian and African descent gathered for a photograph at the British Library. The photograph, inspired by the famous photograph of American jazz musicians taken in New York in 1958, A Great Day in Harlem, was called A Great Day in London. In the 2004 photograph, Margaret stands almost hidden in the upper left-hand corner, behind literary critic Maya Jaggi and in front of novelist Lawrence Scott and poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Almost everyone in the picture is either a friend, a colleague or an author whom Margaret has published or mentored over the years – all pioneering Black and Asian writers involved in publishing or the arts. Margaret’s connections within the Black arts scene extend around the world.

Among the articles and photographs that Margaret shares with me in March is a letter she received from the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, dated December 15, 1975, on the letterhead of Transition magazine, sent from Accra, Ghana. Soyinka is writing in response to a letter in which Margaret takes him to task for including few women in his anthology, Poems of Black Africa. He promises to do better. ‘I know that in the next edition I will especially search for poetry by women.’ This, I discover, became the impetus for Margaret to compile her anthology, Daughters of Africa. And in that anthology Toni Morrison features prominently – one year before she became the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize.

When I had a chance to meet and interview Morrison in 2017, I wrote to Margaret asking what Morrison was like. Margaret responded by sending me a video of an interview she did with Morrison in February 1988. In it a young-looking, soft-spoken Margaret speaks with poise and insight about the literary context and importance of Morrison’s work. The interview had been hurriedly made after another TV interview between the two of them was dropped over concerns about poor audience size. One month later, Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize. Margaret jokes about being in great demand between 1992 and 1993, when Morrison and then Walcott won the Nobel Prize, because ‘none of the mainstream literary critics seemed to have read either of them at that point.’

The more I learn about Margaret, the more I realize that her life has indeed been ‘necessary, fascinating and picturesque’. Margaret seems to have been in touch with every prominent figure in Black literature, art and music from across the world – a veritable pan-African who’s who of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. My curiosity grows, and we begin what becomes an ongoing and sometimes daily email exchange. Margaret eventually sends me a virtual album labelled: A&B/MB (assorted book jackets, cuttings, letters, photos). It takes me hours to work through the hundreds of images included. As I pore over them, I keep thinking that her archives need to be properly stored and protected in a national archive, especially so when she tells me the reason she has scanned

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