This morning’s lockdown commute is Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now edited by Susheila Nasta. This anthology of essays was published in 2019, in part, to celebrate 35 years of a the ground breaking and incredibly important Wasafiri magazine. It includes essays by Shivanee Ramlochan, Ramesh Gunesekera, Kei Miller, Bernadine Evaristo, James Kelman, and Marina Warner (❤️) on the power of literature to be politically transformative. It’s about identity, citizenship, belonging, and so much more. Read it!

Memory is a fickle thing. Yet, sometimes it alights on an event and attaches itself firmly, so that a particular moment becomes conspicuous in our memory of a certain phase of our lives. It was March 2016. My friend — a Bengali Indian studying with me at the University of Oxford — recounted this. She was having lunch, eating a sandwich on a bench in the small park outside the office where she worked in the evenings during our student days. As she sat there, an old white woman came up to her out of nowhere. She looked at her pointedly and said, “Shut your brown mouth while you eat.” Then walked off.

I asked my friend how she responded to such an unexpected attack. She said the shock was so strong it took her a while to register what had happened. Soon, the June 2016 referendum for Brexit took place in the United Kingdom and this kind of racism erupted more widely in the country — this time with a certain impunity, a certain pervasive flair.

We live in a greatly altered world. The rise of right wing nationalisms and of political intolerance has manifested itself in the curtailing of human rights and the silencing of civil societies across the world. In such a politically bleak time, can wounded communities or individuals, who have been historically subjected to discrimination and systematic disempowerment, find any solace in literature? The “brave new words” in this anthology of the same name, edited by Susheila Nasta — the title an obvious play on Aldous Huxley’s historic 1932 novel — try to offer something of an answer to this overarching question, by drawing together essays by writers from a range of marginalised positions: black writers, black women writers, immigrant writers, gay writers and writers from the global South.

In the opening essay, ‘Call Yourself English’, British writer Blake Morrison vividly recounts his personal experience of a world changed starkly in the wake of Brexit as a biracial, middle-class, male writer. Describing post-Brexit England, he writes: “‘[g]o home’ the bigots cry. But home isn’t a place you come from. Home is a place you make. In the 1940s my mother came from Ireland to make hers in rural Yorkshire.” The disillusionment of this scenario is brought home when he describes the England he imagined as a teenager, a world in which “none of this was going to happen ... we would all be trans — transnational, that is: fluid, pluralistic, opposed to borders.” Morrison, however, is hopeful as he glimpses a liberating force in literature. At a time where borders, both territorial and imagined, are pervasively affecting the way people imagine and treat those distant and different from them, he suggests that “there remains a way to roam freely: in books.”

This is an invitation to the reader to reflect on reading as a practice. Reading this essay, I found myself wondering, in what ways can we as writers, readers and academics alter both the literature we choose to focus on and the way we read it, to read more inclusively and diversely? The necessity of this becomes alarmingly clear in another essay, ‘The Minds of Writers’, by Jamaican poet Kei Miller, which calls out the thinly veiled dehumanisation that gay and queer characters have been subjected to in Caribbean literature. Miller argues that there is a great responsibility for writers to fully explore communities and individuals as characters with real life and specificity, rather than depicting them as caricatures. He is one of the writers in this anthology who spells the task for writers quite clearly: “[t]hat is the high and holy order of writers — to tell people who they are, to offer them both the plodding banality and the incredible magic hood of their personhood.” And so he echoes other voices in the anthology when he issues a gentle plea to resist a cursory overview of any book or genre of literature. Instead, he advocates a conscious and full-bodied engagement with literature, reading deeply and with self-awareness, to combat biases both within ourselves and others. For Miller, this entails that we become conscious of how the literary canon has historically been complicit in processes of marginalisation and that we make efforts to resist, and renegotiate the terms of the dominant literary discourse itself, when we interact with it as readers or writers.

A new anthology of essays questions whether communities or individuals historically subjected to discrimination and systematic disempowerment can find solace in literature

In a cultural moment in which travel is glamorised and mass-marketed as a means of finding your ‘self’, a common thread in several essays is the discomfort of not fully embracing any one ‘home’ or place of belonging. By studying immigrants’ experiences, the disillusionment that lies behind many such aspirations is probed, leading Polish-born writer Eva Hoffman to declare that “most people still live local rather than global lives, and they derive their sense of attachment to such places — a need which has been ignored by the more globalised ‘liberal elites’.”

Brave New Words explores the theme of exclusion at various levels — it articulates not only the consequences of being expelled from countries and territorial affiliations, but from language itself. In her essay, ‘Seeking the Tree of Life’, Hoffman recounts her memories of migrating from Poland to England and trying to adopt English as a language. She writes: “for a while ... I was in effect without language, as Polish went deep underground ... and English remained a baffling terra incognita. But what I felt even more saliently was that I was without an internal language in which to talk to myself. This was a brief but very radical and informative state, for it made me realise to what extent language constructs us, shapes our interior lives.” Personal memoirs such as this where writers venture into terra incognita as they delve into the abyss of memory make these essays so rewarding for the reader as she finds experiences which are, perhaps, painfully shared.

Another essay that I found to be didactic in a soothing, and at the same time sharply illuminating, way was Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘What a Time to be a (Black), (British), (Womxn) Writer’. Evaristo, whose novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize last year, offers a detailed history of the black feminist movement in the UK during the last half of the century. Evaristo stringently beckons black writers and activists to learn from their predecessors by fully appreciating the rich history of black women writers in the age before social media, when activism was a more gradual and less marketable process.

Evaristo issues several important warnings that no one else is talking about in this moment of flamboyant, widely self-proclaimed progress with the rise of movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Her advice to young writers, especially, is to resist the enchantment and self-congratulatory impulse created by immediate recognition and fame through social media. As a young writer, I have personally struggled to carve out the intimate isolation that good writing grows out of, in an era in which we are constantly bombarded with images and news of other people’s lives. And so Evaristo’s words hit me quite hard as she bluntly writes: “we were doing it for ourselves rather than hoping to be cherry-picked by this country’s white cultural productions ... our journeys to sustaining a lifelong career comes from a deep place within us.”

Evaristo’s words led me to wonder, what is this “deep place within us” from which good writing comes? If I were to imagine this as a real space, what would it look like? Is it a space that allows human fragility and vulnerability? How do we navigate the often cold, hard fact of difference in this space? It also clears the space for more critical questions, such as how we should read literature in the ultra-digital age and what new responsibilities this volatile time brings on writers.

What’s great about this collection is that it does offer some degree of an answer to these overwhelming questions. However, it more importantly manages to fulfil its aim to include a wide range of diverse voices — geographically and culturally. I was, for instance, pleasantly surprised to find in the anthology Pakistani writer Bina Shah’s essay ‘The Life and Death of Pakistan’s Sabeen Mahmud’, about the human rights activist who was murdered in 2015. Reading Shah’s essay, I was utterly heartbroken as I revisited the pain and jolting sense of bewilderment that many Pakistanis felt in the wake of Mahmud’s death.

Which leads me to the point that this book is better enjoyed if it is treated as a starting point — an introduction to some fine, contemporary intellectuals and writers, and to the study of universally shared experiences such as marginalisation, exile, belonging and loneliness in the 21st century. I, for one, am excited to start reading — as the writers here suggest — more widely, deeply and holistically this year.

'I began writing poems not because I was inspired, but because I was compelled.' So begins Shivanee Ramlochan’s essay 'The Good Brown Girl: questioning obedience in Indo-Caribbean women'. As Ramlochan is compelled to write, I am to reading; I race through Brave New Words at breakneck speed, filling my commute with words and thoughts and quotes and knowledge. I am all at once amazed by its contents, and angered by it. The topics range from the familiar to entirely new, the writing stupendous throughout. This book is a celebration, and a list of disappointments. It’s bloody good.

I had really hoped it would be good. The cover reads like a dream list of interviewees for Bad Form, names that you know, and your mother would love. There are more awards in the 'About the authors' section at the back than I can fit into the word count for this review. Booker Prize awards, Costa Book awards, an endless spread of international literature prizes. Bernadine Evaristo, Blake Morrison, Romesh Gunesekera. All of these names make the book interesting; they do not, by themselves, make the book good. That’s the best bit. All of these essays are fascinating.

That, in a book of essays, is due in large part to the excellence of the editor. The editor of Brave New Words is Susheila Nasta, MBE, Professor of Contemporary and Modern Literatures at Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor Emeritus at the Open University. Not only that, but the Editor-in-Chief of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, founded in 1984, and which has just turned out its 100th edition. Brave New Words, in Nasta’s own words, 'celebrates 35 years of Wasafiri and continues its founding aims'. The cynical among you may deem the purpose of Brave New Words as 'diversity', I think it is more romantic than that. Its purpose is to bring you to worlds beyond the collective imagination of a world made stale by the monotony of contemporary literature. It’s a voyage into the world left purposefully unknown by the publishing industry. And it’s very, very interesting to read.

I am tempted in writing this review to summarise each essay and its authors, my thoughts on each, the internal debates it led me to. To encourage you to read their entirety, I will instead draw your attention to just three. The final essay in the collection by Maria Warner is 'Out Loud: the experience of literature in the digital space'. I am struggling to find words to describe, on an online blog, an essay discussing the impact of the internet on literature. Literature, she argues, has always been, and always will be, a transforming art form. Stories will always exist, but the mediums through which they are expressed are changing, and that is not just okay, but exciting. Her words fill me with curiosity; a newfound appreciation for the impact of the systems I take for granted to connect with you, our readership, our supporters. There is something just as exciting about reading Evaristo’s essay. Not only the essay itself, but the knowledge that we hold of her future success, reading her from 2019, reflecting on the creation of black womxn in the present day. 'What a Time to be a (Black) (British) (Womxn) Writer' declares the title. As I read the essay, I am filled with joy. She spouts off book after book, name after name of groundbreaking black writers who are breaking ground with their work in the 2010s. Though it is disheartening to realise that this work, that of The Slumflower, Otegha Uwagba, Gal-Dem, to name a few, is still ground-breaking in 2020, I am left with the resounding knowledge of Evaristo that 'the spirit of entrepreneurship, community and arts activism will us stain us long after it’s no longer woke to be “woke”'.

The last essay I will leave you with is the second in the collection, and the one that I began with. I may, perhaps, be biased towards it. Her 2017 poetry book Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is visceral. It defies explanation, it is transformative and loud and quiet and beautiful. Her essay is the same. It describes her youth, how her poetry began, and I think, for you young readers, it would be of most immense importance. She articulates her personal struggles so deeply, I would defy any person, any creed, any gender, to read it and not be moved. I will not spoil it for you, but I would implore you to read it.

This review is not intended to be gushing, but it probably is. In mid-January, when my desire to create beyond my salaried hours is dwindling, and my knowledge of my purpose is shaking, I am revitalised by the words of these authors. Brave New Words is a celebration of Wasafiri, and a celebration of literature.

Brave New Words edited by Susheila Nasta is a collection of 15 writers who explore the written word, critical thinking, and being a writer today. One of the writers is Bernardine Evaristo who explores what feminism is today and how many black writers have been erased by white canon. It gave me a lot to think about and many new things to read! 📚

There are many more writers in the collection that expands one’s perspective! Educate yourself!