Who is Onyeka
Black Prince
Dickens is a friend of mine as much as Ayi Kwe Armah and I don’t have to apologise for either. It is a sequel in the sense that it flows naturally from Waiting to Explode, but it stands alone.
It is only the spiritual understanding, animistic and real, the quest for truth, which keeps hope alive in the city ghetto where you are marked out for failure, branded beast at every feast before you ever became men, or women.
I wanted to tell the streets how they were, not as in some glossy MTV rap video, but how they really were, with the seedy side of drug dealing, prostitution and vice. I wanted to talk about community and how the lives of everybody on this earth in some way are interconnected and they are. Even the most racist white man like Johnny the Vic has a relationship with Tayo, even if this is indirect, i.e. a friend of a friend or just by confrontation. This is a small Island and I wanted to show the smallness of England and London in particular and how the insularity of our intentions is not born out by the reality of our lives.
As much as we owe our origin to the Caribbean and Africa we have been made in England, even our rejection of mainstream culture is because we feel we have been rejected. We assume the role of outsiders because there is less emotional pain for us. After all we first settled in areas where nobody else wanted to live, that’s why we were allowed there. It is against this backdrop, of disadvantage and isolation that I write the Black Prince. As a testament of inner city decay interwoven with black resistance it is an example of culture reinventing itself.
Racism so often stated and misquoted. I wanted to show the reader how power works. How racism operates through power; yes you’ve got Johnny, Toni and others, the way they express themselves is through violence, but Mr Thomas expresses his own brand through words and intellectual verbosity. The result is the same, though the methods are different.
Youth and vitality energises the pace of the plot, it moves. I don’t subscribe to the standards of English some of you may like. The words form a pattern. The language is designed to carry you on a journey like a painter in cubism giving you a symbol as an indication of life, hesitating, then giving you another. I use words to do this, expressing moments of confusion with words in strange places, or misspoken, or misplaced. Moments of tension in bold or hyphenated.
Synopsis of the Black Prince (beware spoilers)
The first few chapters are really a beginning but I do not begin with a chapter heading, you begin to read and then you realise you are in it like life. No one ever asked us if we were ready to be born, but asked or not we are - with a scream and a shout. We begin with the London cat prancing though the decaying city streets and Johnny and friends discussing in broken cockney how blacks are finished. Only to be interrupted in mid rant by Mr Patel the owner of Mr Patel’s famous off licence in Peckham’s front line. Despite his attempt to prevent a fatality and a wish that aka Jamaican Bob was in his car. As is usually the case with naked racial violence, it is always those who least expect it who are subject to it!
Like a Shakespearean Tragedy where the extras appear before the main characters, eventually Tayo arrives in chapter three. A year older and wiser we hope! Reasoning with Peter and finding amusement in William Lynch an off duty policeman.
A brief interlude of Tav and his Sikh nationalism obviously not tolerated in cool Britannia. Paul finds this out to his cost, surely Enoch, Winston and Victoria would turn in their graves.
We move swiftly now though Tayo’s rights of passage, a rights of passage of conflict, fumbling in his friendship with Michael and Flex, the latter bringing some real street credibility to their endeavours of waking up the local youth and turning them from materialism to self love. Susan and her mothering thorough the pain of experience, as if reason and discipline could destroy apathy, she tries. Busta her absent baby father in some hilarious and horrendous encounters with Tayo and others, his drug dealing friends in an underworld of connections with organised crime and the establishment.
Personal success seen through the eyes of the eradication of the evil of ignorance, surely the teaching of black history cannot be wrong for a multicultural state? But it appears that the forces of ignorance like the brothers in the chapter Superniggaz, or the misguided liberal lecturers, or social workers, do not see it that way. But their opposition only heightens the resolve of the young. Even ones like Melanie and Jenny are caught up in the emotion.
Appia and Susan in a spiritual union if not a physical one. Tayo and Appia finding peace within and for each other. Susan committing herself to education and Michael trying not to get involved but by circumstance dragged in. But like a shadow over the earth, the British Empire and the imperial way looms. It is only the spiritual understanding, the quest for truth, which keeps hope alive.
So there is success, even with Ade coming to terms with trans-racial adoption and the pain he had tried to put aside, or Flex rationalising his mixed parentage, prison and juggling.
There is unfulfilled longing like a dog howling at the moon hoping to bring it down, much joy, pain, horror, humour and laughter. Laughter so much that people have fallen off their chairs whilst reading on the train, I have seen it with my own eyes. I swear. There is loneliness, even if that is self-induced by behaviour. As for justice, who has the right to appoint themselves as the guardians of morality on the street? Is it a matter for the police and the public servants, well what if they don’t understand the issues and don’t care even if they do? Surely a community needs it’s own standards of morality and the vitality of youth whether we like it or not, will determine its own levels. Indeed they may be ones we don’t approve of or understand, but when you face the barrel of a gun, surely as the one in the firing line only you can determine what is justice or retribution, what is fair and unfair. When young black men and women are killed or maimed for the colour of their skin, what should be the response. Well you make up your own mind. Thoughts and ideas to provoke discussions I believe.