London bookstore

Race and Britian

As I approached Bookmarks Bookshop, a woman greeted me on the sidewalk and invited me to attend an author discussion.  Knowing it was a socialist bookstore, I was intrigued, there aren’t a lot of socialist discussions in Los Angeles.  The author was Onyeka, a law lecturer and historian who writes novels about the black British experience.  I have heard black Americans talk about the difference between being a black person in England and one in the United States, that they didn’t feel the taint of racism abroad that they do at times at home.  My sense was that Britain was an example of how we as American could improve in our race relations.  Onyeka’s take on the black British experience was completely new to me.

Onyeka described himself as a third generation British citizen who was still treated as a foreigner because of his skin color.  The term ‘foreigner’ struck me, for all of our race issues, I don’t think black Americans are thought of as foreigners.  Onyeka’s grandfather was of the generation who came from Africa to fight for the UK during World War II and were intensely patriotic and religious.  Two generations later, Onyeka feels his complexion branded him as an outsider, one of the fallen, potentially a terrorist, and definitely foreign.  Where his grandfather proudly displayed the Union Jack, Onyeka’s community displayed pictures of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers.  He described his novels (The Trilogy:  Waiting to Explode – How to Survive, The Black Prince – Leopards in the Temple, and The Phoenix – Misrule in the Land of Nod) as capturing a brief moment in time in 1980s.  A decade that Onyeka concluded was the worst for blacks:  Michael Jackson was the highest payed black man and he changed his nose and lightened his skin color, more black men were marrying white women, and the political culture shifted to the right.  Onyeka wrote concurrently to the events and hoped to capture an ethos that faded by the 1990s and was gone by 2000.

I don’t have any knowledge to evaluate the veracity of Onyeka’s statements and I don’t think I need to, the value in the talk was hearing the views of someone in a world completely different from mine.  I’m reminded that it is exactly that experience that independent bookstores provide, they open the window to worlds I’d never otherwise experience.

To the Left

The author talk reflected the diverse viewpoints of the stock of books.  The selection and categories of books at Bookmarks are unique.  The store devotes entire shelves to the ‘Black Struggle,’ ‘Fighting Racism,’ ‘War & Imperialism – Middle East,’ ‘Marx & Marxism.’  It was a bit like walking into a Soviet bookstore with numerous options involving Trotsky, Marx, and Lenin.  As a former Soviet Studies major (yes, I’m old enough that the title of one of my majors is a country that no longer exists), it felt like re-visiting my college curriculum.  Being a socialist bookstore, many of the books advocated a viewpoint far different from mainstream thought.  It can be a bit startling, but a intriguing at the same time.  If you’re in Bloomsbury, peek in, who knows what you’ll learn.

Bookmarks Bookshop

1 Bloomsbury St

London, WC1B 3QE

England