A Harlot's Progress

"Yes. What Dabydeen does is construct a whole narrative around this painting, and at the same time interrogates the function of art. It’s not simply taking the Black boy and giving him a story, it’s actually asking: why was he in this painting? Dabydeen is also an art historian, and one of the things that he has talked about eloquently is the way that in the 18th century, Black children and especially boys, were taken by very wealthy families and put in the household, a bit like page boys… slave children effectively. You often see them in portraits. Dabydeen suggests that one of the reasons they are in portraits is to contrast their black skin with the white skin of the main people in the portrait, so in a way they exist to facilitate whiteness, amplify whiteness, make us particularly aware of whiteness as a phenomenon. “I love books that convey compassion. It’s so important” The main part of the book is about slavery. What excited me so much when I read it was the question of how you represent really terrible trauma in a way that’s accessible to a reader. Because I don’t know about you, but when I read accounts of slavery, particularly slave narratives, I keep flinching. It’s hard to do. But we need to flinch, because it is horrendous. That violence is really hard to achieve in fiction. One of the things that David Dabydeen does is create a kind of surreal form of narrative for those parts that are talking about slavery. So, on the slave ship, you have heads rolling across the deck. It’s quite hallucinogenic, a sort of heightened reality. For me, that was absolutely the most appropriate language for describing the slave trade; it really captured the horrors. It also goes on to think about the aristocracy of 18th century Britain and how much of their wealth was absolutely contingent on maintaining that slave trade. All kinds of structures are looked at: the role of art in upholding and maintaining discrimination and colonialism; the position of the aristocracy… What also interested me was that the white working classes in the novel were treated respectfully and humanely as people also caught up in an inhumane system. Although they treated Mungo, the slave boy, badly, there were reasons for that. I love books that convey compassion. It’s so important. It’s that idea of revisionist sort of history, decolonising history, so that the stories that are otherwise absent get told. One of the things about contemporary fiction about slavery is that it can say things that slave narratives themselves couldn’t say—because they were censored narratives. They were usually told to, mediated by, abolitionists. Dabydeen plays with that in this novel, by having Mungo tell his story to an abolitionist. And the abolitionist gets lots of different versions and doesn’t know what to do with any of it. He doesn’t know what’s true and what isn’t. Of course, the novel is also contesting the idea of a single truth; it’s giving us multiple truths and multiple ways of seeing things, which British history has tended not to do. I think one of the things that’s happened, certainly with English literature, is that it works through exclusion. ‘Is this novel a great novel?’ ‘ This is what you need to read, don’t bother with the rest.’ That kind of exclusion is often based on race, class and gender. So we need not to replicate that when we think about Black British writing. It’s a real problem, because, after all, who does the choosing? It tends to be educated people. Historically, in universities, it’s been white people, middle class people. So of course the narratives are chosen to reflect their interests and values. We don’t want that. Even if it’s somebody like Bernardine Evaristo—she’s very aware that she doesn’t want her values to be reflected in the books that she chooses. She wants something broader than that."