A Life Elsewhere

"Yes. Segun is someone I published at Cape. He is Nigerian but his parents were diplomats so he has travelled a lot and his stories reflect that. One of them, Monday Morning, won the Caine prize. It’s about a little boy living in a refugee hostel and he sees this amazing hotel one day and goes in and falls asleep on one of the beds. The writing is very still and there is not much plot really, but the stories are about how people live when they are seeking a life elsewhere. Jumbo and Jacinta is about a couple who have moved to Canada, near Niagara, and the quiet wife suddenly realises that she has never liked her husband. There is another one about a man who goes to a dominatrix and it gets very pervy and sexually disturbing. What I love about Segun is that he doesn’t do the thing that people do when they are writing about black people, like talking about coffee-coloured skin or deep chocolate eyes or anything. He just writes them as people and I love him for that. As a black reader who reads a lot I always find there is a big pointer to this person being black. Segun writes them as people, not ‘other’ people. Books are often like men in that you can be surprised by the ones you find cute. I had lunch with a scout recently and she was asking me about the books I publish and looked at my list. She said that I obviously had an interest in identity, in people moving from place to place. I said; ‘Really?!’ So, I went and looked back at my list and I think they are often about lives lived elsewhere. There is a sense of loss in the stories, yes. Sometimes people move from a bad situation to a better one though, and the characters are never sure what it is that they’ve lost. In some cases it’s obvious, like the couple whose child has died, but when you move to a new place and have to become a new self you have to ask yourself who that old self was, something you wouldn’t have to do if you stayed in the same village where your grandparents grew up. You have to ask questions and that is what I like. I like the questioning."