I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be

A Memoir in Eight Lives

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different.

This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a small-time criminal with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride.

Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of black British experience. Written the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'M BLACK, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE is a unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

© Colin Grant 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Reviews

  • Colin Grant writes about the characters in his family with the mischievous, dramatic flair of a natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read.
    Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author Girl, Woman, Other

About the author

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is an author, historian and critic. He has written acclaimed biographies of the Wailers and of Marcus Garvey. Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. His most recent book, Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. He is director of WritersMosaic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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