History, as James Baldwin once famously observed is not the story of the past but the present. Coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the docking of SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948, this issue shows us how the many global intersections of Britain's mixed cultural past continue to reverberate in today's migrant present. When Andrea Levy's award-winning historical novel, Small Island, first appeared in 2004, it was applauded for its fictional portraits of the forgotten voices of ‘Windrush’, for bringing the nation's post-war migrant history centre stage and its timely intervention into what had largely been a male founding narrative of arrival and settlement. Reviewers were often unaware of earlier Caribbean and black British fictions of this era; whether classics, such as The Lonely Londoners (Sam Selvon, 1956), The Emigrants (George Lamming, 1954) or, more significantly here, given the objective of our special section focussing on ‘Windrush women’, Beryl Gilroy's belatedly published 1950s novel, In Praise of Love and Children (1994). Despite such gaps, the appearance of Small Island was significant; not only was Levy, herself a daughter of Windrush, presenting her story through a range of narratives – male and female, Caribbean, Irish – but its engaging depiction of Britain's diverse migrant histories began to touch a wide public readership — I once saw over five people reading the paperback version in one carriage on the London Underground just after the novel's winning of the Orange Prize was announced. Interestingly Levy's title, which playfully signalled Britain's shrinking post-war global status – once ‘great’ empire, now ‘small island’ – was not only powerfully ironic but remains prescient, especially given ongoing Brexit debates over a decade later around ‘Englishness’, national identity, the rights of belonging or leave to stay. There is no doubt, as Grace Aneiza Ali and many of the other contributors to this issue differently observe, that migration continues to be the ‘defining moment of the modern era’ and ‘few’ can be ‘untouched’ by its ‘sweeping narrative’.
Highlighting the diversity of the period of migration following ‘Windrush’ and looking within and outside the parameters of what still figures as a powerfully constructed icon, this issue brings together Caribbean and black British voices from across the generations. Loosely defined here as the ‘Women of Windrush’, our special section comprises a range of genres and a mix representing the contemporary writing and works from past generations. It is a small sample which is by no means representative or comprehensive. Hannah Lowe's feature-interview with three contemporary poets (Grace Nichols, Karen McCarthy-Woolf and Jay Bernard) points to the icon of ‘Windrush’ as ‘that huge fiction of a ship’ (Jackie Kay), a fiction which continues regardless to impact on many imaginations. In interrogating the enduring legacy of this myth, we feature an extract from Beryl Gilroy's pioneering novel, In Praise of Love and Children, as well as providing the transcription of two interviews, originally conducted at the ICA in 1986, to celebrate the publication of Gilroy's Frangipani House and a first novel, Timepiece by Janice Shinebourne. Like the 2004 moment when Levy's Small Island was first published, the mid-1980s was a critical period for the publication of black and Asian women's writing in Britain. Publishers influenced by the success of African-American writing in the US began to see the migrant black experience in Britain as a potentially profitable market. And it was at this moment that adventurous publishers such as Virago and the Women's Press began to commission anthologies such as the groundbreaking Watchers and Seekers (edited by Rhonda Cobham and Merle Collins, Women's Press, 1987).This volume of stories, essays and poems, featuring only the work of women, included, amongst many others, now well-known writers such as Collins herself, Amryl Johnson (who sadly died in Britain in 2001), Meiling Jin and Valerie Bloom. Above all, it was a moment when black women writing in Britain began to get the long-awaited recognition they deserved. Too often anthologised or out of print, the many women who contributed to such vital anthologies are not always remembered. Moreover, as Maria del Pilar Kaladeen's memoir ‘Windrushed’ painfully evokes, amnesia was generated not only from without, but from within, as some of the older generation chose to sidestep their own histories, shrouding their own pasts from their black British offspring.
The preoccupations of many of the writers featured in our special section intersect of course in illuminating ways with the works of others published here. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, one of Zimbabwe's bright new talents and author of the eagerly awaited novel House of Stone, reflects on the invention of national histories in her discussion with Brian Chikwawa about Zimbabwe in the post-Mugabe era: ‘Good writing’ she stresses, always ‘transcends the moment’; it goes ‘beyond’ that ‘which eventually becomes history’. Contemporary South African politics and the writing of fiction also features prominently as a concern in Francesca Mussi's essay on the late Nadine Gordimer's writing of her post Truth and Reconciliation novel, The House Gun. Examining the un-settlings of global politics in the Middle East, Adnan Sarwar's honest coming-of-age memoir, as he remembers living the ‘War on Terror’, offers us complex reflections following the 2003 invasion and the ethical reverberations of its aftermath. As always, we feature several absorbing stories from around the world which transport the reader into different local contexts: whether the almost surrealistic and hidden bookish underworld of forgotten Hindi novels in Connaught Place, Delhi (Sujit Suraf), to the gripping and dark ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Corpse’ (Gemma Weekes) or the intimate and humorous portrait of a dramatic moment of change within an Indo-Caribbean family's village existence (Niala Maharaj).
Finally, we would like to congratulate the authors of our three outstanding winning entries from the 2017 Wasafiri New Writing Prize. In platforming the established alongside the new, Wasafiri has continued in its mission to connect writers across worlds and to seek out fresh and new international talents. Our distinguished panel of judges – literary journalist and critic, Boyd Tonkin; poet and dramatist, Sabrina Mahfouz; and memoirist, Andrea Stewart – were unanimously impressed by the level, range and quality of the pieces. We feature here then for the first time the work of Julie Abrams-Humphries, whose winning life-writing piece, ‘Crinoline Lady’, has inspired her to write a longer book about her grandmother's life; ‘Some Freedom Dreams’ by rising star Ndinda Kioko (fiction winner); and ‘Petit Navire’, a perfectly crafted short poem by Mehran Waheed. We hope all our readers will continue to spread the word about the Wasafiri New Writing Prize which draws on work from across the globe and continues to attract a wide readership.