Reflections on Meeting the New Daughters of Africa

I walked across the bridge to Somerset House on dreary grey Monday evening. Halfway across the bridge, I looked down at the water and watched it flow, even in its muddy state there was a continuous flow. Some of that water evaporated this summer and turned into clouds, and those clouds could be the same ones that were now pouring rain down on me. A continuous lineage of water that continues to flow and nourish the earth.

Margaret Busby is that bridge to me from which I can look and see my literary lineage flow and thrive. And I need to be able to see that especially in a world where the publishing sector is run by people that have no relation, nor interest or experience in preserving my lineage. The only experience they have is in exoticising, erasing and diminishing the content of black womxn writers. And it is due to this that I only found out about May Ayim when I was 23 years old. Now, May Ayim is a central root in the upholding of my spine.

Yet, in 1992 Busby, already, included Ayim in her first collection, Daughters of Africa. This is an important inclusion as the voices of black womxn living in other parts of Europe outside of London should have their narratives heard alongside Black British, African, Caribbean and African…