88
Drum: READS
Some Kind of Black
by Diran Adebayo
Abacus, 238 pages, £6.99
Young fitted-up and black
In his first novel, Diran Adebayo takes in
almost every aspect of black life in contemporary Britain. But is it possible to
write a novel which educates as it
entertains? Matt Taylor takes a look and
thinks the answer is yes.
In other hands, a novel like this
could have gone terribly wrong. It’s
a tribute to Diran Adebayo’s selfconfidence and sure touch that in
fact it’s a really good read, moving
seamlessly between tenderness and
toughness.
You’d barely notice it unless you
looked, but Adebayo has managed
to cover drugs, mixed-race relationships, gangster culture, intra-black
racism, family violence, sickle-cell
anaemia, police violence, religion
versus secularism and issues of
where home is, and all in one novel.
But this is no dreary political tract.
Written in stylish street talk, it’s
only the sex scenes that should
have been cut to spare the reader.
(“She took his seed, she took it
neat. Did that mean love?”)
Some Kind of Black is the story of
twenty-something Dele and his
sister Dapo. British-born to proud,
old-fashioned (for which read controlling, ambitious and sporadically
violent) Nigerian parents, Dele is
one of the few black students in
his year at the University of Oxford
where
he’s
learned a little
about Law and
a lot about
working his
status as ‘novelty negro’. He’s just
getting a degree to fulfil his father’s
ambitions and would rather be in
London living it large with his friend
Concrete and hanging out with his
much-loved sister, Dapo, who
spends a lot of her time in hospital
enduring painful episodes of sickle
cell disease.
When Concrete, Dele and Dapo
are wrongfully arrested and brutalised by vicious police racists, Dapo
ends up in intensive care and Dele
gets politicised. He also begins to
run with a new crowd of people,
including Sol, who has hazy connections with the Nation of Islam,
a suspiciously smart West End flat,
and no obvious source of income.
As Dapo lies in a coma, the local
community decides to demonstrate
its opposition to the Police’s behaviour but unity soon gives way to
factions and violence.
Yes, it does sound like a car crash
between Trisha and Jerry Springer,
but no, it doesn’t read that way.
Large parts of this novel are real
page-turning material, and the
scenes between Dele and a feisty
though stricken Dapo are tender
enough to draw tears. The ending
is a little abrupt but you can judge
that for yourself.
The thing you might find yourself
wondering, however, is about the
book’s target audience. In many
ways this might be seen as a novel
primarily for non-black readers; it
certainly offers a refreshingly truthful insight (on many fronts) into
black life in modern Britain, cutting
effortlessly through the simplistic
political correctness that insists
everyone is the same and culture
counts for nothing. You certainly
won’t get this kind of low-down at
‘diversity seminars’.