The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo

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Andre Bagoo is an excellent poet, he writes great short stories, and as an essayist – oh my goodness…

This collection ranges far and wide in terms of subject matter – but always insightful.

To quote one of them …

But let’s say Twain is right and all we do is conform. Can’t conforming still be a form of resistance? Can’t it trigger rebellion? Be it’s own sign of an independent assertion of values?

When Rosa Parks got onto the bus at Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, she didn’t disobey any rules. She conformed to them. The prevailing laws divided the bus into white and black sections. Parks sat in the black section. When the white section filled up, the bus driver attempted to expand the section for whites-only. The law called for “equal but separate accommodations”. It didn’t permit this practice of shifting the goalpost, a practice that had apparently developed over time. Parks stayed in the section designated for her under the law… It was by conforming to a racist law that she asserted her individuality...”(p33)

We all know the story of Rosa Parks – except I had never heard this story of Rosa – and it is so powerful, it is a turning of the oppressors rules against them – you take their power away by playing by their rules.

Later in the collection the long essay The Free Colony asks a really profound question in this paragraph…

Motivating the so-called independence movement of the 1960s and the granting of independence was not the idea of freedom, but of race. Colonial subjects were citizens of the British Empire. They could (and I will argue should) have been fully integrated into Great Britain and given the right to name Her Majesty’s prime minister at the polls. But the idea of black, brown, or yellow bodies from overseas taking root at Westminster; the idea of a society in which a pale class is no longer wholly in control of power had to be avoided at all costs, as remains the case today in Britain, with the fear of the foreign, of the fear, for instance, of Turkey joining the European Union. (p118)

This is the route that France has taken with its overseas departments – but it has not overcome racism in France. Bagoo holds a mirror up to us Brits, and what we see in it is awful. I am not accountable for all the wrongs the British state has done, and yet my comfortable life is in part, possibly in large part, a result of that history.