Friday, February 27, 2009

File Under: A Rant

I had heard good things about Doreen Baingana's book "Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe" and was pleased that my library had a copy in stock.

On my first attempt to find it, I drew a blank, but this is a common problem in my library - many books are listed as in stock, but are not be found on the shelves.

On my next visit, I looked for it again on the Fiction shelves where it was categorised as being, but again to no avail. Then I had a thought occurred to me and I looked on the Black Writers shelf, and there it was.

Doreen Baingana is a black writer in so much as she is black and a writer, but I still think the catalogue's record of the book being in the General Fiction section is more accurate. For me the Black Writers section has connotations and I as a white woman would normally have no interest in those books and would feel somewhat of a fraud in that section (in the same way that I enjoy the beats of NWA, but know that "911s a Joke in Your Town" is not aimed at me).

At what point does a writer who is black cease to be a Black Writer and just become a Writer?

Having taken the book home, I read "Tropical Fish" in one evening. It was fantastic. Set mainly in Uganda, some of its themes were very specific to that place, but other parts of it were universal. It is a wonderful book, and not one that should be marginalised in the Black Writers shelf.

So the lessons learnt are once more to not trust the library catalogue and to look in the Black Writers section again because who knows what other gems might be tucked away there.

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