An interview with Emma Dabiri
Moya Lothian-McLean | Tolka, Issue Three, August 2022
Emma Dabiri and I are talking at opposite ends of the day. In Pennsylvania, where the Dublin-born scholar and broadcaster is currently teaching, it’s 11 a.m.; for me, the evening is drawing close. But Dabiri is energised; it’s the third occasion (by my count) that we’ve been thrown together in an interview context and yet she always finds a new, fascinating thread of thought during our interactions.
Dabiri is a multi-discipline thinker. While her work fits into rich traditions of radical perspectives, her areas of interest – Black feminism, the Black–Irish experience, intersecting histories of oppression, marginalised history, to name but a few – are often underexplored. It’s why her non-fiction interventions have become such landmark works. Her first, Don’t Touch My Hair (2019), is well on its way to modern-classic status as a creative text, marrying academic research, personal experience and introducing African scholarship to a mainstream white Western audience. Dabiri’s second book was of no less import; the playfully named What White People Can Do Next (2021) was an answer to the plethora of self-professed ‘anti-racist’ books released the year previously. Instead of prescribing individual solutions based upon ‘privilege’, Dabiri laid out a blueprint for coalition, drawing upon decades of radical anti-racist work by the likes of the Combahee River Collective.
Outside of her work as an author, Dabiri boasts a broadcasting career likely the envy of many peers. She has numerous documentaries under her belt, across a number of mediums, from BBC Radio 4’s Journeys in Afrofuturism to Channel 4’s Me and My Afro (2020), which saw her recognised with the Cannes Lions Silver Award. Co-presenter of BBC Four’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces since 2017, Dabiri has extensive involvement in the art world too: she’s not only a trustee of the Hugh Lane Gallery but a member of the British Council’s New Arts and Creative Economy Advisory Group.
When we speak, during a sun-dappled March afternoon on my end, she is fresh off the back of teaching students at Villanova University, where she currently holds the Charles Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies for spring 2022. There she presides over two courses: Creative Non-Fiction for Change and Green and Black: Irish and Africana Literature and Culture. I’m thrilled to discover this titbit; it’s hard to imagine we could create a more fertile ground for discussion if we tried.
Moya Lothian-McLean (MLM): Primarily, the Emma Dabiri works which the public at large are most familiar with are your creative non-fiction books and essays. When did you first start lasering in on non-fiction as a preferred form? You’re an academic, so I’m interested in how you developed such a supple voice, one able to answer both the demands of academic writing and communicating with a mainstream audience, which is rarer than many expect. What were your first forays into non-fiction as a form?
Emma Dabiri (ED): I think the first serious non-fiction piece I wrote was when I was eight years old, and it was called ‘Break the Chains’. I wrote it while [my classmates] were studying for their [first] communion. My mum, like many people of her generation, is a lapsed Catholic. I grew up not being interested in making my communion or confirmation, which [to non-Catholics] doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it really was. So while everybody else was preparing for this huge ritual and really significant moment in their lives, studying their catechism, I had my own little section in class. I’d gotten really obsessed with Olaudah Equiano, the abolitionist, and wrote this little biography on him. It covered up to the present day – which was then the 1980s – and looked at the material conditions of Black people in America and how it was linked to this history of slavery.
I remember the cover really clearly; I’d drawn a man’s calf in shackles that trailed from the front to the back of the book. It didn’t get published, obviously. But that was the first piece of non-fiction I wrote – there’s definitely a steady through line between that and what I do now.
In terms of adult writing, it was when I was doing my PhD – I had all these ideas I wanted to express and get out more quickly than in, say, published journals. I think it was in 2013, I wrote a piece called ‘Who Stole All the Black Women from Britain?’ Obviously the landscape has changed so much since that article but it was about the visible absence of Black women in popular British culture, which contrasted with how much popular British culture was influenced by Black culture. I rooted it within a historic analysis and bell hooks ended up sharing it online, so it ended up going viral. I’ve been writing consistently about these ideas, in those forms, since then.
MLM: You grew up in Dublin and spent most of your formative years there, bar a five-year sojourn in Atlanta, Georgia. As a young person, were you plugged into an Irish literary tradition? If so, what did that look like?
ED: Yeah, I was totally plugged into one but not necessarily consciously. I’ve always read a very broad range of books. But because I was interested in Blackness and understanding my own position in Ireland at that time – where I was quite isolated – most of the books I actively sought out were by Black authors, predominantly African-American ones. But in my immediate environment there were lots of Irish writers and Irish literature who I studied at school. I think at that age I was potentially more interested in the stuff I had to go and seek, like Black American literature. But being in Dublin I grew up in a very rich vernacular culture, where great importance is placed on language – particularly spoken language. Our spoken language is almost an art form; it has a humour and irreverence that I don’t really encounter in many other places. There’s specific [geographic] iterations to it as well – the one I’m most familiar with is Dublin’s.
Another interesting discovery I made was when I started reading a lot of Black American writers and uncovered how influenced they had been by Irish writers, which led me back to reconsider writers like James Joyce, who I’d have studied in school but not thought about too deeply. Not that I took them for granted but they were just so much the fabric of a place where I didn’t necessarily feel like I belonged. But it was fascinating to read about people on the other side of the world who had been inspired and moved by them in particular ways.
MLM: It’s funny, isn’t it, how aspects of the self can be recontextualised when you’re afforded a new perspective through eyes you respect. Did reconsidering how these Black Americans felt about Irish writers influence how you analysed your own conceptions of identity? Currently you’re teaching on the links between America’s Harlem Renaissance and the Irish Literary Revival, which preceded it by about two decades. What themes does that area of study throw up?
ED: I think by the time I was deep into those links [between Black American authors and the influence of Irish writers] my conceptions of identity were pretty much where they are now – which is seeing identity as a fluid and ever-evolving thing, rather than something that is fixed, binary and discrete. One of the major themes of the comparative course I’m teaching now is looking at architects of the Harlem Renaissance, like Alain Locke or [W. E. B.] Du Bois, who were really international in their scope. There’s a quote from Locke, actually, where he’s saying what has happened in Dublin, in terms of a cultural renaissance through literature, and playwriting is what needs to happen in Harlem and will have a similar impact for Black identities.
Quite explicitly, [Black Americans] were referencing what the likes of J. M. Synge, who wrote Playboy of the Western World, and W. B. Yeats were doing in Ireland. You also see Yeats showing up in African postcolonial writers, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart – that’s a line from Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’. [These writers] were interested in the ways dialect is really key and how Irish writers were grappling with using forms of dialect that had been presented as primitive or uneducated or something to be ashamed of because they were different to standardised English.
That’s something you see in the Harlem Renaissance, actually, the tension between writers who are using those forms of dialect and some Black critics of the time, who are saying this doesn’t subscribe to how they feel Black people should be presenting themselves in order to be seen as equals. And others are [pushing back], saying ‘No, this is the first time we’re [able to have this] naturalistic expression, and this is elevating these forms of speech to the literary status that they deserve’.
MLM: What other similarities have been pulled out between the two traditions?
ED: There’s the attempt to pay homage to the cultural identity of groups of people whose culture has been presented as inferior and as one of the rationales for their subjugation. A lot of the Harlem Renaissance writers saw parallels between the circumstances of Black people in America and the colonialism that was still existent in Ireland. Alongside that, there are interesting commentaries from Black voices at the time, like Marcus Garvey, who were saying that even though there are these parallels between Black Americans and the Irish in Ireland, there are other tensions that exist between Irish Americans and Black people in America. So there is a recognition of the different positionality of the Irish in Ireland versus their descendants in the American diaspora. But still – and I think this comes from Du Bois – there is [understanding] that even though the American context often pits Black Americans and Irish Americans against each other, there can still be acknowledgement of the shared experiences of Black people in America and the Irish experience of colonialism in Ireland. There is that capacity.
MLM: In terms of cultural exchange, do we see contemporary Irish literary figures during the early twentieth century continuing that international dialogue with Black Americans within the Harlem Renaissance?
ED: I’m not sure to what extent some of those key Irish figures saw those parallels, especially because they didn’t have much familiarity with Black American culture. The Irish Literary Revival had happened twenty years earlier and foundational people within the Harlem Renaissance literary movement are looking to that example of Irish literature and theatre, people like Yeats and Lady Gregory, who is a significant figure in the formation of the Abbey Theatre in Ireland. One of the moments you see Black America having a really strong influence on Ireland is with the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. So reciprocity and exchanges are there, there’s just historical gaps.
You also see Black Americans coming to Britain and being disappointed by British radicals failing to see the relationship between their own radical movements within the UK and, say, Indian and Irish anti-imperialism. Claude McKay, this anti-colonial, anti-imperialist Marxist thinker comes to Britain – I don’t think he actually went to Ireland – but he has this exchange between him and George Bernard Shaw where Shaw says something quite racist and McKay is disappointed. As a Jamaican radical [based in America] he has an international vision and scope [while in London, McKay worked with Irish nationalists, attending solidarity rallies with Sinn Féin supporters who reportedly greeted him as ‘Black Irish’] that he would have liked to have seen more while in Britain.
MLM: Are those gaps in reciprocity and dialogue caused by physical distance and the time it takes for ideas to travel or are racial disparities factoring in, in the way white Irish writers may not immediately be recognising what Black America is: that their struggles are linked?
ED: I would imagine race is a salient part of that. I don’t see how it could not be when those white Irish people at that time would very much have a sense of themselves as white people, in a white country. Historically it’s very close in time but when it’s actually unfolding there are those gaps of a couple of decades.
MLM: I wonder if that is how long it took in that period for idea transference to build up into a distinct tradition or movement when you’re dealing with locations that are so physically far apart. It’s also interesting because when you look at France, for example, spaces like Paris become almost a hub where both these traditions collide and find a wider audience. You’ve got a lot of Black Americans seeing their work being recognised in Paris and it also acts as a space where censored Irish writers like Joyce can be published freely.
ED: Yeah, that is actually interesting – I’d like to look into France as a third space and maybe that’s where people are coming into contact with one another and these ideas.
MLM: Bringing ourselves into the present day, you exist at a really interesting intersection as a non-fiction writer. How do you see yourself fitting into a contemporary Irish literary scene? Who do you view as your peers?
ED: Primarily I’m an Irish writer but I’m writing about race in a way that not many – if any – Irish writers have before. There is a particular critical lens I apply that is not commonly found within Irish writing. Ditto, no matter what you call yourself or say about yourself, if you’ve been immersed in something, that’s going to have an impact on you. And as well as growing up in Ireland, I spent the first four years of my life in a very Black environment – that’s where I learnt to speak. Even though I was very young I was exposed to a lot of very postcolonial and Black radical ideas. So it’s not a coincidence I have an interest and feeling of affinity with those traditions.
My dad was studying at Morehouse in Atlanta, which is a HBCU [historically Black college and university]. I have a very early memory of seeing the spine of the Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. So while I am an Irish writer, I was also having exposure to things that a lot of Irish writers don’t have familiarity with. My work is really grounded in postcolonialism, the Black radical tradition, so I’m applying those literatures to this Irish perspective I have. So I think it’s created where there’s not a lot of other people writing in that space.
MLM: You’re peerless, is what you’re saying.
ED: [Laughs.]
MLM: It’s interesting; I see you placed along Black writers in the radical tradition, like bell hooks or even Reni Eddo-Lodge, but mentally I certainly see you and, say, Shon Faye, as peers. You both bring together these unique identities as a jumping-off point for wider analysis in a way that feels completely fresh but also begs the question of why these perspectives have gone overlooked for so long.
ED: I’m more than happy with that. I’m [also] really loving Doireann Ní Ghríofa. A Ghost in the Throat is the only book I’m looking at in both of my classes. I actually see parallels between that and Don’t Touch My Hair that I haven’t seen anyone else making. There’s a part of Don’t Touch My Hair where I’m talking about oriki – a Yoruba form of oral poetry that has great cultural significance – and the way it collapses temporality by having parts of it that are centuries old and other parts that are composed in the moment, fused together. There’s a part [in A Ghost in the Throat] where Ní Ghríofa is talking about finding the voices of women – the book is centred around this Irish epic poem. There are things she’s doing in that book to reconstitute marginalised and suppressed histories that feels very akin to what I’m doing in Don’t Touch My Hair. Ditto the blending of different genres like historical research, linguistics, history and memoir.
Because we’re both Irish writers, Irish women and of a similar ages, I see these parallels. I’m surprised no one else has made them. But then I think ‘Oh, I’m a Black Irish writer and she’s a white Irish writer’. So maybe that’s why I see my work compared to people I have far less in common with in terms of the way we’re writing but we’re Black so we’ll be spoken of in the same context. But Doireann’s work is one I see interesting parallels with and would like to talk to her about it.
MLM: I’m keen to talk about the actual craft of non-fiction writing. Reni-Eddo Lodge recently made the comment that non-fiction writing is ‘nine parts research, one part writing’. I feel the actual nuts and bolts of putting together a work like Don’t Touch My Hair or What White People Should Do Next is under-discussed. What don’t people know about the construction of your work?
ED: There are certain ideas that are popular and regurgitated online; everyone who is online knows these particular ideas and references them. Especially with Don’t Touch My Hair, I wanted to include a lot of stuff that you can’t find online. I’m a researcher – I have been doing a PhD for a long time [laughs], it’s very close to being finished. This is my final year. And I taught African Studies for over a decade. One of my big motivations in going into academia and writing non-fiction is I was aware that there was really incredible research done in African Studies that really gives us the tools to think about reality – certainly to think about identity – in ways that are not just a reversal of white supremacy, but actually present us with a different ontology. When it comes to identity, they show us alternatives for imagining identity in far more fluid, contingent ways. You won’t really find those kind of ideas engaged with or spoken about on [popular] online spaces. I felt it was a real shame that these ideas existed in papers not read outside of a small pool of academics.
So it was important for me to in Don’t Touch My Hair to introduce some of those ideas to a broader audience, which is why [it cites] African philosophy and metaphysics and ideas about gender that [don’t adhere] to the same organising principle that we understand it to be in lots of the cultures whose hair culture I’m examining in Don’t Touch My Hair. The research that went into that book was a culmination of not just me writing that book over two years, but research I had been doing for decades. I was just giving a talk in Princeton about how I used hair as a text – I’ll actually just read out what I wrote in an Instagram caption reflecting on this.
[Begins to read.]
We discussed ways in which hair can operate as a text and how I read hair in addressing archival absences, silences and distortions while writing Don’t Touch My Hair. I was using hair as an archive as a text because it’s this lively and creative visual language. But I also spent a lot of time in traditional archives like the Black Cultural Archives and British Library, as well as trying to think about how we can address the limitations of those spaces, particularly when it comes to marginalised, oppressed and non-Western cultures. With What White People Can Do Next, I was able to produce that quickly because it was a lot of research and theory I’ve been working on for my PhD.
MLM: I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can also make these traditional archival tools more accessible; my housemate, Jason Okundaye, is currently working on what will be a groundbreaking non-fiction book, examining a really under-researched history. But he’s discovered that he can only navigate a lot of these archival spaces necessary for the book because he’s been equipped with the tools from a prestigious university education. A lot of the marginalised people who his work is built around can’t even access documentation of their own histories held by the likes of the BFI.
ED: That’s why the work of people like Jason is so important in addressing this. Sometimes the stuff is there but you don’t know it is or how to access it. With all these conversations about diversity, inclusion and decolonisation, now would be the moment – if ever there is one – to prioritise making these collections accessible. I did this project with the South London Gallery; they had access to the archives of Northcote Thomas, who was the first anthropologist sent to Nigeria as part of the British colonial project. The gallery was working with a group of young people who were going through that material, reassessing and repurposing it. It was material created through the violence of the colonial enterprise but it was contextualised; projects like that can go some way in making this material and information more accessible. A lot of the cultures I was looking at were ones whose epistemic tradition did not rely on the written word or an ‘archive’ as we understand it. A lot of their knowledge was stored and disseminated through oral forms, like poetry, but also through other types of language, like the communication that happens through hairstyling. So I was interested in coming up with a methodology that honoured orality, rather than seeing it as secondary to written text.
MLM: How does your work with the art world influence your non-fiction work and creative practice? I feel like this aspect isn’t discussed as much, despite being quite a large part of your career.
ED: Thanks for asking me about that; it doesn’t come up often. Don’t Touch My Hair was flying high in the art-history charts; I was like ‘Yay!’. In Don’t Touch My Hair I draw really strongly on John Berger and I’ve presented Britain’s Lost Masterpieces for four seasons. I’m a trustee of Ireland’s oldest contemporary art gallery [the Hugh Lane Gallery], I’ve done lots of work with art institutions and my PhD is actually in visual sociology. It has a practice-based element; it’s not just a written thesis. Visuality has a strong impact on how we understand race and it’s something I’m really interested in exploring. With my PhD, I’m exploring visuality in an abstract, non-representational way. The piece I’m working on is concerned with race but I have no interest in reproducing images of racialised bodies; I’m looking at colour and sound and precolonial Irish concepts. I’m excited to put that out into the world as I think it’s very different to the mediums I’m increasingly associated with. Visual culture has such a profound effect on how we understand the world and ourselves, it’s necessary to be able to decode and understand it.
MLM: You’re also currently teaching Villanova’s Creative Non-Fiction for Change course. How have you approached this? What were the most pressing texts to introduce to your students?
ED: I really wanted to share with them a broad range of writing non-fiction in ways that could be seen as bringing about change. We’ve looked at everything from slave narratives to poetic prose. We actually looked at Shon’s book within that course. I wanted my students to examine explicitly activist writing but from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. We’ve looked at things like the Combahee River statement, Huey Newton’s writings and quite a few Audre Lorde essays, which my students have then compared to the likes of thinkpieces from our current moment that profess to look at similar themes. That has been very fruitful and insightful. A lot of my students have been struck by how contemporary that older writing feels in terms of the issues they’re engaging with, but how different their approach is, compared to the popular ways of talking about ‘justice’ now.
MLM: What are some of the most striking differences in comparing past and present approaches to popular non-fiction ‘activist’ writing?
ED: Some of the differences identified are frequent references to coalition in the older work and the fact that it’s informed by lived experience as Black people in America but is underpinned with a deep knowledge of theory and empiricism. There’s a more structural analysis that is often absent from a lot of thinkpieces that proliferate today. I don’t think there’s a grand narrative I can say about the way everyone’s writing now but when it comes to a lot of popular or ‘successful’ writing of, say, racial injustice, it’s very much concerned with the individual. It’s in terms of what the individual has experienced but also how the individual actor can be held accountable and make change. Which I think speaks to the highly individualised nature of our lives and culture today. [It’s] the deep-seated logic of neoliberal ideology that we might be contesting but are so deeply moulded by, even our responses against it reproduce its norms. For example, there’s tons of pieces about microaggressions whereas a lot of writing from those previous generations looks at a far broader picture of how different forms of exploitation are intertwined, and how acknowledgement of that can contribute to building coalitions that might actually be powerful enough to bring about more enduring change.
This interview first appeared in Issue Three of Tolka (May 2022). Issue Three is available to purchase here. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
Emma Dabiri is the bestselling author of two books, What White People Can Do Next and Don’t Touch My Hair. She is a research associate at SOAS University of London and a PhD researcher in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths University. Her most recent TV documentary, Hair Power (2020), won a Silver Lions Award at Cannes. She is currently the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University.
Author photograph by Stuart Simpson.
Moya Lothian-McLean is a journalist and editor, writing on politics, digital culture, gender and race. She is a contributing editor at Novara Media. Previously the politics editor at gal-dem, her work has appeared in the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, VICE and elsewhere.
