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The Books That Made me
The books that made me: Gary Younge
Gary Younge*†
,
gary@garyyounge.com
Amelia Horgan‡
Abstract
From the British Academy's 2024 Summer Showcase, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester and Honorary Fellow, Gary Younge, discuss the literature that has influenced his life, intellectual development, and current work, with writer and assistant lecturer at the University of Essex, Amelia Horgan. From childhood memories of reading to present-day reflections, they delve into both fiction and non-fiction books that have shaped and inspired Gary’s thinking.
Keywords
literaturereflectionsbooksreadingsociologyWelcome to The Books That Made Me. It is an absolute honour to be here today with Gary Younge. The Books That Made Me is the British Academy’s new literary rendezvous where we get to know one of the British Academy’s brilliant Fellows through the books—fiction and non-fiction—that inspired their life and work. Our guest today is award-winning author, broadcaster, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and honorary FBA, Gary Younge. The Guardian journalist, author of Dispatches from the Diaspora [Faber & Faber, 2023], will discuss the literature that has influenced his life.
I wanted to start with a quote from James Baldwin, which gets at some of the heart of the idea behind this event. James Baldwin writes, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’
Let’s get started. First, we’re going back in time chronologically. What book from your childhood or young adulthood had a profound effect on you?
The thing that’s interesting about these questions is that it’s as much about where you are in your life as it is about the book itself. It’s where the thing you’re reading hits you at a certain point. For me, I was a very precocious teenager. I joined a Trotskyist party when I was 15 and got kicked out when I was 16. I then did French at night school. It was while doing this that I read Les Jeux Sont Faits by Jean-Paul Sartre, which is essentially about freedom. It centres on a character who is killed, but because he’s not had the chance to actualise his freedom, he gets another chance to be a free person. He’s given 24 hours to be free and he can’t do it. Ultimately, through my engagement, even at that early age, with politics and issues of race and so on, and even as an adolescent, that question of freedom and what it takes to be a free person was really what I was interested in and what I’ve been interested in for my whole life in a way.
I remember interviewing Angela Davis, the African–American activist, and she said, ‘What if we thought about freedom as being more than just the breaking of chains? What if we thought about what it could actually be?’ I feel like, in some kind of organic sense, that is what I was after. This was an introduction at that kind of age when you’re really ripe for it, or I was, which was 15 or 16. Obviously, you can stay out and you can flick the Vs at your parents and you can do all the things that feel like freedom at 15, but is that really you being free or is that you just acting out? This really got me there.
It is that sense of what do you do with your life.
Yes, ‘What is this for?’ It happened to coincide with a friend of mine who got Buddha’s Words of Wisdom out of the Stevenage Library and it was lying on his table when I went around to see him. I remember picking it up, and it was full of these little aphorisms, and I was struck by it because Buddhism is so keen on what it means to be a free person and what it means to shed material things. Once again, it was a very formative point in my life. It was the reason why I applied to do the course that I did. I studied to be an interpreter. My school was encouraging me to apply for Oxford or Cambridge—it did not really care which one—because if they had accepted me I would have been the first person from my school for a long time who had gone there. It was all this stuff that made me think, for better or worse, ‘But I don’t really want to do that. I can see that that will look good for other people, but if it doesn’t look good for me, then I’m not being a free person. I’m operating in somebody else’s fear.’
I did try to explain it to my mum, and then she said, ‘Just do whatever. I’m not following.’ I was 17. I went to Sudan to work in a refugee school. It was all driven by this sense of self-authorship, particularly coming from a working-class background. My mum used to say, ‘Whatever you’re going to be, it probably doesn’t exist yet. You’re going to have to imagine yourself doing it. Don’t look out there and think that you are going to see you in 30 years’ time. This country isn’t set up for you. You’re just going to have to do you and you’re going to have to do it as well as you can.’ All this stuff was very helpful in terms of giving me a kind of philosophical framework.
Yes, so you were able to see yourself and your actions over time and leap ahead into the future like that.
Yes, and not feeling completely lonely about it, but feeling like maybe you were walking in the tradition of something or that it made sense somewhere, even if you could not see it in Stevenage in that moment.
What book made you think differently about some aspects of your life or pointed to different paths?
For that, there were two books that I read back to back. I went to Sudan. I hadn’t been a big reader up until that stage. I had basically read the books that I needed to get to university. I finished school one year early with my hair falling out. I was not very well, really, because I was quite an intense kid and probably a bit weird. I knew that I needed a break. I knew enough about myself to know that I couldn’t go on and start studying again.
Of course, the obvious thing to do is not to take a year off and do Interrail or something, but to go to Sudan and work in a refugee school. I was surrounded by other kids of my age and some a bit older. Most of them were super-posh; a couple of them went to Eton and Gordonstoun. This is where I learned that I had been to comprehensive school because I didn’t know before, I just thought it was school. They said, ‘Did you go to a comprehensive?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that before. Nobody calls it that where I come from.’
I started reading out of spite because they were all big readers. I thought, ‘Well, if you can do it, I can do it and I can do it.’ There was a library at the refugee school and in that library, I found two books. One was Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution, which is this brilliant feminist tract. I was definitely into revolution and resistance, and I was into women, but not particularly politically. I was just a 17-year-old heterosexual boy, and this was my introduction to feminism. Prior to that, when I had encountered feminism—apologies to some of the people in the room, but this is as a 17-year-old boy—it was posh white ladies telling me that there was something wrong with me. That is what it felt like. I couldn’t see them connect it to class or race or anything. They didn’t feel like my people, and so I needed help with it. I got a theoretical basis through Sheila Rowbotham’s book.
Straight afterwards, I read The Color Purple. I was completely blown away. It did not complete that journey, obviously. It completed the beginning of that journey. This was a journey I had to go on and, of course, if you’re doing it right, you’re still on. Yes, I was stunned by the literature, but also by the message that there was power for me as a man in feminism and that feminism was in my interest to be a complete human being or, in my crude understanding of what socialism was, to be a complete socialist. If women are not free, then nobody is free. I was immensely grateful for it and gripped by it.
You’re going to do a reading now from The Color Purple.
If we go back to the story of me losing my hair and not really doing very well, then I had been powering, if you like, through my young life, and trying to equip myself to get away. Where I grew up was fine. There were no major pathologies. I just wanted to get onto the next stage. To do that, I needed A-levels. I felt that I needed to excel. I also had the very uncompromising love of a Caribbean matriarch. With The Colour Purple came this realisation that sometimes you have to just wait and smell the roses. You have to live. You only get one life, which, given that my mum died about a year and a half after reading this, was very timely.
The extract is about Shug Avery and Celie. Shug Avery is a singer. Celie is an embattled woman who’s in awe of Shug. Shug has told her that God is not white. God is not a man. God is a thing. Shug is also making a move on Celie. Celie says you cannot do that while you are talking about God.
Shug says, ‘God love all them feelings [meaning sexual feelings]. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.’
God don’t think it dirty? I ast.
Naw, she say. God made it. Listen, God love everything you love and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. ‘Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.’
At that age, I remember thinking, ‘Yes, when is the last time I actually tasted food rather than ate it? When is the last time I just looked at the sun?’ Well, not at the sun—that’s not very clever—but at the clouds. When did I just stop? ‘I am here. I am in Sudan. Is my head somewhere else or should I be present? Can I be present?’ That was the beginning of a kind of understanding that actually physically being in a place is not really enough. You actually have to invest yourself in it.
You have to feel that kind of embodied freedom, right?
Yes.
I think it’s a big leap especially for nerdy teenagers to do that as well. It’s a big leap into the world. The next question, relatedly, is about pleasure. What sort of books do you gravitate towards when you read for pleasure or for relaxation? What’s the embodied freedom there?
The books I read for pleasure are mainly crime novels by Black writers. I like crime novels because they have a strong narrative. I don’t do beach holidays, but they are kind of beach reading. You can pick it up. You can put it down. When you have a little reading session, you can get through 30 or 40 pages and feel like you’ve done something. Walter Mosley’s books I really enjoy. He did a series of crime novels called the Easy Rawlins novels, which are mainly about a Black private detective who had moved from Louisiana to California. He adopts two kids. One minute, he’s in a shootout, and then the next minute, he’s at a parent–teacher conference kind of thing. There are a couple of films that you might have seen, including Devil in a Blue Dress with Denzel Washington.
Attica Locke is a female crime writer. She’s African American and her books are set in Texas. They are much more contemporary. Walter Mosley is still around, but his books are set in the 1950s, so there’s lots of stuff about the GI Bill and communism and that kind of thing.1 Attica Locke’s stuff is more like there’s a pastor with his hand in the cookie jar, but he’s also a big Obama guy. Something goes wrong and someone gets murdered and the detective is looking for them. Once again, the thing that unites them is that while he's engaged in derring-do he also has a life and his marriage is falling apart and his mum is ill or his dad is ill or whatever.
The other one would be Chester Himes. Chester Himes was a lot earlier. There was a film of one of his books, Rage in Harlem, that had Danny Glover and Robin Givens in it, and they are real shoot ’em ups. ‘Someone has stolen some gold from Mississippi, and you have to find them by Tuesday’, that kind of thing. Yes, I find them very easy ways to be reading without thinking too hard.
If you aren’t reading them on the beach, where are you reading them? Where is the holiday?
Well, I have kids, so ‘holiday’ is a really technical term. You’re just taking the madness on the road, and you still have to do the laundry. It is usually at my in-laws’ place or with extended family of some kind or with other friends. So I'm really just reading them when I can.
Changing tack now away from the work of the holiday to the work of sociology, if you were to recommend one book within your discipline for someone who was new to the subject to read, what would you recommend to them?
That would be Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott. This was a brilliant book and the reason I would choose it is because it overlaps with what I think of as my disciplines. Originally, when I was making the move from full-time journalism, I thought I would teach journalism and for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, the first few journalism places I went to, it was all ‘Computer says "No"’. I was a visiting professor at Manchester and I asked somebody there, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ She said, ‘Why don't you come here?’ I said, ‘You don’t teach journalism here.’ She said, ‘No, you could do it in sociology’, and I said, ‘But I’m not a sociologist.’ She said, ‘Yes, you are. You just don’t know that you are. Your books are works of sociology’, which was a nice revelation.
Andrea Elliott is a journalist who has, maybe, yet to realise she is also a sociologist. She stays with the subject, which in this case is a family of homeless people. It’s centred around Dasani, whose name is given from the bottled water that her mum likes. I think her mum’s name is Chanel. This is the world that we live in, and you see the impact of racial capitalism in New York with this family. She does a brilliant job, which I’m grateful for, of not making them saints and not making them demons. These are people who don’t always make the best decisions. Look how they thrive and look how they fail, and you see the systemic issues, but then you are left thinking, ‘Yes, but what could a state do to support that family when these things in some ways are so interpersonal?’ You also think, ‘They really should do something.’ When the first articles—that formed the basis for the book—came out, it was just after the New York mayoral election and there was a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and Dasani became the poster child of what a new New York could do, and then, of course, they all went their way and Dasani went hers.
What I particularly like about this, which is the thing I was always striving to do in my journalism, is that she sticks with it. Journalists tend to fly in, get the poverty or misery or joy they are looking for, and then leave. As a reader, you're left thinking, ‘What happened to that person? I’m sure that whatever happened to that person did not just happen on that day. It had been going on for a while, and I wonder where that’s going to go.’ It’s one of the most curious things in any media that, when you say to an editor—and this was my experience, often, not always—‘I want to follow this. I want to look at knife crime over a year, not just chase the ambulance to the A&E and then cover the verdict. I want to pursue it’, they say, ‘What are you going to find?’ And I would say, ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to do it, would I?’ If we knew what we were going to find at the end, why take the journey?
What I can tell you is we cover things extensively, but not well. Nobody does it well and to do it well is going to take some time and that is a bit of an investment, but the investment is worthwhile. Then halfway through the project, someone will get stabbed, and they’ll say, ‘Gary, someone got stabbed. Quick.’ They’ll say, ‘The Evening Standard did this’, and I’ll say, ‘Yes, but it’s crap. It is crap, and what I’m working on—I think, I hope—will be good, but it’s going to take longer than just the last 24 hours.’
The narrative for the long-form writing isn’t just to make a story that makes sense; it’s to get at the issue and to actually understand it.
Yes, and there are very few issues that are worth covering that you can understand in an afternoon or even a day. I know that journalism, and particularly daily journalism, can’t always be doing that, but actually, it can do that, and increasingly, because we have Twitter [X] and Instagram or whatever, the immediate thing, like the verdict, is already covered. So increasingly, newspapers or news organisations, to be relevant, are going to have to get more to the ‘whys’ as opposed to the ‘whats’. Why is this happening? Otherwise, you’re just like a bloody goldfish. You have a memory of about eight seconds.
Yes, you’re producing new content rather than understanding what’s actually going on and how it came to be. I guess this is another temporality question. What one book do you feel everybody must read in their lifetimes?
Yes. That is a big one.
That is a big one.
My lifetime is not over and it’s the same for everybody in this room. The one I chose for this is Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, and I chose it very practically, partly because it’s short. If you want everybody to read something in their lifetime, then don’t recommend Hilary Mantel, because it’s going to take a while. People are just going to look at it and say, ‘I’m not going to read that in two lifetimes.’ This book, Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, gets to an understanding of European pathologies through the experience of colonialism. It lays out how we should understand the more recent pathologies. That is just the groundwork. He’s not trying to turn the world on its head. He’s just saying, ‘For example, there have been genocides before.’ This was written in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and he looks at Germany and the Hereros.
He says, ‘When it comes to the Holocaust, of course the Holocaust is its own thing. It is its own thing, and we should understand it as its own thing, but it is related to other things.’ In some ways, what is different about this was that Europeans were doing it to each other, but they have been doing it to other people for quite a long time, which is not particularly controversial; it is an unanswerable fact. There is a great line in it, which I used as the epigraph for my fifth book, which is about all the children who were shot dead in one day, and he says something to the effect of, ‘You know what the problem is, and so do I. The issue is not knowledge. The issue is courage. It’s having the courage to face the problems that we know exist and to seek the solutions to them.’ That is so often the case. We refrain from calling things what we know they are because we’re scared to, and of assessing what the solution would be because it seems too big. It might be too big to manage. It might be too big for the political culture to absorb, but otherwise, you end up just talking around things and not through them.
Often, I’ll hear a news commentator say, ‘That was a very controversial statement that X made’, and I think, ‘It was not a controversial statement. It was racist, is what it was’, or sexist, or bigoted in some way, and you’re not helping us to understand it by saying it’s controversial, because there’s a range of things you can do that are controversial that are not that and that has a name. You just do not want to give it that name.
I remember Naga Munchetty getting disciplined. She is a presenter on BBC Morning. She was asked what she thought of what Trump said about sending immigrants home. She is a woman of colour. She said, ‘In my lifetime, when I have heard that, it has always come from a place of racial alienation’, and so on. She was disciplined by the BBC.2 First, she was asked; secondly, it is her job; thirdly, it is true, which is thirdly and firstly in a way, which becomes an issue in the trajectory of my life. Do you want the kind of diversity which Angela Davis described to me once as, ‘A difference that makes no difference and a change that brings no change’? Do you want us to look different but act the same or do you actually want this woman of colour’s point of view about what this is? That is what she said.
I found Exterminate All the Brutes engaging and incisive. It’s done through a set of vignettes. It’s not one seamless narrative. It’s readable.
It’s good to recommend something readable. What you said there put me in mind of a quote from the Black American socialist James Boggs about being kind of grit in the machine rather than letting the smooth flowing of the machine happen. There are some people who just by speaking their experience already put a stop to the machine. It is also incumbent on everyone to not accept that smooth running of things and to be that irritant or that grit.
Yes. None of us, for good reason, can fully go around speaking our truth. There are barriers. There are other people. There is the possibility and likelihood that what you say is your truth could do with being better informed and so on, but certainly, with a kind of open heart and a thick skin to if not speak your truth, at least speak your mind as you see it. It took me a while, and I would have been in my thirties before I realised this. Up until then, I would hear things and think, ‘I don’t know about that’, but you’re the only Black person in the room and people are older and you have a bit of imposter syndrome. I got to my mid-thirties and thought, ‘Life is too short.’ My mum died when she was 44 and that was a very painful but useful corrective in terms of, ‘You don’t know how long you’re going to be here.’ When you open your mouth, it turns out that other people in the room thought the same and they had the same issue of courage and of perspective. It comes back to being a free person. What’s the point of you being here if you’re not going to say something?
Life is not always long, and sometimes you have to do the thing.
Yes, and the thing is often not as big a thing as you think it is. It’s not as dangerous a thing as you think it is. I interviewed John Carlos, who was one of the Olympians who raised his fist in 1968. I said to him, ‘What was going through your mind as you raised your fist?’ He said, ‘The first thing I thought is, “You cannot put the shackles on John Carlos no more”, that what is done cannot be undone.’ He said, ‘I didn’t realise that that picture was going to go out and be one of the most famous pictures for all time but that was the thing that I had to do in that moment.’ There is a very powerful thing he said, which is, ‘In life, you are born, and you die, and you cannot help either of those things. What happens is what you do in the middle, whether you do what it takes to be right in the planet in your moment.’ Not everybody gets to raise their fist on an Olympic podium. Almost by definition, very few people do, but we all get to speak up at staff meetings. We do. There is risk involved, but with most things that have allowed the space for me to be sitting here talking to you, someone had to risk something, so then you are only paying it forward, really.
Yes. What you are reading at the moment. It’s away from perhaps this particular question of freedom? Maybe not. We’ll see.
I’m reading an amazing book by Tim Brannigan called Where Are You Really From? It’s a memoir and not a thriller, so I am not spoiling the end when I tell you that the first line of the book says, ‘The day I was born was also in a way the day I died.’ Tim Brannigan’s mum, who is a Catholic in Northern Ireland, has an affair with a doctor from Nigeria. Her marriage is not going very well, obviously. She becomes pregnant. She decides to keep the baby. Against all ethical everything, she manages to do a deal with the doctors that they will conspire with her to tell everybody that the baby was stillborn and that the baby would go to an orphanage and that she would then adopt the baby when she could. That’s what she did. He’s adopted by his own mum and he doesn’t learn that story until he is about 17. He grows up in Northern Ireland. That’s already kind of crazy. He is very attracted to the Republican cause. He’s about my age. He’s born more or less the year that the Troubles start, and he ends up being arrested and being put in the H-block for quite a long time. He becomes maybe not a senior figure, but a significant figure in the IRA in the H-blocks, and then he comes out and he becomes a journalist. It’s a very well-written book. It’s very honest.
My academic work since I started at Manchester has been on post-war Black Europe and there have been a few amazing stories that I’ve read. There’s one book called My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me [by Jennifer Teege]. For those of you who saw Schindler’s List and the pathological Ralph Fiennes character—his daughter has a relationship with a Nigerian, and she has a daughter that she puts up for adoption. That man who is shooting people ends up with a mixed-race granddaughter. He’s been hung after the Nuremberg Trials by the time she is born, but she still knows her grandmother and a bunch of other people, and she finds this out quite late. She’s well into her thirties, and then she goes on a journey. She had seen Schindler’s List and not known that that was her grandfather. There are all these stories that are told, but they aren’t well known. Tim Brannigan's is, I think, one of the most powerful ones. When I was asked the question, ‘What are you reading?’ that was the thing I was reading.
Fascinating. It is a really fascinating book. That takes us on to our last question. What’s the book that you wish you had written yourself?
Yes. Apart from Harry Potter, because that would have made me a shitload of money, there is A Seventh Man by John Berger, which I was introduced to because there was a John Berger conference on A Seventh Man. A Seventh Man is about migration. In this case, it’s about migration into Europe. It’s a series of vignettes that really capture the nature both of migration and of its role within capitalism and the human cost of it. I’m going to read a little bit here. If I were to challenge this in some way, it would be to say that it’s about men migrating but there were a lot of women who did migrate. This is written without them in mind.
He says, ‘It is not men who immigrate but machine minders, sweepers, diggers, cement mixers, cleaners and drillers. This is the significance of temporary migration. To re-become a man (husband, father, citizen, patriot), a migrant has to return home. The home he left because it held no future for him.’
Then there is the excitement of the arrival. “‘Here you can find gold on the ground. I am going to start looking for it.” The friend who had been in the city for two years answered him, “That is true. But the gold fell very high in the sky, and so when it hit the earth, it went down very, very deep.” […] The use of labour already produced elsewhere means an annual saving for the metropolitan countries of £8,000 million.’ This was written a long time ago. Finally, ‘To those who have machines, men are given.’
There is something there about the experience that I’m most familiar with, which is of post-war Caribbean migration, as my parents both came in the early 1960s, of coming to earn and to go back. My mum went back in a box. My dad went back and was buried there but went back and retired there. People came to earn and to return. It was supposed to be a five-year project. But life takes over. There’s that idea of the gold falling and being very deep, and them constantly like hamsters on a wheel trying to catch up with that project, but also the way in which I would say the British system understood their moving and the way that they imported workers, but people came. My mum came to be a nurse, and then my dad was from just up the road in Barbados, and she knew him there, but then they got together here. They set up a life and then my dad left. There is this sense of, ‘Yes, there are the needs of capitalism and then there are the needs of people.’
Particularly significant in this moment when we have the far right and anti-immigration being so insistent, is that my mum came in 1962 as a result of the expansion of the NHS, which was at the time being pioneered by none other than Enoch Powell, who was the health secretary. She came right before the first immigration laws about limiting post-colonial migration started. In many ways, she was emblematic of that person and labour and moment, which we are still in, of the country needing a thing and also deciding that it will be hostile to the thing all at the same time. I heard Nigel Farage speaking and the BBC interviewer said, ‘The big issue for people is healthcare’, and this and that, and Farage said, ‘Yes, but that is also an issue of migration.’ He meant migrants putting pressure on the NHS. But the obvious follow up to that is, ‘Yes, but there would be no healthcare system without migrants.’
The National Health Service has always depended on migrants. 1948 was the year when they decided there would be open borders for people from the colonies. That was the year they set up the health service and they did not do it one for the other. That was a contextual relationship, but if you did not have the Irish and the Caribbeans and the Mauritians and so on, there would be no health service. There would have been no transport system. Good luck tomorrow in the Euros if we didn’t have migration. If we didn’t have migration, we would have no bloody team. We would have no team. Imagine your playlist. Imagine your bookshelf. Imagine almost anything. Imagine your high street. A Seventh Man made that real at a particular moment and in a skilful, delicate way that I wish I could do.
There is the way in which the obscuring of that history itself can be a violent act. It puts me in mind of that nice way of framing it, which is the reason that people who have migrated here, especially people who have come from post-colonial contexts, are here is because the Brits were over there.
Yes.
These are interconnected. It is implicated in this world system.
Yes. My mum did not come to Britain by accident. Sivanandan said it, ‘We are here because you were there.’ Sam Selvon, who said, ‘You know, we have met before.’ I was in the National Archive recently doing some research and I found this survey that they did in 1948 about British understanding of the colonies in which, in 1948, the year of Windrush, half of British people could not name a single colony. Some people thought Lincolnshire was a colony. I know! Britain has this capacity to not know where it has been and not know what it has done, even sometimes as it is doing it. It then expects everybody else to have the same ‘forgetfulness’, because of course it’s not forgetfulness, and then to pluck certain memories out of the sky.
People will say, ‘We won the war’, even if they were not born, even though they did not fight. They will say, ‘We won the World Cup’, even if they didn’t play, even if they weren’t born. When you want to talk about colonialism or slavery, they say, ‘I wasn’t born. I wasn’t there. That’s nothing to do with me.’ Either you have a collective historical identity or you do not. If you can turn up to a football game in a crusader outfit, then you can talk about colonialism. Well, take off the outfit.
That leads us nicely on to the Q&A. We have time for one question.
Question from the audience: In my mind, I kept on going through that notion that you talked about in terms of change and courage and those two ideas. I had a certain point in my own life where I had to make those kinds of decisions. I’ve seen it in your writing, in terms of a change of the way in which you looked at the world. I was thinking that people like Nigel Farage, to use a phrase, will use exactly those same arguments, which are, ‘I have to now stand up for what I believe. I am only saying what is true’, and so on. I find that quite a difficult place to argue from because I know why I have to make those statements. I’m not entirely sure what you do when a Nigel Farage also says, ‘I have been quiet too long. I have to have the courage to say this, this and this.’ I wonder whether you could talk through about how you address, in a way, the same argument but being put by somebody who you absolutely disagree with in terms of the basis for it.
It is a good question. In my work, particularly when I was a correspondent in America for 12 years and I went back to cover the Trump election, I would often encourage people who said that to say, ‘What could you not have said before? Tell me, what would have been the price of you saying that before? Why do you think that?’ and taking some time to explore what it is. Sometimes what they say is, ‘I could not have said that before because people would have said I was racist.’ I say, ‘Let us stick with that. Why do you think that they would have said that?’ My personal feeling is that it is because it is racist, but as a journalist and as someone in the world of inquiry, I want them to talk about it.
I remember speaking to a white working-class woman who was voting for Trump and who had voted for Obama twice and who said, ‘People think we are stupid.’ She said, ‘People talk about white privilege and I do understand what they mean, but I do not feel any of that privilege.’ I felt that, ‘Yes, we could break it down. We could slug it out, but I get that. I get why you are saying that.’ I am fully aware that my pain is not the only pain. Quite often, though, when people say, ‘You cannot even say X anymore,’ I am like, ‘You just said it. You just said it, and actually, you can, and you do, and these are all the places where that is said.’ If I am arguing as opposed to teasing things out, I say to people, ‘That has been a very common view for a long time. There is almost no price for you saying that, really, apart from that you might lose some friends. It sounds to me like they are friends you do not want anyway because they think differently from you.’
Generally speaking, you have to work from the premise that people are coming from a genuine place and then ask genuine questions as to why they think what they do because there is usually something underpinning it. I don’t think it necessarily means that you are going to get any closer to their point of view, but I do think often that you get closer to understanding their point of view than just dismissing them. Often, in my personal life, I don’t want some views. I do not have time. I do not have time or energy to have some of that poison in my personal life. When I’m reporting or when I’m researching, that is not my personal life. That is my professional life. I feel like, in those moments, it is my job to understand.
As a final point, the media actually does itself a disservice in moments like Brexit or Trump and Corbyn. For all three, the media did the same thing where they write people off. They think they know who they are yet they don’t. They treat them almost anthropologically. It’s like ‘David Attenborough goes to Sunderland’. ‘Here I am among the working class of the north.’ They would do better to listen more, and rather than trying to predict what the world is going to be, they should describe the world that they see, but they don’t do that.
It’s a problem for all of us because then there are these shocks. It’s like, ‘Where did that come from?’ Partly, it came from a place where a bunch of very entitled people, most of whom I would agree with about 80 per cent of what’s going on in the world, were not doing their job. They were sneering at people rather than trying to understand them. Particularly at an event like this, it’s important to emphasise it is our job to try to understand the world. It is our job as academics and thinkers to try to understand the world and then convey that understanding, not to look down on it or sneer at it, even when it is scary. That is our job.
Thank you. That is a wonderful place for us to stop. Thank you very much.
Books mentioned
Allan, G.F. (1959) Buddha’s Words of Wisdom (London: George Allen and Unwin)
Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1975) A Seventh Man (London: Verso Books)
Brannigan, T. (2010) Where Are You Really From? (Newtownards: Colourpoint Creative)
Elliott, A. (2022) Invisible Child (London: Cornerstone Press)
Himes, C. (2021) A Rage in Harlem (London: Penguin Modern Classics)
Lindqvist, S. (1996) Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press)
Moseley, W. (1990) Devil in a Blue Dress (New York: Norton)
Rowbotham, S. (1974) Women, Resistance and Revolution (London: Penguin)
Sartre, J.-P. (1947/2003) Les Jeux Sont Faits (Paris: Gallimard)
Teege, J. (2015) My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me (London: Hodder and Stoughton)
Walker, A. (1982) The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
1
The GI Bill was a programme introduced after the Second World War to support American military veterans.
2
After significant protest, the BBC reversed its decision, although the harm had already been done.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a48
Published on: 13 December 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 205
Article download count: 1
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Younge, G. with Horgan, A. (2024), ‘The books that made me: Gary Younge’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(4): a48 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a48Crossref
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October 2022
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May 2023
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July 2023
Nature, ideology, and the ecocritical enterprise: Wangari Maathai’s The Green Belt Movement and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life Zaynab Ango
The dominant knowledge about African environments informed by Western literature—scientific reports, travelogues, memoirs, journalism, and fiction—has constructed an image of Africa as a pristine wilderness of exotic biodiversity on the verge of destruction due to Africa’s ignorance-based environmental culture. Contrary to this, Wangari Maathai’s and Nadine Gordimer’s environmental discourse, in The Green Belt Movement (2003) and Get a Life (2005), respectively, reveal Africa’s environmental decline as the direct consequence of the long history of colonial and capitalist exploitation of its natural resources, and the transformation of its environment into a resource base for industrial production. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of post-colonial ecocriticism, this article argues that environmental representations are mediated by the ideological configurations that generate them. Consequently, Maathai’s and Gordimer’s environmental discourse repudiates the dominant knowledge of African environments, offering alternative ways of engaging with its ecological issues while highlighting the dangers of capitalist resource exploitation on Africans’ environments, lives, and livelihoods. The image of the environment, in their works, ties politics and ecology together, providing an understanding of how the environment enables a rethinking of socio-political justice in dealing with Africa’s ecological crisis. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘African ecologies: literary, cultural and religious perspectives’, edited by Adriaan von Klinken, Simon Manda, Damaris Parsitau and Abel Ugba.)
22 May 2024
Language at school: literature or linguistics? Richard Hudson
This opinion piece argues that the education system in England suffers from a lack of KAL (Knowledge About Language) which is so extreme that it deserves the name KAL desert because children are taught virtually nothing about the languages that they study, whether English or a foreign language. The dominant view of language sees it merely as a skill, rather than as something interesting which is worth exploring, and the only content taught and tested in language lessons comes from literature rather than linguistics. This desert is to be found not only in our schools but also in our university departments of English and of foreign languages, so future teachers of English and foreign languages are not equipped to teach about language; modern linguistics has very little impact on the school curriculum apart from the Advanced Level exam in English Language. I also show that the present decline in both English and foreign languages actually started about 1970, and may arguably be due in part to the KAL desert. However, I also report evidence from three recent initiatives that a lot of children enjoy exploring language and learning about it, so I suggest that the decline in languages, both English and foreign, might be halted by teaching more KAL. Finally, I suggest a roadmap for achieving this by increasing KAL first in universities and then in schools.
15 July 2024
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