When you get offered a guest post from an author whose book you have recently read and loved, it is a giant yes! Kòkú Àkànbi is a brilliant story and the author shares a personal letter about writing this book.
Disappointed by the lack of diversity in my University course, I centred my dissertation around postcolonial Nigerian literature. Through this I actually became quite curious about pre-colonial Nigerian history. I was amazed by the things I found out, like the incredible and highly sophisticated Benin and Oyo kingdoms that were never mentioned in school.
Once I graduated I knew I wanted to write a novel that would speak to children straddling British and African identities and make them proud of both. I’ve always been frustrated with the lack of children’s literature featuring black protagonists. I know that this is steadily increasing, but we have a long way to go when it comes to building a canon of children’s literature that reflects modern Britain.
As a child I was especially drawn to fantasy and adventure stories; reading them as an adult was disappointing as I began to realise how inherently racist they were which naturally takes the fun out of anything. They were genres black people have historically been left out of, or worse still, been positioned as the object of ridicule.
Adventure books were explicitly racist (Heart of Darkness, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan etc…), fantasy books (such as Lord of the Rings, or the Harry Potter series) simply didn’t include any important characters that looked like me. The only books in which I found myself represented were American novels that dealt with black trauma.
The few children’s novels that did include black protagonists were often very gritty; they generally spoke to an older audience and the themes were stereotypically around poverty, living on a council estate, drugs or fighting against racism. They distinctly lacked the whimsy and magic I sought in literature, which is why I often felt like I had no choice but to relate to white protagonists who were allowed to explore their childhood and go on amazing adventures to far-away exotic places.
I’ve never quite managed to write successful stories about people who looked like me and Koku Akanbi and the Heart of Midnight is my first attempt. Koku Akanbi speaks to the authentic experience of being Black and British with a dose of adventure and magic that could be enjoyed by a child of any background.
I feel that we are living in a time where a lot of non-fiction is coming out to help us navigate our identity as people of colour such as The Good Immigrant and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. However, there’s a huge gap when it comes to literature that centres around the coming of age of black children, specifically black boys. When I think about the stories that had a profound effect on me growing up between the ages of 9-16 I think of coming of age stories with male protagonists such as the Alex Rider series, the Percy Jackson series and Artemis Fowl. In fact I cannot name a single black child that I could relate to growing up and that’s appalling.
Koku was initially created out of the frustration that came with being constantly excluded and misrepresented in literature. As Audre Lorde says: “if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment”. But Koku’s spirit broke out of the confines I set for him. It has been lovely to explore his emotional vulnerability and to define him outside the boundaries of what black boys are “supposed” to be. Koku Akanbi is not a martyr, or a freedom symbol, he is a thirteen-year-old, smart-mouthed kid with a morbid streak, who is very sensitive at heart.
My Shelves Are Full 