DB: After The Scholar came Society Within. Because of those 2 books and for want of a better term, the publishing industry has tucked you into the ‘urban’ niche which as we know reads ‘black’ in media speak. Your most current novel Snakeskin pays tribute to hard boiled detective writers like Elmore Leonard and moves away from that ‘urban’ straitjacket. How much have people tried to lay a guilt trip on you by saying that you are no longer representing what it means to be black and British in your stories?

CN:People on the street are fine about it. I went to talk to prisoners in Feltham Young Offenders Institution when Snakeskin had just come out and all the brers in there were bigging up my books. They told me that I had reflected their lives from day one and didn’t have a problem with the new directions I was moving in. Every one of my books, every one of my stories is as urban, (in that it reflects life in the city) as The Scholar. They are about black people in the city doing different things. It’s still black people and it’s still in the city so I can’t understand and I can’t see how I would not be reflecting that in my work. All my plays feature black central characters so how are they any less urban than Society Within?

DB: Do you yourself feel any kind of need to maintain that urban thing? Would you for instance consider writing a story that had no central black character as a way of stretching yourself?

CN: Yes. I would write whatever story I felt like writing. The only thing that would bother me in terms of theatre and the film I am working on at the moment is that I would like to know that I am giving black people work. But if a story demands a central character who is not black, I will write that story. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone except myself. I feel that I have done the so called ‘urban’ or ‘black’ fiction. My last play was called B is for Black and had a black male central character. It doesn’t get much more representative than that. Even if I did a story that had a central character that was not black it would still be a story that black people could relate to and there would be black characters in it.

DB: Caryl Phillips wrote an article for The Guardian in July this year that asked the question why black people didn’t feature more in the writing of white British writers.

CN: I think that is an extremely disingenuous question for Caryl Phillips, an eminent scholar, to be asking. He knows why. DB:Intellectual discourse only then?

CN: Yes, and that’s all it is. It doesn’t have any grounding in reality. And he asks that question while he is teaching in America and out of touch, perhaps, with what is happening over here. He takes great pains in one of the 3 stories in his book Higher Ground, to write from the perspective of a white central character and the other 2 stories from black characters points of view. He is an amazing, wicked writer but I would prefer that he wrote an article spelling out the reasons why black characters don’t feature more often in the work of white writers.

But still black British writers who have as successful a career as Caryl Phillips, all seem to do the same thing, asking why. Why not come and work with budding black writers and help us elevate those black central characters? Why doesn’t he advocate someone other than Zadie Smith, who is someone who hasn’t written any books or stories that feature black central characters. His essays don’t mention any other black writers. I feel a little lost when I look to those guys. We are supposed to be looking to them for inspiration and support and all they are writing about is why we haven’t got black central characters or black writers. If you are just trying to get paid then at least have the balls to admit it to us. Other than that I don’t see the point of why he is asking that question.

DB:Have you ever considered writing a story set in the Caribbean?

CN: I’d have to live there for at least a year before I would try to do that. And it would still be an outsider’s story. I am not going to write a story about living and growing up in the Caribbean when I haven’t. I couldn’t get published in America because they said my stories were too British and wouldn’t sell. They suggested that I wrote African-American stories with African-American characters. In this country, the only black fiction that sells right now is ‘Windrush’ or ‘ghetto’ fiction. It’s almost like an exotic notion of black British. You are treated as ‘other’ and as long as you are treated as ‘other’ you are accepted. You’ve got to know your place. You’ve got to know that you came from somewhere else first.

They (the publishing industry) don’t want to deal with you if you were born here and writing stories that buck the trend of what a black British writer should be writing about. This of course reverberates into a political arena and they would have to start facing up to some serious things about the way that they are treating people. They don’t want to do that so it’s best to keep putting into the artistic arena notions that you are still other. This is from personal experience.

DB:You are currently working on a collection of short stories that have a darker, twilight zone edge to them and the novel in progress has a more mystical theme. It’s obvious to me that you are trying to free yourself from any kind of preconceived notions of what black people can write about. How well do you think this new direction is going to go down?

CN: Well it is not going down at all well at the minute

DB:Why’s that?

CN: Because the short stories are just not selling.

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