Hey people, my name is Akala, author of Natives. I am here at my local
Waterstones, this is my book Natives here, it's out on the 17th of May and this is
a book, really it's part memoir part political essay and what it does is it
takes significant episodes from my life and it essentially tries to use
scholarship and history to explain why I see the world the way I do. So it takes
things that I went through and extrapolates them and looks at if these
were isolated experiences or if they have larger relevance to the forces of
race and class, as we see there from the subtitle 'Race and class in the ruins of Empire'
It looks at my own experiences in the larger socio-economic and political
and historical context of British society. So I want to share with you some
of my favourite books. Books that have most influenced me you know across the
spectrum; fiction, politics, history. This one right here is in my opinion of the
sci-fi that I've read, the best science fiction book ever written. Yes, I am going
to say that and yes, you can hold me to account on that. Dune by Frank Herbert.
It is indescribably good. I would say, you know, ideas-wise, if we think of someone
like Philip K Dick for example; incredible ideas but, with the greatest
of respect to Mr. Dick, the writing is not as necessarily as poetic whereas with someone
like Frank Herbert you get both. You get a kind of literary pleasure of beautiful
language, kind of ornate language but not overdone and incredible ideas. It's set on
the planet Arrakis which is a desert planet around what they call this
geriatric spice, melange, which is a non-too subtle metaphor for oil, you
know there's a lot of Middle Eastern history in there, very, very
clearly but made into allegory. It's set around this family called the Atreides
which is one of the royal houses on the planet Dune, which is the other name for
the planet Arrakis. And it's just an incredible saga of struggle for power, of
competition between aristocratic houses, of how a charismatic leader can unite
an otherwise you know poor and disparate and warring people; and it just
the characters are alive in my head, the world is alive in my head, it is
genuinely one of the most influential, brilliant, beautiful, realistic stories of
fiction I've ever come across. Dune by Frank Herbert. So this book right
here is one of the most influential political books of the 20th century and
again I say that not lightly. This is The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a Martinican psychologist who participated in the
Algerian war for independence, he was over there treating people during that
war but he was one of the greatest, or arguably the greatest, anti-colonial
scholar of the 20th century. Part of this really important and globe shifting
post-World War II upheaval that saw many of Europe's former colonies win
their independence and really, really gruesome battles for
independence and battles for freedom. And one of the greatest critiques of
imperialism really looks at the psychology of colonized people and the
colonizer. Really breaks down a lot of the most unpleasant dynamics of human
history. It's honestly one of the most influential reads written in
incredible prose. Really, really eloquent, even as he's saying some of the
most brutal, difficult things. Very much influenced by Socialist thought and Marxist
thought; things of that nature. But put its own, what is now called you
know black Marxism, has this very much Third World, global South, pan-Africanist
spin on Marxist thought, that was for a lot of us people like me who come from
the Caribbean, grew up in the intellectual tradition very much
influenced by Frantz Fanon. So it's really hard to overstate how much this
book influenced my worldview, many other people's worldview and many other
people's understanding of the destructive nature of colonialism and
pushed people towards, I don't want to say revolutionary, because that's a very easy
and big word to throw around, but more revolutionary politics or a
more critical politics; that's critical of power. So it's really a book that
everybody should read to really, really understand the impact that colonialism
had on the global south from a psychological perspective from someone
who lived it and saw it firsthand and breathed it and dedicated his life to it
and died an early death partly because of it you know. Mr. Frantz Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth. So the next book I want to look at is by a man who I do
believe won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but don't quote me on that,
a man called José Saramago. And this is his greatest book, I've read a couple of
his books but from what I've read I'm going to say this is his greatest book, a
book called Blindness. I don't know whether to call it dystopian. A man is at
a traffic light and he goes blind and this contagion of blindness starts to
spread throughout the city and then the authorities quarantine all the blind
people in a mental asylum where they get terrorized by crazy blind people
I'm not saying blind people in general are crazy, I'm saying what happens in the
book! And then the the asylum burns down and they escape and the blind contagion
effects the entire city and the entire society. And I believe it's
obviously a metaphor for the human condition, for our own blindness,
for our hatreds, for our fears, for our passions, for our wars; for all of those
things. But it's just unbelievably well written. Before I start
the guy refuses to use punctuation. For the you know young people at school you
learn rules so you can break them and what Saramago shows is if you know the
rules of punctuation as well as he presumably does you can basically do
whatever you want. There'll be like three pages without a full stop and it makes
sense. I don't know, by what alchemy is this achieved? He has no speech marks,
there's hardly any full stops. He'll use a comma and then put a capital
letter after the comma; look I'm not lying, 'root, comma, All with a capital A.
So this is genuinely you know it's interesting because even though my book
is a politics book and it's nonfiction I never used to read fiction till about
you know seven, eight years ago actually and it's writers like Saramago that
are one of the largest reasons why I realized that something was missing from
my life and that fiction is actually sometimes realer than real life and
this book when you really finish it, you feel you know a certain sadness about the
human condition but generally just admiration for a writer that is just
unbelievably good. So this one here is Blindness by José Saramago. So this book
right here is shockingly, I feel a bit embarrassed to admit this but I'm going to admit
this anyway: this is actually the only Toni Morrison book I've read. I know I'm not
supposed to say that in public but it's the truth.
I have a couple of others and why I haven't read any more Toni Morrison
since I read this maybe five, six years ago I have no idea. Again, another Nobel
Prize-winner, fully deserved her prize, one of the greatest literary figures of
the 20th century; I'm gonna have to read some more Toni Morrison. This one here,
Song of Solomon, is set in the 1930s, it's between a wealthy black land owner,
son of a black, wealthy land owner. A man called Macon Dead Jr. and his
sagas with his friend Guitar, as he's traveling through the south. And it
brings up some areas of black American life in that period that most people
don't know about. For example most people just presume, who are not familiar with
the period, that African Americans were generally poor in the period, in the
1930s, before integration. But there are actually lots of wealthy black
people in that period. And so she sets it between this son of a wealthy black
landowner but then his friend Guitar who joins an African American terrorist
organization essentially, or at least an organization set up to rival and
revenge the atrocities and the lynchings being perpetrated in that time by people
like the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. And so it really is a kind of political
analysis really of black life in that period and the different paths and
sagas but really, like all Morrison's books, no matter how much there's a
background of politics and society and history and the challenges faced by
black America, are always great, believable, honest, complex human
characters. So another great book , another Nobel Prize-winner, another one of the
greatest writers of all time. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon. Read it.