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The fiction ghetto

Published 12 March 2009

Observations on bookshops

Why is it that, nearly 20 years after the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, the works of fiction in your local high-street bookshop may very well be segregated according to the colour of their author’s skin?

Walking into a London branch of Waterstone’s recently to buy a copy of a novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Toni Morrison, I noticed a curious deficiency in the Ms between Blake Morrison, Ewan Morrison and . . . John Mortimer. Asking at the desk whether the shop had simply sold out of the Nobel laureate’s works, I was directed to the Black Writing section, a niche-interest bookshelf between Sci-Fi and Gay Porn.

In modern, multicultural Britain, this was rather puzzling. So I went around the corner to a branch of Borders – and found exactly the same system. In the carbon-copy versions of these stores in towns up and down the land, it is likely that you will find significant authors, who happen to be black, absent from the shelves that accommodate writers of all other races.

This method of organisation can prove obstructive in searching for a particular volume, particularly as selection appears to be somewhat arbitrary. Zadie Smith is perhaps not “black” enough for Black Writing, being out front with all the other Ss. But, irritation of literature lovers aside, is it not rather offensive to relegate a work of fiction to the book ghetto at the back of the shop because of its author’s ethnic origins?

Trevor Phillips of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is usually very keen to comment on issues of segregation – claiming only last year that the inherent bias of ordinary Britons would prevent the election of a British Barack Obama – but a spokesman said that this was not an issue on which he would like to comment.

A spokesman for Waterstone’s claims that all works by black writers should be stocked simultaneously in Black Writing and in the common or garden fiction area, and blames the specific stores I visited. “Toni Morrison should be in fiction and black fiction,” he said. “It must be a fault within the store in which you shopped. The stock should be automatically replenished.”

But why is there a separate section in the first place? It is demeaning, to say the least, to suggest that so many brilliant black authors will only really be of interest to those who happen to share the colour of their skin.

Within the same patch of London, another large bookshop, Foyles, has not elected to round up all the books by black authors into one section. Kate Gunning, head of buying at Foyles, explains: “The tendency to separate out ethnic writers is in many cases unpopular with the customers. When I used to run a bookshop of my own we would get a lot of complaints from black and Asian customers. One of my colleagues here is Punjabi and argues very strongly that it’s racist.”

The tendency, Gunning argues, is a relic from a different age. “We used to separate out gay writing at Foyles, but a few years ago it became redundant – you’d find people objected to being put on the ‘death row’. Gay writers are now so accepted, there isn’t a distinct need to market them separately. Increasingly the tendency will be to integrate rather than separate.”

Lovers of literature – whether black, white or fluorescent pink – will no doubt hope so.

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4 comments from readers

MisterAedan
12 March 2009 at 12:51

I worked for Borders in Cambridge a few years ago and the "Black Writing" section had been abolished shortly after opening due to customer complaints, although it (among other anachronistic categories) remained on the American-designed inventory system as a reminder of different bookselling styles and institutional laziness. This lead to some anomolous situations - "gay writing" and gay/lesbian/transgender studies would both be accidentally shelved with gay erotica, "black writing" would make its way up to black studies in the social sciences section on the second floor, and so on, if my colleagues weren't paying attention while shelving. I admit I thought other shops had taken a similar approach as quite aside from political issues, it's simply inconvenient to subdivide needlessly and was definitely detrimental to sales of books that got caught up in this confusion.

Frederick Chichester
12 March 2009 at 20:55

This is surprising in "modern, multi-cultural Britain"? What peculiar logic. It is precisely multi-culturalism that explains the separation.

Darran
13 March 2009 at 15:55

I have worked in several book shops and the only reason that black and gay writing sections exist is customer demand. I ran the black writing section in Books Etc Wandsworth and there was a large local black customer base that would come in to pick up books by the likes of Eric Jerome Dickey, Sister Souljah and Zane, and they would not expect to look for them in the general fiction section. The thing these writers have in common is that in my experience they are read pretty much exclusively by black people. It was sometimes difficult to know where to shelve a writer, but the rule of thumb was that if a writer has a fan base beyond a specific readership they would go in the general fiction section. For example, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith and Ralph Ellison were in general fiction, and amongst gay writers Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters and Armistead Maupin were shelved in general fiction, whilst some writers that were read fairly exclusively by gay people were shelved in gay writing.

Booksellers, myself included, may not be comfortable with it but it is lead by consumer demand. The fact is the first thing many black customers would ask me when they walked into the store was 'where are the black books?'. I was never asked where the Indian or Chinese books are by an Indian or Chinese customer.

Kate Gunning of Foyles may believe 'it is in many cases unpopular with the customers', but Foyles is a small, high brow chain, and I guarantee they don't sell many of the books that would go into a black writing section, so she doesn't need to concern herself with this issue. You would have been better off asking the buyers at Borders or Waterstones if you wanted an insight into this issue.

Freeman
21 March 2009 at 19:43

When I started working in the library in Brixton many years ago they had a section called 'black writing'. When I was shelving I thought this was the horror section and used to put all those books in there. It took a long while for someone to tell me the absurd truth.