while the Brexiteers are preposterously described as ordinary and hardworking, as if everybody else isn’t
Roland was very willing to defend himself in an EU debate on the BBC with a Brexit campaigner who accused him of being ‘a metropolitan elite tosser’
to which Roland riposted that his family didn’t last six months in the great English countryside when they first arrived from the Gambia before they were hounded out of the village by the rabid racists of the sixties
in other words, he said to his accuser, there’s a reason why black people (Roland usually avoids the descriptor ‘black’ in public as much as possible – so crude) ended up in the metropoles, it’s because you didn’t want us anywhere near your verdant fields and rosy-cheeked damsels
nor is he ashamed to be elite, Roland added, why should he, Professor Roland Quartey, the state-educated son of African working-class immigrants, be denied the right to rise up the ranks?
or are you saying that black people should only work on the assembly line, clean toilets or sweep up the streets?
the audience clapped and cheered
before his speechless interlocutor could think quickly enough to counter-punch, the Chair called time on the debate
Roland had been given the last word, he should have felt triumphant
except he was pissed off that he’d had to engage with race and was, in the aftermath of a debate that went viral (of course that one did), seen as a spokesman for cultural diversity
which he resolutely is not
an arm slides gently around his waist from the side, it’s Yazz announcing herself in the nicest way possible, which is lovely, because he never knows whether she’s going to hug him or berate him
Dad, she says, snuggling up, a bit tipsy, he suspects, in spite of her proclamations of being practically teetotal
hello darling, he replies, kissing her forehead
I was so worried the play was going to be awful and humiliating for Mum, you never know with her, we’ve been there before, right? she done good, didn’t she, Dad?
she did, are we proud of her?
yeh, dead proud
did you tell her this, you know you have to
several times, while staring deep into her eyes so she knew I meant it, she’s very needy deep down, although you and I know this success will go to her head and she’ll become impossible to handle, Dad, impossible
he squeezes her ever closer to him
he loves it when she lets him hug her
feeling her warmth softening into him
Yazz is the reason he got his act together, his life is divided into the Before Yazz and After Yazz eras
before Yazz, he was an unexceptional university lecturer who’d gone to a rough Ipswich comprehensive, spent his teenage years working hard enough at school to escape his home town of Portsmouth and in his downtime drooled over his idols
the dinky and adorable Marc Bolan, the surreally space age David Bowie, and the delectably pretty lead singer of Sweet, Brian Connolly
in that order of preference
when he made it to university in London he joined the Gay Society on the very first day and made up for lost time in gay clubs
still managing to graduate with a first class degree
he got his first lectureship after eighteen months’ searching, and once there found he simply couldn’t sacrifice his hard-won social life in order to devote the thousands of hours it took to sit down alone and write the damned books that would turn him from an anonymous academic into someone who was respected as a public figure
with Yazz en route he took stock, decided he needed to be a greater person for the child he’d consciously decided to bring into the world with his friend Amma, who was perfect for the job of mothering their child in that she was intelligent, creative and fun
he was deeply moved when she accepted him as her sperm donor
after his trip to Le Wank Bank, Amma quickly fell pregnant, by the time Yazz was born he’d begun writing his first book, intending it to be intellectual without being overly academic, popular without being populist, he wrote about what interested him – philosophy, architecture, music, sport, film, politics, the internet, the shaping of societies: past, present, futuristic
his first book made his reputation, by the third, it was sealed
however, unlike Amma, his career has never been predicated on his perceived identities, as expected of black intellectuals (even the term ‘black intellectual’ gnaws)
he bemoans the fact that black people in Britain are still defined by their colour in the absence of other workable options
nor can he authentically call himself Gambian when he left when he was two
in any case, neither his blackness nor his gayness are the result of conscious political decisions, the former is genetically determined, the latter psychically and psychologically pre-disposed
where they will remain, not as intellectual or activist preoccupations
but rather as footnotes
the university gig keeps him financially afloat in between book advances, he doesn’t mind giving the odd lecture to mature students, won’t teach classes any more, and as he’s famous and on the telly, they can’t make him
so what if the students are disappointed, he didn’t create the system (he just works it baby!), has a rule not to reply to emails unless they come directly from his bosses, whereupon he replies immediately and with great cordiality
this works very well because everyone else in his department has given up asking him to do anything
he knows he’s loathed by his ‘colleagues’ who practically snarl at him when he walks down the Corridor of Long Knives
what does he care?
he’s rarely there
when Roland started writing the first of his three-part magnum opus he’d already decided he wasn’t going to be accepted by L’Établissement, he was going to become it
his bredren and sistren could damned well speak up for themselves
why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back?
white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race
Yazz stirs herself from their reassuring hug, he loves her more than anyone, even more than Kenny
the moment she was put into his arms after birth he was smitten, it’s been the same ever since, he can’t control his love for her, even though she can be such a handful at times, spiteful, when she feels like it
he worries about her going forth into a world that will punish her if she doesn’t play the game to win by the rules
she needs to become proficient in the discourse of diplomacy, but she’s so contrary
takes after her mother in that regard
this part of London is so special at night, isn’t it, Dad? she says rather dreamily, isn’t St Paul’s so, like, majestic?
absolutely, it is majestic, darling, I think of it as the architectural heartbeat of the capital, dominating the skyline for hundreds of years until the city’s skyscrapers challenged its powerful symbol of religious supremacy with economic prosperity
although, and this is a little-known fact, Le Skyscraper was actually indebted to various high-rise precedents such as the eleventh-century high-rises of Egypt, the Renaissance tower houses of Florence and Bologna, the five-hundred-year-old mud-brick constructions of Shibam in Yemen
you see, Yazz, the concept wasn’t new at all, it was the ancient municipal solution applied to the mid-century population expansion that resulted in dense urbanization