Back in January 2020, Hinterland editor Andrew Kenrick and contributing editor Yin F. Lim sat down with Tessa McWatt, author and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, to discuss her memoir Shame On Me; in a conversation which delved into racism and antiracism, the Meghan Markle effect, and the relationship between literature and activism.

Yin F. Lim: I just finished Shame On Me and given what’s been in the news these past few weeks, I got goosebumps.

Tessa McWatt: It is timely, isn’t it?

Andrew Kenrick: Just in the weeks since we spoke to you [about doing an interview] and certainly since I started reading the book there’s been the Meghan Markle story, and questions about white privilege on the BBC’s Question Time.

TM: What’s really disturbing and interesting is that it’s been timely for people of colour forever. It’s only considered timely now because there are other [white] people being pushed back. So the pressure to recognise that racism is a huge issue consciously and unconsciously is [phew] right there, right in front of us.

AK: So you’re saying that now it’s beginning to intrude on the consciousness of the wider public?

TM: There are other forces that are making it a perfect storm; the press, the Meghan Markle stuff, Brexit, all kinds of things going on in the States. One of the reasons why I wrote this book was because, in 2016, my dad died, then there was Brexit and then the US election. I just thought there is such a division here and I need to state my case, which is kind of a bridging case. But I don’t know if it serves people who have always experienced antiblack racism. They go ‘yeh, yeh, I know, that’s what we’ve been experiencing’ but it does serve people who haven’t thought about it.

YL: When we first met at the UEA literary festival, I remember you said ‘I am now angry enough to write my memoir.’

TM: Oh really?

YL: Yes, that’s always stuck with me. Especially reading this now, I understand the anger better. Was there a catalyst or turning point where any reservations you had about putting yourself out there diminished?

TM: Even now I have reservations about having written it, because anything you write is on the page and it belongs to a moment, it’s not necessarily how you’re feeling now. So there’s a bit of reservation thinking ‘what was that moment?’ It’s stayed the same, I’m still as angry, I’m still as upset, I’m still watching the argument, the black and the white for want of better words, are still clashing and making me uncomfortable. So it’s the discomfort, as well as the anger. The anger I could probably take out by involvement in politics or sitting in the street for Extinction Rebellion – all of which I do – but it’s that discomfort, trying to pin down the fine points rather than the sound bites, trying to pinpoint the subtleties of this, the micro-aggressions, the unawareness, the subtleties of being slightly asleep to what’s going on around you, but from many directions.

YL: Is that what you hope your book contributes to the whole conversation?

TM: I do. I hope it picks apart some of the black and white. That it nuances and makes it more complicated than that. Because one of the points I make in the book is that the ‘plantation owners,’ as I call them, love it when we fight. They love it when it’s black vs. white, because they can go on to run their plantations and make their profits while we’re fighting against each other on the plantation. So the book is about pointing at where the real problems are.

YL: It’s about opening up conversations – it’s not as simple as saying ‘this is racism’ or ‘that’s racism’.

TM: It’s not a question of whether racism exists or not: it does. And it’s not a question of whether Britain is a racist country: it is. It’s just how does it manifest itself and how is it systemic and how is it other things? How is it part of being British, how is it part of the structure and how does it cause people to behave in reaction to a given moment?

AK: And whenever those sorts of conversations occur, the mainstream media seems to deal with it very superficially. I’m thinking of when Stormzy was asked whether Britain was still racist – his comments were misrepresented , and the conversation became ‘Stormzy says Britain’s a racist country, how dare he say it’s a racist country’. It all becomes reduced to fighting over the surface details without really engaging in the conversation.

TM: Yes, absolutely. And to not even be able to acknowledge that I’ve had this experience. You can’t tell me that it’s not racism if it’s my experience. You can’t deny my experience, because that’s the ultimate in white supremacy, right: ‘you didn’t have that experience, that doesn’t happen.’

YL: It’s like gaslighting, isn’t it?

TM: Completely.

YL: Because the more you go on about how you got it wrong, the more…

TM: … it becomes my fault. I was wrong. I’m misinterpreting. I’m oversensitive. I’m just a victim. And that’s why, in the book, I use scare quotes – ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘yellow’, ‘brown’ – as a way of highlighting the way that language is a tool, but also a weapon, and that we need to be very careful of it. We’re all products of language, we’re all built on stories. And we need to be careful about the stories we tell and how we hear them. We now have a whole bunch of new stories about race – we have Meghan Markle, we have Lawrence Fox, they’re stories – and how we hold those stories and how we tell them and how we interpret them are really important to a contemporary way of understanding what we’re doing as ‘othering’ people.

AK: When you’re discussing – or teaching – history, it can be dangerous to project modern views and language on the past. There are nuances in there we’re not always aware of. But there are people who want to whitewash our view of the past, for their own modern agenda.

TM: I guess I was trying to find out why we need to draw boundaries that keep us tribal, that keep us white, black, keep that purity, keep that tribe safe. There are threats from the ‘outside’. Why do we have those threats? Because in my interpretation of it, capitalism tells us there’s a threat because we’re in competition with each other and if we’re in competition with each other there’s not enough. It says that ‘I don’t have enough and therefore I need to keep you out’ and so you become other. And if you are from the power base, that usually comes swiftly and brutally. No matter what the current other is, there’s always an ‘other’; currently in the West it’s probably Muslims. Throughout our history there’s always been a reason to put that border up, and borders are the essence of racism. I saw this photo that went viral on social media recently, of a Joey – a baby kangaroo – stuck in a fence, burnt and charred during the Australian bush fires. But it was the detail of the fence that was so awful, because the kangaroo was running away and it got stuck in the fence and died; it made my heart race and my blood churn. And there’s so much about that that’s absolutely wrong: people – creatures – fleeing who can’t get to where they want to go because of that border, and that border defines others. Others can’t get into our space. And I think we have to examine why we need that border.

AK: What’s the reaction been to the book?

TM: Oh it’s been really good, on an individual level. I’ve had amazing responses, from lots of different kinds of people, but mostly from people of mixed race who say ‘I’ve never seen myself in a book, ever, until now.’ This 35-year-old woman wrote to me and said ‘no one has ever written about me before’, so that’s really lovely. A lot of people who say ‘I’ve never looked at myself, looked at race, at whiteness as a state of mind’ before.

AK: I have a question about intimacy, and this is a question that we often ask authors of memoir and autobiography: having read it I feel like I know you, know a different side of you. What’s the reaction of friends and family been in that regard?

TM: My family’s all fine with it. My friends who are not necessarily intimates say ‘I never knew that, I never knew that was how you were experiencing the world.’ They’re surprised, and a little bit blocked out of those things. And it’s true, I don’t wear those reactions in my everyday life – I mean, I fight for those issues, but I don’t wear them all the time. Essentially, I’m a privileged person, so I don’t walk around reacting to things if they’re about me. I do if they’re about other people and power dynamics that hurt them.

YL: That’s an interesting point about privilege. I was talking [to Andrew] about this conversation I had about Afua Hirsch’s book, Brit-ish. Well, the other person said ‘it’s quite a strident voice… and she’s privileged.’ Almost as if because she’s from a privileged background she’s got no right to talk about race. I felt that’s all the more reason you do.

TM: It’s why I wrote this particular book and not any other book about race. The shame is on me, as well as on other privileged people. The shame is on me because of the whiteness, because of privilege and liberalism and how ‘attainment’ can be seen to be outside of race, to be post-racial. But the world is not post-racial. I happen to work in the master’s house and not in the field. That’s all that means.

And the book is a lot about me recognising that, and that’s where the privilege is.

YL: Your book ends with hope, and I wondered: does that hope extend to dismantling the master’s house? You touch on the next generation.

TM: Not just the next generation. Now, with the burning, flooding, decimated planet, we could say ‘Stop! Let’s look at what we’re doing.’ The planet needs us to stop and look at each other and say ‘we need to do something together here.’ I’m not that hopeful. I’m hopeful in that I think individuals can ask ‘who am I?’ And then they can join together and have better conversations, but I’m not 100% convinced that we’re not on some kind of selfdestruct path. I don’t think I would have said that when I finished writing the book, but maybe we’ve gone too far since then.

AK: Because we’ve had three years of this country tearing itself apart, and we’ve just doubled down by electing a Conservative majority.

TM: We’ve doubled down. And I think had I written the book after the election I might have been less optimistic. I don’t know. I think there is a place for slow, individual change and for those individuals to join up and form groups. For me, if I don’t resist and push back against what’s going on now, I don’t want to be here. So I have to push back. And maybe if everyone who feels that joins together… But I’m less confident that we can really change anything soon. Maybe it’s over the long haul – but the really long haul.

AK: Those mass protest movements like Extinction Rebellion seemed to have captured the imagination last year – but are they having an impact?

TM: I’m not sure. I just came back from Barbados at Christmas; I have family there. But I was surprised by how much blind consumption through tourism still thrives. Fiddling while Rome burns. I don’t want to say that I’m not hopeful, because the book does end with hope, but… I need to find it again. I need to find that hope again.

YL: After the Brexit referendum there was a point that I thought ‘at least people are having the conversation.’ Before that they weren’t, people were very much ‘oh no, it doesn’t exist, we’re very open minded here.’ But I think after Brexit people started talking about it. If there’s any plus point about any of these horrible things it’s that new people are coming forward with their own voices; they’re not holding back any more; they’ve got a say in this.

TM: I agree, but it just feels that the voices are more polarised. That it’s gone back to a lot of hate. After the 2019 election I thought ‘OK, you don’t want me here, I’ll leave,’ because that’s what the massive support for a Tory Brexit felt like. And I feel a lot more resigned than I ever have before. [Pause] Gosh, this is terrible. I’m really glad you picked up on the hope in the book, because that’s what I wanted there to be.

AK: Did you decide to write a book about race or did you decide to write a memoir, or were they always connected?

TM: They were always connected. I’d always had the idea that I’d break it down, break the race discussion down into body parts. And so then as soon as I decided that I thought I can’t only objectify the body because that’s what other people do; I wanted to undermine race and take it on at the same time. I wanted to be responsible, because I cannot speak for everyone, I can only speak for myself, that complicated self; and in speaking for that complicated self, it’s a complicated argument. So in a way it was a book I was born to write. Nobody else – that I know – could have done it that way, and I had to do it at that moment.

AK: That’s interesting to hear about the decision to structure the book around the body, because we were wondering if that came later in the process, but it sounds like it was very much there from the start.

TM: That was at the very beginning. Because I don’t fulfil the quintessential body types of any those so-called races, I had to break it down that way. YL: So it became an interrogation.

TM: Yeh.

YL: I thought it was interesting that you took an almost scientific approach.

TM: It very much is an experiment in many ways. It’s an experiment in non-fiction, and it’s an experiment in a discussion about an essay vs. a memoir. It’s a hybrid, like me.

YL: When you’re dealing with family history, when you’re writing about yourself, it’s often based on memory. In particular with family history, you never get everything, do you? I was wondering whether hybridity was the solution to dealing with those gaps?

TM: Absolutely. I fictionalise some of my ancestors because I don’t have access to them. Hybridity of form, hybridity of approach, hybridity of the physicality of things. I think that’s probably the organising principle behind the book.

AK: Did you find that challenging? There’s a tendency when writing non-fiction to smooth the story, especially when you’ve come from a fiction background where all the answers for the story are within you. Did you find…

TM: …being constrained by truth a problem? Yes! It’s not so much that the truth was a problem. I’m a storyteller, and so it was telling a real story. I think everybody is a storyteller, even science is storytelling on many levels. If you want to expose a truth, you tell a story around it, whether it’s setting up petri dishes to confirm that story or narrating it. I think science and literature, science and art, have a lot more in common than scientists allow for. I recently talked to Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness and someone who is steeped in medical humanities, and told her what I do – not for this book, but I have another project that’s mentioned in the book, my loneliness project. I said ‘we share stories against loneliness,’ and she said ‘that’s medicine.’ Storytelling is what medicine needs, and that’s one of Christie’s points, that patients need to be able to tell their stories in order to get well.

AK: I was going to ask you about shifting from writing fiction to non-fiction, but it sounds like it wasn’t so much of a shift.

TM: Not so much. I had written the draft of a novel before I wrote this, then I won the Eccles British Library award for Shame On Me and my agent sold it, so then I had to get it finished. I’ve since gone back to the novel and have just handed it in to my agent. It was a joy to go back to in many ways; because you don’t have to worry about the truth. But my next book is non-fiction, so…

AK: Do you think some of the themes that you touch upon in this book, that you’ve uncovered, will reoccur in your fiction?

TM: You’ll see them if you read my next novel, which is a kind of King Lear for brown girls. It’s about that dying off of that superior, white narrative; it’s got an older man, an 86-year-old man, and a young Indian woman, who’s a Cordelia figure for him. And so those themes are definitely there. Power dynamics are in almost everything I’ve written.

YL: There was something that struck me when I read the acknowledgements in the book, where you thanked your publisher for encouraging you not to hide behind your ideas.

TM: Yes, she really challenged me. Because I had used all sorts of passive constructions, my sentences had a fairly academic tone, and she asked where I was in all of this. She made me come out from behind that style of quite formal language and into the forefront of the writing, so that it became much more ‘I’ centred.

YL: How did that feel? Because this is really personal, that must have been very uncomfortable.

TM: It was at first, but she coaxed it gently. The things that I exposed were always going to be the same, but it’s the way the sentences were constructed that changed and became more personal. And so it probably felt more personal to you as a result, but to me it was always that same amount of exposure but I was hiding behind that language of essay-writing, rather than using a more confessional tone.

AK: That’s bold and brave, to inhabit the book so fully there’s no shield to hide behind.

TM: There’s authority in that as well. I knew when I was writing it everything had to come back to me, because I didn’t want to make big statements about things I didn’t know about. I don’t know about other people’s experiences, so I had to make them about me. So the personal was always going to be the political. That’s the only way I could justify the political, by making it personal.

YL: And the authority from which you speak was the personal.

AK: What were some of the other challenges you faced when writing this? Because one of the problems about writing family history is that, by its very nature, it relies upon certain members of the family, some of it’s locked away from you. When writing ‘real’ history, you can go to archives, you can look it up, but with family history it’s personal. That sort of history isn’t in a book.

TM: Most of it is oral history, most of it is family stories. And most of the stories were reliant upon my mother, who’s got dementia! Her dementia was just beginning when I wrote it, but she doesn’t remember some of the things she told me. So it became, again, a question of: how do you know what’s true, how do you know what’s real? And history books are one kind of authority, but is that book authority – is what someone said about race back in the seventeenth, eighteenth century – any more authoritative than my ancestors’ stories? No, because since then we’ve challenged those authorities. Storytelling on the level of race science is still very much storytelling.

YL: So you can’t treat all authorities, all stories, the same.

TM: No, how can you? Or else you’d believe those race superiority stories, you’d believe Africans were inferior, if you believed all science at all times.

YL: Your mother is a central character in the book, and your grandmother. There’s obviously a very strong bond there. Did your stories mainly come from them?

TM: From family, yes. From my cousin, who lives in London and who’s got a memory like a steel trap. He’s 6 or 7 years older than me and lived in Guyana longer so he has a better memory of it. So a lot of the research was relying on everybody else’s stories, as well as a bit of research on the McWatt family tree. That’s how I know my great-greatgrandfather came from East Lothian, but why what happened in Guyana, and who got his name and who didn’t get his name, is the unknown. A lot of those are hush-hush family secrets. AK: In the book you encounter this other McWatt…

TM: … the big black Dr McWatt. Which was an incredible moment, when I saw my dad’s name – because he was also Dr McWatt – on the oxygen cylinder at the airport. And my dad had just died, needing oxygen.

AK: Did you ever find where your families intersected?

TM: Yes, my great-great-grandfather’s cousin was his line of the family.

AK: There’s that pressure in recovering the stories. I got very interested in my family history when my mum died, because she was the custodian of the family story and I felt this real drive to go and see my grandad, who was very old at the time, and to talk to him and get these stories out of him. There was that need to find out, and that regret for not finding out sooner.

TM: Do you feel regret?

AK: Yes, in some respect.

TM: And you feel, how am I going to know? You might have to write fiction now to fill in the gaps [laughs].

YL: I was thinking about the importance of stories from women, because you talk about suppressed voices. So, in a way, bringing stories from your mother and grandmother is a way of giving them a voice.

TM: And I can trace the McWatt side, but I can’t trace my mother’s side except through her father, so that female lineage is always blocked by the name change, and denied. And because, in this case, nobody in my family acknowledged my great-great- African grandmother. I don’t know where she sits. I asked my cousin about her, because they knew her son, but they don’t know. Nobody knows anything about her.

AK: Were there any other spurs of your family that you were interested in, but you couldn’t get to?

TM: I was really close to my Chinese grandmother, so I’d really like to find out more about her family. And then there’s the Amerindian side.

AK: Which is where you had to fictionalise your ancestor?

TM: Yeh. As a Canadian, the indigenous issue is very important. It’s one thing to have bloodlines, it’s another thing to claim an identity that you have no experience of. And that’s where cultural appropriation comes into play. It would be great if we were all trans-racial, but that doesn’t speak to people’s experiences. Because it’s often not about skin colour, it’s about experiences, it’s about poverty, it’s about violence. And sometimes those experiences have nothing to do with race – it goes along with race, because we’re on the plantation, but not always.

AK: You mentioned earlier about the need of a capitalist society to ‘other’ certain people, and at times that’s been a class rather than race-based othering.

TM: It still very much is class othering, especially in this country. I’m such a naïve North American. I came over thinking it would just go away, it would get better, because there’s a kind of meritocracy in North America that just doesn’t seem to exist here. And I think I’ve only realised that in the last 5 years, and I’ve been here for 21 years. Meghan Markle has made the first good move, she’s started to dismantle the royalty, but it’s not going to be enough.

AK: And the press’ response to that, the outcry…

TM: ‘How dare she? She’s ruined him. This uppity black woman has taken away our prince. Ruined the monarchy.’ Good on her. I wasn’t a big fan of her before, I couldn’t care less about her, but I like her more now. But there’s something very elemental about the British Empire, in this country. I don’t know if it will go away.

AK: A lot of the arguments supporting Brexit revolved around sovereignty and a return to a ‘golden age’ that probably never existed…

TM: Or existed on the backs of those other people that they didn’t know about, who were harvesting their sugar.

YL: That they chose not to see.

TM: How are you, Andrew, where do you sit? What do you feel about all of this?

AK: Very uncomfortable. I’m a staunch Remain voter, but before that I admit that I thought all of these problems had been fixed. I couldn’t see the problem. I come at it from a slightly different angle, because I’m gay. I came out in my thirties, and I freely admit my experiences as a white middle-class man coming out in the noughties would have been a very different experience from a working-class or black man coming out, or someone coming out in the eighties or nineties.

TM: So you have a sense of where you sit relative to the othering.

AK: And I’m keenly aware of my own privilege because of that. Which is why I’m very careful when we have these sorts of conversations, although I like to think that I’m aware of that privilege that I’ve enjoyed. Because my coming out story was very boring: I told my mum I was gay and everyone accepted me, the end. I don’t want to project my experiences onto questions of race, though. But that does then make me feel like I don’t own the identity; because I’ve never felt that pressure, I’ve never felt that victimhood. I’ve never felt that homophobia.

TM: But that’s exactly what the book asks you: who are you relative to inequalities? I don’t know if you’ve heard of Ibram Kendi’s book How to be an Antiracist, in which he says there’s no such thing as being not racist – we’re all racist. The difference is are you antiracist, do you have antiracist actions. I wrote a TLS review that doesn’t speak well of the book necessarily, but this one thing is very clear, it’s not about doing nothing, it’s not about saying ‘I’m not a racist so I don’t need to do anything.’ It’s about where are you when that’s in your face, and how antiracist are you. It’s a really good marker. You might be privileged and you might be all kinds of things but in the face of homophobia and racism, who are you, what do you do? And I think that’s a good marker, that action, verbal as well as physical action. Who are you in the face of climate collapse, who are you in the face of racism? AK: Are you a bystander, in which case you’re complicit.

YL: I was going to ask you about action. Do you think that’s the path you’ll take going forwards?

TM: Yes, writing is one thing, but not every book hits a mark with other people. Writing is action, it’s definitely important, but writing is aimed at people who read. And at people who read a certain kind – a certain level – of writing, so it’s not enough to just write. Especially with the climate crisis, it’s not enough. When the book came out [in October 2019], I went from recording Start the Week with Lenny Henry, Keon West and Matthew Syed on Radio 4, to sitting and blocking a road in Trafalgar Square, because it was the same day as the last Extinction Rebellion action started. So that felt good; I went from saying stuff to blockading the road. I was accompanied by people who felt the same. To do something, and to do something with other people, feels good.