Women reading the world — and rewriting it

Growing up, I could always be caught with a book in my hand. There was my favourite picture book, Corduroy, about a teddy bear that comes alive and the little girl who longs to buy him. As a pre-teen I devoured the Swedish Pippi Longstocking books, about the imaginative and free-spirited nine-year-old who claimed to be the “strongest girl in the world”. Later, there was the young adult novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D Taylor, about an African-American family living and working in rural Mississippi in the 1930s. These books taught me that one gift offered by reading was as a way to spend time in realities different from your own, and that it could alter how you think about your own life and reality.

But I remember the first book I read as a young woman that engaged me in a way unlike any other. It was the 1996 novel Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter, by the Zimbabwean author J Nozipo Maraire. It is about Shiri, a Zimbabwean mother writing to her daughter Zenzele, who lives in the US and attends Harvard university. It is full of stories, confessions and advice to remind Zenzele of who she is and where she comes from, and to hold the history of her own culture alongside the American one she is steeped in.

For me, a young woman with Nigerian parents, but born in America and raised in four countries across three continents, the book spoke about an element of my own life that I had not as yet encountered in literature.

It made me consider in a deeper way the particularities of my own story, and that there were multiple cultural narratives and histories that needed to be mined and shared. It was one of the first books that showed me how, in offering their views and experiences, women could shape how they are understood by the world, as well as helping readers to expand their sense of how the world could and should work. I saw Shiri’s letters as offering a different world view but also as teaching a particular kind of agency to her daughter, and to any other young woman who might read them.

I am drawn to the 1915 painting “Maid Reading in the Library” by the Swiss artist Edouard John Mentha. Standing on a bookshelf ladder with her feather duster tucked momentarily under her arm, the maid is engrossed in a book. On the shelf are large encyclopedic volumes, taxidermied birds and bats, a skeleton. It is a scientific library of some sort, so it appears that the maid is not reading a religious tract or a book about housekeeping, the types of literature then deemed suitable for women. And its contents have seemingly kept her riveted, oblivious to the fact she is being watched, by us and perhaps by the owner of the library.

Reading can be so engrossing as to distract us from external pulls, demands and expectations. But it can also inform you about realities that challenge how you’ve understood (or been led to understand) the way the world works. And it can inspire you to desire and concoct other worlds. Perhaps this is why it has always been considered dangerous for certain groups of people not only to read, but also to have access to a wide variety of books, not just the ones prescribed. Reading taps at our interior lives and opens up our imagination, seeding ground for transformation and for action out in the exterior world.

The first time I saw Swedish artist Carl Larsson’s 1906 painting “Model Writing Postcards”, I was unexpectedly smitten by it. A naked woman is positioned in the middle of the canvas, sitting writing at a table covered with papers. She is framed by three portals into other worlds. On the wall behind her is a portrait of the head and shoulders of a fully clothed woman; there’s no clear sense of what she’s occupied with outside the frame, suggesting a world in which women are only partially seen or understood.

Beside the writing woman is a framed painting on an easel; this one depicts an entirely nude woman and some sketchy outlines of the lounging bodies of others. The women on the canvas inhabit a world where women’s bodies are poised for a consuming eye. Given the title of the painting, it seems that our writing heroine was the model for both paintings in the room. But directly in front of her, just beyond a vase of flowers, is a window open to an exterior world where life blooms and flourishes in other ways. A little bit seems to spill into the room from beyond the window.

In the centre of these various worlds, the writing woman is busy narrating her own. I am intrigued by her nakedness. It feels symbolic of the life she leads as a model, and as a woman, the demand that she offer herself up for others’ consumption. But the nakedness to me is also symbolic of how a woman writing must learn to nurture unashamedly her own interior life and work, in order to tell some of the truths of what it means to be her.

One of the most captivating images I have seen of women reading and writing is the National Portrait Gallery’s 1977 photograph of Margaret Busby, the Ghanaian-born writer, publisher, editor and broadcaster. She sits on a chair in the centre of the frame, gazing at us head-on. She is surrounded by a mountain of books, as though she could be caught in a literary avalanche at any moment. In this photograph, it is her beautiful and full gift to read and write, and to curate writing that gets put out into the wider world.

But it is also in its own way a precarious and dangerous thing, to use one’s mind and voice so boldly in societies that spent centuries believing that women, and especially black women, had nothing worthwhile to say. And such places still exist for many non-white women, where large swaths of society believe this. Entire countries, even.

Busby, now 77, was Britain’s first black female book publisher, and in 2020 she served as the chair of judges for the Booker Prize. The NPG photo was taken by Mayotte Magnus in Busby’s office at Allison & Busby, the publishing house she co-founded in 1967. In a 2020 Guardian article by Aida Edemariam, Busby remembered being “treated as some sort of freak — ‘the girl from Ghana goes into publishing’ — as if they were saying: ‘Black girl can read.’ That was the society we were part of and what I was used to, so I just got on with what I was doing.”

Several Christmases ago, my mother gave me a present that astounded me in its thoughtfulness and insightfulness. She had commissioned an artist to paint a 3ft by 4ft image of me sitting cross-legged on a chaise, a blanket wrapped loosely around my thighs and an open book in my hands. I am wearing my glasses and dressed casually in a tank top, with a scarf tied loosely to hold back my hair. It’s not a portrait meant to highlight my physical attributes or make me attractive to a viewer. I am reading the book in my hands, and there is a broad smile on my face. It is a glimpse of a reading and writing daughter lost momentarily in a thrilling world of her own.

[email protected]; @enumaokoro

FTWeekend Festival, London

Come Saturday, September 3 to listen to Enuma Okoro discuss ‘Women Writing the World’ with novelist Jamaica Kincaid as part of the festival at Kenwood House Gardens, London. Also, choose from 10 tents packed with ideas and inspiration and an array of perspectives, featuring everything from debates to tastings, performances and more. Book your pass at ft.com/ftwf

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