Joan Riley (1958-*)
Joan Riley was born in 1958 into a working-class family in Saint Mary, Jamaica, where she was the youngest of eight children, and where she experienced at first hand the dire effects of poverty and the debilitating consequences of being situated at the bottom of the Jamaican social system. While at school in Jamaica, Riley received a classical education. She studied William Shakespeare and the English canon, and because at the time more writers from the Black diaspora were being published she was also exposed to other Caribbean, African and African-American writers. In 1976, she left Jamaica to live in Britain where she attended the University of Sussex and the University of London, and she subsequently obtained a position working in the social services. In 1985, Riley’s first novel The Unbelonging was published in Britain. This was shortly followed by the publication of her other novels Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Romance (1988), and A Kindness to the Children (1992), and also an anthology of short stories Leave to Stay: Stories of Exile and Estrangement (1996) which she co-edited with the New Zealand poet Briar Wood. Riley’s novels depict the experiences of poor Jamaican immigrant women in Britain, where subject to blatant racism from a hostile white society, and also subject to a vicious sexism within their own families they are prevented from attaining a sense of self, and making a decent life for themselves. Riley’s novels fit into the tradition of exile novels that were written in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s, such as George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1950) and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). This is a notable period in British history when black immigrants first began to enter the country on a mass scale, and is marked by the arrival of the SS. Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948, which deposited 492 black immigrants onto British shores. Riley novels were unprecedented as for the first time they documented the experience of diaspora from a female perspective.
Riley believes that she occupies a special position as a writer in that she is depicting a reality that has never before been represented, in either Jamaican or British fiction. Previously, Jamaican writers have derived from the rich middle-class elite, and consequently, portrayals of the poor tend to reproduce that perspective and are distorted. As such, Riley claims that she has never before read any fiction that she can personally identify with: ‘There’s never been a voice that’s a poor voice, and I’ve never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction’. Riley asserts that her own subjective experiences of her socio-economic background and her observations as a social worker, where she witnessed at first hand the consequences of the endemic racism in British society, enables her to identify with and accurately depict her black working-class characters: ‘I have credibility. I know the masses’. The authenticity of Riley’s writing is also maintained by her use of Jamaican dialect which she considers very important, and by the social realist narrative she employs.
Riley believes that she occupies a special position as a writer in that she is depicting a reality that has never before been represented, in either Jamaican or British fiction. Previously, Jamaican writers have derived from the rich middle-class elite, and consequently, portrayals of the poor tend to reproduce that perspective and are distorted. As such, Riley claims that she has never before read any fiction that she can personally identify with: ‘There’s never been a voice that’s a poor voice, and I’ve never, ever seen myself reflected in Jamaican fiction’. Riley asserts that her own subjective experiences of her socio-economic background and her observations as a social worker, where she witnessed at first hand the consequences of the endemic racism in British society, enables her to identify with and accurately depict her black working-class characters: ‘I have credibility. I know the masses’. The authenticity of Riley’s writing is also maintained by her use of Jamaican dialect which she considers very important, and by the social realist narrative she employs.
