Louisa Adjoa Parker © Hazel Beevers
In Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (2020), postcolonial literary scholar Corinne Fowler named Louisa Adjoa Parker along with other writers from the Global Majority—V. S. Naipaul, David Dabydeen, Shanta Acharya, Grace Nichols, John Agard, and Maya Chowdhry—as those who set in motion and spotlight the conversations surrounding rurality. One of Louisa’s books, Dorset’s Hidden Histories (2007), is a narrative history of Black people in the Dorset countryside since the 17th century. Her writings on nature are sculpted as well by her colourful personal histories: being raised by an English mother and a Ghanaian father who were in a violent relationship, moving homes and being unhoused, having a child with an alcoholic traveller who died of a drug overdose, raising her own children in the rural southwest, and now championing local Black history.
On decolonising the countryside, Louisa argued that “Black and Asian people [in rural Britain] have a right to connect with nature, although historically our relationship with the land has been denied (by white people and by ourselves).” Her works of poetry and prose—among others, her collections Salt-sweat and Tears (Cinnamon Press, 2007) and She Can Still Sing (Flipped Eye, 2021) as well as the anthologies she’s part of, Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (404 Ink, 2024), More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry (Canongate Books, 2023), and Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree Press, 2015)—unveil the themes which are enmeshed with rurality and race: class, belongingness, migration, childhood, access. Louisa Adjoa Parker is a testament that the colonised, the enslaved, and those in the alterities can remake and re-world British nature writing—a traditionally colonial and imperialist literary genre.
In this conversation that spans from the southern Philippines to southwest England, I spoke with Louisa on her remapping of rural racism in southwest England, the ever-growing flame of Black British Nature Writing, and how her oeuvre speaks to that literary tradition.
—Alton Melvar M Dapanas, October 2024
Alton Melvar M Dapanas: In your poem ‘Black Orchid’, you wrote about alienation and exoticisation as a Black woman surrounded not only by white people but also of a ‘white-dominated’ landscape:
The folds of silk are as white as the moon
in a night sky next to my ebony skin.
Women glide around the room like swans,
Dipping their long white necks…
In another poem titled ‘Land, Real and Imagined’, you penned: ‘Yes, I am from here, really, / but also from there. My feet / connect me to this piece of earth / which rolls away in green waves, / this piece of earth inhabited / by people who do not look like me. / This is how I wear my skin: / it tells the story of another place.’
Could you tell me about the ways in which place becomes racialised—as a nature writer and a Black woman living in and writing about the English countryside?
Louisa Adjoa Parker: Place is always racialised—as a writer who is writing about nature and the countryside, it can feel as though there’s not much space for people who are not ‘traditional’ nature writers: white, middle-class, male. It is only in recent years that this has been challenged. Writers like me act as a witness to the countryside and its connections with colonialism, Empire, and slavery, which hasn’t been widely addressed in the mainstream. Rural history is very much rooted in this history, particularly here in southwest England where the Transatlantic Slave Trade began in Devon—and that hasn’t been widely acknowledged. There’s also this idea that the countryside represents Empire and the so-called ‘English identity’ which is reflected in literature. Yet that completely ignores the fact that Empire would have brought people and goods and all sorts of connections with the former colonies—and that’s a part of the history of rural Britain.
As a Black woman, to live here makes me very visible, and to write about my experience also makes me very visible because there aren’t many of us doing that. It can feel daunting because when you start challenging racism in rural spaces, it does seem to evoke quite a strong backlash and anger, almost as if the very fabric of rural society is threatened by the different, non-traditional voices telling our stories. People appear to feel that we are changing and rewriting history—and yes, we are, we’re trying to retell and reimagine history from the perspective of the ‘Other,’ the oppressed, instead of only the oppressor. I don’t think we lose our heritage by doing so, but gain from the richer and more honest narratives.
Racism in the countryside definitely permeates my poetry. I’m interested in the intersectional experiences of living in the countryside and belonging to multiple marginalised groups. I began writing to talk about the unusual experience of being a person of mixed heritage in the 1980s Devon—along with the feelings of not fitting in and loneliness as someone whose face doesn’t fit against the rural backdrop. I wanted to explain to my white friends what it feels like, what the challenges are, how lonely it can feel, and how lost I was, and hopefully do so in a way that starts to break down barriers and stereotypes about Black and other Global Majority heritage people.
Dorset’s Hidden Histories: Beginning to Explore Four Hundred Years of the Presence of Black People in Dorset (Dorset: DEED, 2007)
Dapanas: Your personal essays, especially those in New Daughters of Africa (‘Black histories aren’t all urban’) and Nature Is A Human Right (‘How can we end rural racism?’), all speak against the prevailing rural racism, dispelling the notion that the Black body doesn’t belong to rural England. How does rural racism manifest concretely?
Parker: Rural racism doesn’t get challenged, noticed or talked about as much as in other spaces. And yet, it’s there, right under the surface. Challenging or talking about it can bring about a lot of anger and denial. The reality for people living in the countryside, especially those of us of the Global Majority heritage, is that the majority of us experience some level of it whether that’s subtle, in the form of common micro-aggressions, or overt.
And yet, I do think things are beginning to slowly change, that, post-George Floyd, we’re now having more conversations and the wider community is becoming more aware (except for the people who aren’t interested in this as perhaps they hold deeply entrenched ideas of white supremacy). For many years, there was an attitude of ‘No problem here! We have no Black people here. No people of Asian heritage here. Therefore, there isn’t a problem. They’re all in the cities. Racism is an urban issue.’ Now it’s more widely acknowledged that there is a problem, which needs to be addressed. Things are definitely moving on.
Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature eds. Durre Shahwar and Nasia Sarwar-Skuse (Edinburgh: 404 Ink, 2024)
Dapanas: An important anthology in which you’re part of, Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (eds. Durre Shahwar and Nasia Sarwar-Skuse) just came out this year from 404 Ink. Could you talk about being part of one of the few literary anthologies—if not the only one, so far—on Nature Writing written by writers from the Global Majority?
Parker: My essay ‘A British-Ghanaian in the West Country: On Symbols, Myths and Reimagining the British Countryside’ in the anthology explores my lived experience as a Black woman of mixed heritage in southwest England, a place which I have written about quite a lot. Being a daughter of an immigrant and the ‘symbols’ of the countryside were the thread that ran through it. I hadn’t given much thought to symbols before this, and I wanted to explore them in writing. I brought in the conversation I had with Professor Corinne Fowler, highlighting my thoughts about these symbols and what they mean to me. It was really exciting to be part of the anthology and to be truthful, I didn’t really know any of the other contributors before I read Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature. It was amazing to see all these other works written from different perspectives within the overarching theme of Nature Writing. This significant book, to me, is part of a wider movement to make more space for voices in literature, especially in Nature Writing. Hopefully, there will be much more to come.
Dapanas: So there is a disconnect between Black people and other people of colour with the British rural terrain. But that is ‘beginning to shift’, you wrote in one of your essays. In what ways is that change happening? And is that reflected in the publishing industry as well (e.g., the presence of writers of colour who are writing about nature, place, and travel)?
Parker: These days, there are more campaigns, more movements, more charities, and more institutions (e.g., Black Girls Hike, The National Trust, and the Campaign to Protect Rural England). People are becoming more aware of this disconnect, wanting to work to end rural racism and reconnect with the land. You can see it on social media, too —more representation of Global Majority people in rural spaces and engaging in outdoor activities. I think this is becoming more normalised than it used to be.
In publishing, we still have a long way to go. Publishers nowadays are much more conscious of publishing ‘diverse’ writers and they appear to be thinking about diversity. But I believe we need to dismantle old infrastructures before we can rebuild them; there needs to be a deep connection to the work, a robust understanding of history and the harm that has been caused, and an understanding of the benefits a truly inclusive literary world will bring to us all.
Dapanas: Jennifer Leetsch, in Configurations of Migration (2023), listed you along with Laura Barker, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Niellah Arboine, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Tjawangwa Dema, Marchelle Farrell, and Zakiya McKenzie as ‘a new generation of Black British nature writers and artists striv[ing] to confront Britain’s racism as it burrows deep within its landscapes’. Leetsch went on to write that these nature writers and artists ‘unapologetically link their own histories and memories of migration, diaspora and displacement to an either inherent or acquired embodied knowledge of the land, thus working against the positioning of the Black body always outside of land and reaching for the possibility of a cultural and imaginative geography that transforms rural Britain’. Could we dwell on this particular line: ‘the positioning of the Black body outside of land’?
Parker: For so long, there has been this incredibly strong disconnect between the Black body and rural spaces (such as landscape, green spaces and nature). It has just become so normalised to think of Black as an urban state of being, to think of Black people as only ever existing in urban spaces and having urban identities, cutting them off from anything to do with nature and land. And that’s ironic when you consider the countries, rural spaces, agriculture, and the history of Global Majority heritage people in countries where they or their families come from. Perhaps that is partly why Black communities have wanted to disconnect from land, a deliberate move away from the idea of being a worker, a peasant, or enslaved. There are, I’m sure, practical elements behind this given that when people migrate to the United Kingdom, they go to cities to find their families and communities where they belong; it’s where the resources and jobs are. These factors render moving to rural spaces either a privilege or an impossibility. There’s also the possibility of not only the non-acceptance of rural communities to anyone who is not white but also the presence of ideas, cultures, and information shared within Black families about the English countryside, which for many hasn’t felt safe.
Dapanas: In the fiery constellations of contemporary Black British nature writers—Laura Barker, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Niellah Arboine, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Tjawangwa Dema, Marchelle Farrell, and Zakiya McKenzie—where does your work come in? How do your poetry and prose converse with the larger body of Black Nature Writing?
Parker: I feel as though my work is definitely part of Black Nature Writing but I never previously thought of myself as a nature writer at all. It was other people who put that label on me, who got in touch and asked me to speak at a panel and talk about Nature Writing. I hadn’t seen myself as a nature writer per se, I was simply writing about lived experiences—mine and others—of being in the countryside. Nature was more of a backdrop to the human stories. I wasn’t really writing about nature, I wasn’t writing about the animals, the land, and plants. But I guess I am evolving into a nature writer now that I understand you don’t have to be an expert in order to explore these stories.
I’ve recently been commissioned as the Dorset Nature Calling Writer which is an amazing opportunity to learn more about the landscape and people from different groups I’d never really thought about before—such as farmers and those from the farming communities. It feels as though my practice is evolving, and I want to be an inspiration for other people who perhaps think, ‘Oh, I can’t be a nature writer! I’m not an expert enough.’ I’d like to make it clear that anyone who engages with and spends time in nature can be a nature writer. It’s as simple as that.
Dapanas: You were a lifelong walker before getting diagnosed with a chronic fatigue condition. One of your poems ‘Boiling Kettles’ also spoke about neurodivergence. How does Disability percolate into your writings on nature and your creative practice?
Parker: That’s interesting you asked this, because I recently started to consider the fact that I, and many of my family might be undiagnosed neurodivergent (or, as with some of the younger generation, diagnosed). ‘Boiling Kettles’ is about the anxiety I experience when I go away and leave the house. I guess it depends on how you see these things, doesn’t it? In some way, I do consider myself as someone living with physical and mental disabilities. I find life very challenging, everyday situations that many take for granted can be overwhelming for me. In other ways, I don’t want to take away from the experience of other people who have more extreme barriers in their lives due to chronic illness and neurodivergence. I’m very conscious of the many barriers such as Disability when it comes to accessing nature. And I’m passionate about having conversations to find ways to break down those barriers because everybody should have access to land and nature, to writing and the arts. I’ve reflected on it a few times here and there, particularly when I was diagnosed with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) 14 years ago. It is part of my writing, perhaps, but doesn’t inform my writing any more than the other marginalised identities that I write about.
Dapanas: Having written about decolonisation, would you say that an anti-ableist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist Nature Writing is possible? And how can we—writers, publishers, readers, translators, editors—work towards that?
Parker: Absolutely! I believe that’s possible. I believe that we’re working towards that. And I believe that it’s going to take time—all these things take time. We can’t expect to undo hundreds of years of colonialism and the types of thinking that prevailed with it in a few days, weeks, or months. There are big backlashes as well that we have to fight against. And an important part of that is to be able to have conversations with people who have different perspectives to us as respectfully as we can. But critical debate seems to be impossible in this modern age.
Dapanas: A coastal memoir of yours is forthcoming from Little Toller Books. Could you tell us more about it?
Parker: The memoir has been quite a long time coming. At first, Little Toller Books got in touch with me and suggested that I submit a personal essay to their online literary journal, The Clearing. I submitted my essay, ‘At the water’s edge,’ and Little Toller suggested that the essay, which was about my experience of living by the sea, could be turned into a book-length memoir. So, I started writing from that. And now, it’s turned into more of a rural memoir, I suppose. It’s focusing on the experience of being a mixed-heritage teenager in rural Britain in the mid-80s. I explore my experiences from early childhood, living in Devon with my mum and siblings, and how I struggled to negotiate my identity as a teenager with no one around who looked like me, no role models, and nothing to reflect my cultural needs. I explore how I turned to obsessions and unhealthy coping strategies: drinking, boys, and drugs. My mental health was quite poor—the beginning of a life-long struggle. Writing the memoir enabled me to reflect back on those years, from the perspective of an older woman.
It’s been an emotional process, a challenging one. I used my diaries as material for the memoir—and it was really hard rereading how I and other girls were treated at that time by some of the people who were meant to provide us with safe spaces, like our teachers. The attitude towards girls at that time was pretty shocking.
This year, the work I did on the book has been incredibly challenging as I lost my mum in March; it has been traumatic to write about my family. But I’m hoping the memoir will be well-received and inspirational, especially to those who always felt like they were different. I’m very much hoping it’s going to come next year.
