From the Chicago Review:
Malika Booker’s and Nick Makoha’s poetics embody two African diasporic migrations (from the Caribbean and from the African continent) that together comprise the context for contemporary Black British poetry, and Black British life more broadly. Makoha, born in Uganda, left the country to escape the dictatorship of Idi Amin, and has lived most of his life in the UK. Booker, whose parents are from Guyana and Grenada, was born in London but spent her early life in Guyana before moving back to Britain at age eleven. In their debut collections, Booker and Makoha narrate the multiple crossings—both forced and “voluntary”—that bring the Anglophone African continent and Caribbean into conversation in their former colonial metropole. However, in contrast to previous generations of Black British writers, Booker and Makoha did not experience the era before Britain’s colonies gained formal independence, and so their perspectives on the “postcolonial” are different from (though informed by) that of the Caribbean Artists Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
