Product Description

'Where are you from?' 'No, where are you really from?' These questions, which he has been asked since boyhood, drive Ekow Eshun to travel through Ghana in search of his roots, and lead him on an exploration of history and belonging, from slavery in Africa and the West to the present day and what it means to be black. In search of answers, Ekow unearths yet more questions, some shocking contradictions and some long-forgotten truths about his family past...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #343223 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
Ekow Eshun was born in London in 1968 and grew up in England and Ghana. He was the youngest-ever editor of a men's magazine (Arena), is well-known in the media for his appearances on Newsnight Review, and is now artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. This is his first book.

Customer Reviews

Generation Star Wars
Ostensibly a travelogue about a second generation black briton's journey to his parent's birthplace, Eshun's Black Gold Of The Sun is at heart a meditation on belonging and alienation.

It has been said that the Twentieth Century was the century of the homeless man - with an unprecedented number of human beings travelling both within countries and across national borders. The concepts presented in Black Gold are relevant to anyone who has ever grown up in one place and lived in another. In these times of flux the themes are universal. You don't have to be exclusively black+british to understand the book or to identify with the narrator.

As he travels as an adult to what should be, on the surface, his "homeland" to trace his ancestry the writer reminisces on his early childhood in England, his relationship as the youngest of 4 siblings, his family and his formative years.

Many will know Eshun from his time as the editor of Arena [when it was still an independent magazine and separate in form and content to other men's magazines of its time] and also as the recently appointed, high profile Creative Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In both these roles he has stressed notions of personal empowerment, inclusiveness and choice: so it is interesting to see in his book that he is most powerful as a writer when he is at his most powerless and excluded: in the several passages where his emotional exhaustion is manifested as physical exhaustion, i as a reader found myself [meta]physically slumping in my chair in recognition.

Eshun captures the nastiness of the ubiqitious racism of 1970s England perfectly, as he recounts growing up in that dark and hostile time. Vivid too are his descriptions of the various pre-teen battles of two brothers sharing a bedroom carpeted by an ocean of marvel comics and other 70s paraphernalia. The closed yet complete universe of the child - whether it be the ice cream parlour after a science fiction film on your birthday or the strangeness of seeing your parents cry for the first time - is captured perfectly.

While most contemporary british literature falls into the "thesaurus trap" - the use of obscure words which presumably make the writer and the reader both feel intelligent because they learn a new word everyday - Eshun's use of language is simple and direct. The reader is never lost or left behind. Communication is a priority. Combined with an elegant and lucid prose style [the book, I think, can be read aloud as well as digested silently]- the overall effect is one of honesty and clarity.

Highly Recommended.

ps the cover of the hard-back was done especially by the artist Chris Ofili and is one of the best book covers - in respect to its sympathy to the prose - since Brett Eston Ellis's American Psycho.

Where do you belong?
Since I am always entranced by the beauty of West African men it was the author photo of Ekow Eshun which first attracted my attention when I saw the review in the FT. So I took the book as an opportunity to try to see below the surface and understand what such a man is really like. Up to a point Eshun's story succeeds in conveying this. He describes the roller-coaster effect of his childhood, swinging between the prestige the family had as representatives of Ghana in Britain, and the poverty that followed a change of government when his father lost his position. This loss of status exacerbated the loneliness of being a minority in a minority, a black in Britain but not Afro-Caribbean, being black in a middle-class white school, of not having an answer to the question : where do you belong? He describes very well how this uncertainty eats into the family's relationships, between parents and children, between brother and brother, each desperately seeking solutions but unable to help one another. Music is the only place where they can find common ground, a topic of conversation, something to argue about that doesn't carry the weight of personal grief.
The childhood scenes are by way of background explanation, but the purpose of this book lies in Eshun's journey back to Ghana as an adult to see if he can reconnect with his past. There he has family homes to visit, cousins to talk to, memories to compare with the present reality of the country. But with the eyes of an adult he can no longer recognise what he knew as a child, and his text-book knowledge of history turns out to be too black and white, a deeper understanding makes it difficult to reconcile the ideal of Africa with daily life as it is lived. He remains what he was in London, a "white" black among Caribbeans because of his social class, a "white" Ghanan because he cannot lose his western attitude which demands basic comfort and hygiene and respect. But after a crazy taxi ride across a wilderness in an impossible attempt to escape the paradox, which ends in a derelict slave camp, he reaches some kind of conclusion : "maybe you can't undo the past, but the present is mutable.....there is no template to being African or English. You just have to make it up as you go along."
When I finished reading Eshun's book I wished it had been longer, had more detail. It felt like a lot had been left unsaid, that the person behind the story still eluded me. It is neither a travel book dense with practical detail, nor has it the emotional impact of a novel. Nevertheless, it is an excellent account of one's man experience of being black in Britain. As he writes himself "we are not creations of our environment so much as its interpreters....by doing nothing more than being ourselves each of us had altered the nature of Britain. We'd made it over in our own image."

The book leaves me with the feeling I want to know more

An enjoyable & fascinating book...and must read for all.
I truly loved this book & highly recommend it. Although it's an intimate and moving journey of a man's quest to find his true identity in England by way of Africa, I, an American female of non-African decent, could totally relate to & was fascinated by Eshun's experience...and that is the truly magical & beautiful thing about this book...it's unexpected accessibility. Heartfelt and sincere, Eshun's Black Gold of the Sun is an important and much needed voice in modern literate. Fantastic.