Color Blind

June 14, 2010
Williams offers an English journalist's wry, charming memoir of being a black Nigerian girl growing up in a 1970s white foster home in a village of West Sussex, England. As a baby, Anita Williams was farmed out by her glamorous Nigerian mother to a couple in their late 50s, Nanny and her wheelchair-bound husband, Gramps, to be brought up as a proper English girl with the Queen's accent. Altruistic, Christian, and modest of means, Nanny tells her: "Your colour doesn't matter, Anita. You're just the same as me underneath." Yet Anita stuck out like a sore thumb in mostly white Fernmere, visited occasionally by her haughty, highly critical Mummy Elizabeth, an accountant, and Elizabeth's male sidekick, whom the author recalls molesting her sexually when she was very small. While the town bullies routinely called her names, Nanny and her family doted on her, worried sick that she'd be taken back by her mother. Anita's older stepsister, Agnes, turned up for a visit, while a trip to Nigeria with her mother to visit the far-flung relatives cured Anita of her stereotypical notions of Africans. Gradually, Anita learned that being "black" possessed many complicated connotations, and as she grew up she excelled as a student and rebelled in turn. Her beautifully wrought memoir reaches back deeply and generously to regain the preciousness she felt lost to her.

June 1, 2010

From London-based journalist Williams, an affecting memoir about growing up in two worlds, neither quite comfortable with the other.

The author was born in 1971 to a mother "from a well-heeled and titled Igbo family in Nigeria," her father "a civil engineer from a privileged Krio family in Sierra Leone." Neither was struggling. Yet, writes Williams, she was given up for "private fostering," a kind of temporary adoption often used by poor immigrants seeking to establish themselves in their newfound country by working nonstop. As the narrative opens, her mother has left her with an elderly white woman named "Nanny" in a housing estate in rural Sussex and does not return for months. Months turned into years, with occasional deliverances in which her mother reclaimed her for a time, then returned her to Nanny "until she is old enough for boarding school." Years turned into decades, and Anita-Precious Achaba, as she is known, was old enough to have a child of her own—and in so doing out of wedlock earned the ire of her mother, who warned her, "Just because you're black, people are already making up their minds about you without even knowing what you're capable of." In between, Williams touches on themes that have every opportunity to come off syrupy, but she continually rescues the narrative from mawkishness. One important theme is the trope of abandonment. Another is the ineluctable sense of being different in a place in which ordinariness is a virtue—and there are degrees of difference, as when Williams describes a kindling friendship with a young neighbor across class and ethnic lines "Africans are stuck up," her friend says, "they hate people like me. I'm Jamaican."

Apart from a few instances of schoolyard bullying and a creepy encounter with a boy cousin, there are few moments of real drama in these pages, and yet the story moves along toward a satisfying conclusion that speaks to aspiration and desire. Well done.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)