Akala in Conversation at the Southbank Centre

L: Akala; R: Mustafa the Poet / Photo: Abundant Art

On 6 February, hip-hop artist and author Akala appeared at the Southbank Centre to launch the paperback release of The Dark Lady. I had left it too late to actually obtain a ticket for the live event as tickets sold out fast, so the next best thing was to buy a live stream which turned out to be as good, although I would have preferred to be there in person, especially as Akala's entrance caused a riotous and rippling applause from the audience!

Akala was joined in conversation with Canadian poet and singer Mustafa who was such a breath of fresh air to watch. Mustafa's perspective and questions to Akala were so nuanced and thoughtfully prepared on the novel's content about 'race', identity, class and society, that I witnessed an unforgettable dialogue between the two of them. It was like watching a good film; I was hooked from beginning to end!

Akala - Photo: The Times

Akala's debut novel for teens and young adults, The Dark Lady is a magic realism book about a young, Black, orphan boy called Henry, an outsider, a thief, a fifteen-year-old invested with superpowers, living in the streets of Elizabethan London, who is haunted by dreams of the mysterious Dark Lady. Inspired by Shakespeare, the novel refers to Bard's Sonnets and attempts to paint a realistic picture of street life in Renaissance England. 

Akala - Photo: Ents 24

I mostly enjoyed hearing Akala discuss his writing process and how hard he found the task. Although Dark Lady is his debut novel, he had already written Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (2018) a Sunday Times Bestseller non-fiction book that I really enjoyed reading and would definitely recommend. 

There's levels to this thing ...

Mustafa: "What were the challenges of moving into fiction and attempting to maybe draw a thread between Natives and your novel. How do you explore without losing the essence or the clarity that you write with in Natives?"

Akala: "As anyone who has ever written a book will know, brother, my whole definition of what I thought was hard work has been altered by these last three years working on these two books, and you're confronted by the fact that you realise you're no way as near as smart or as important as you thought you were when you were twenty-five ... I think about how difficult it was for me to write these two books and then I think about War and Peace, or Toni Morrison, or James Baldwin ... there's levels to this thing ... as a writer you realise just how difficult it is to complete a book that is even readable, forget good. Anyone who completes a book that's readable deserves a medal. 

I read Stephen King's book On Writing and when he was talking about "I'm fifty books in and still when I read my first draft I think which kind of idiot wrote this foolishness?" And I was oh thank God, it's not just me. The first draft I sent to my publisher they could've legitimately slapped me. Part of this was feeling pressured to send in something; it wasn't really a draft, just a few words and there was that one scene that was "sick" and they was like we know you can do it as this scene is "bad". 

And so I think the technical craft of learning to write a novel is like being the director, the actor, the editor, and the scriptwriter all in one. You've got to decide where the camera is positioned, you've got to decide when to cut from scene to scene, you've got to decide what angle the person sees the film from, you've got to inhabit the emotional universe of each of your characters to get the best out of them like a director does, you've also got to act and be the characters ... man, it's hard brother. And you finish it, and it's not even satisfying when you finish! 

Being a musician I spent the whole of last year driving around bumping these mixes and enjoying listening to my music. I don't think I've ever got that level of joy from my own books. You finish writing them and it's like a gaping wound in your soul. You ask yourself what am I going to do with the rest of my life. You feel distraught; there's this weird kind of melancholy. 

The process of research is wonderful, reading books, making notes — wonderful! Then you get down to writing — awful! Unbelievably hard, like training for the Olympics and then you come 75th! So I think authors are a bit pseudo-masochistic. 

Don't get me wrong, I still appreciated both of the processes. There is a very different creative headspace to writing a novel and writing a nonfiction book. I personally feel like I'm naturally better at nonfiction but that may just be because Natives was longer ago and so the distance of it being five years ago in 2017 makes me feel like the process was easier than it was at the time, because at the time I don't think I felt like that, whereas brother, I'll be honest, the novel was hard! 

I'm not going to sit here and pretend to you ... I think I did nine drafts of 80,000 words, that's work ... and I think it's a very good book, I'm very proud of it but it's not Toni Morrison and I'm not going to delude myself and think it is ... maybe one day in twenty more years I might get there. Writing a good novel is a huge achievement but there's levels to this thing."

I totally understand how Akala felt ... when I independently published my first anthology Brown Eyes, it felt as if I had given birth and then put my baby up for adoption! Very similar to the 'gaping wound in your soul'.

Tickets are available for the Akala in conversation livestream to watch online until 6 March - price £8.50. It's a must watch!!