He had never consciously planned to drive his son to distraction.

To make the boy feel like there was no tomorrow...like the world only existed in this tiny bedroom along with a fleeting glimpse of a boy on the brink of manhood.

Back in the early eighties when I was learning to read for pleasure because the lives of black people were not reflected on British TV, I would recite

The politics of rich painters and other similar poetry to any and everybody who cared to listen.

A few years later, when I first started to write, no wonder my thoughts were filled with the language and imagery of Amiri Baraka and the “agit-prop” tones of the Black Power Movement.