Beverley Bryan

Beverley Bryan (born 18 August 1949)^[1] is a Jamaican educationist and retired academic who was a professor of language education at the University of the West Indies in Mona. Settling in Britain with her parents in the late 1950s, she went on to become a founding member of the Brixton Black Women's Group and co-authored the book The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain.

Early life[]

Bryan was born in Portland, Jamaica, but immigrated to England in 1959 to join her parents who had gone ahead to Britain in 1953,^[1] as part of the "Windrush generation". She and her parents eventually settled in Brixton, London, which had a large Afro-Caribbean community. Bryan studied teaching at Keele University, Staffordshire, and moved back to Brixton to teach at a primary school. Bryan later undertook further studies at the University of London, graduating with a B.A. in English, an M.A. and Ph.D. in language education.^[2] She was a member of the British Black Panthers in the early 1970s, and later together with such activists as Olive Morris and Liz Obi helped to found the Brixton-based Black Women's Group (BWG),^[1] a collective that shared similar radical views.^[3]

Bryan co-authored with Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe the book The Heart of the Race, a collaborative work that came about through the concerns of the BWG, which was published in 1985 by Virago Press.^[1] Speaking of the focus of the BWG, Bryan has noted: "Women came to us with issues from their workplace, incidents in hospitals or health centres; with their care of their children’s case of abuse from the police or schools... This came to the fore and so by the time I came to co-author Heart of the Race, we had the full range of the lives and stories that we could draw on."^[4] The book was reissued in 2018 by Verso Books, with a new foreword by Lola Okolosie, and including an interview with the authors by Heidi Safia Mirza, focusing on the impact of the book since publication and its continuing relevance.^[5]

In June 2020, Bryan spoke about her involvement with the Black Panther Movement in a rare interview with Tell A Friend podcast.^[6] She spoke about the challenges she experienced during the 1970s era of racial discrimination.

Career[]

In 1992, Bryan moved back to Jamaica to join the University of the West Indies (UWI) as a lecturer in educational studies. She was promoted to senior lecturer in 2002 and to professor in 2011, and served as head of the Department of Educational Studies. Bryan is a leading authority on Jamaican Creole learners of English, and has worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Education on language policy. She has also advised other Caribbean governments on literacy policies, as well as serving as a member of the United Nations Literacy Decade Experts' Group.^[7]

She was one of the founders of the Caribbean Poetry Project launched in 2010, a collaboration between UWI and the University of Cambridge that aims to increase the visibility of Caribbean writers in the UK.^[8]

Bryan was the keynote speaker at the Eighth Annual Huntley Conference in 2013, addressing the topic "Educating Our Children, Liberating Our Futures".^[9]

She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby) with "A Windrush Story".^[10][11]

Selected works[]

• The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain, with Stella Dadzie, Suzanne Scafe; Virago Press, 1985, ISBN 9780860683612. New edition, Verso Books, 2018, ISBN 9781786635860
• Between Two Grammars: Language Learning and Teaching in a Creole-speaking Environment, Ian Randle Publishers, 2010, ISBN 978-9766373528

References[]