Up until April 1982, the spirit and pride of West Indian black youth in Britain had usually been best expressed through the immediacy of Reggae music and poetry, not through traditional literary forms, especially not the novel. It was refreshing to read a book that was full and wide in scope and spoke with an authentic voice of and for the Birmingham West Indian community; especially when the author was so young. This first ever Afro-British novel was published with a confidence that black people were definitely going to warm to this picture of life as it was in Small Heath; others would too.
Trinity Arts Association was a community arts workshop who received financial assistance from the then named West Midlands Arts. They were based in the heart of Small Heath, an inner-city area of South-East Birmingham, UK. They were committed to the ethos of the community arts movement, which aimed to ensure that ‘everyday people’ were able to access the arts. Their Literature Department, mainly through the inspiration and enthusiasm of the late John Dalton, between 1978 and 1982, had established a reputation for uncovering and encouraging writers in the Small Heath area, and John Dalton played a pivotal role in the publication of this novel, which catapulted Norman Samuda Smith as the pioneering Black British novelist.
First published in 1982, Bad Friday was Trinity Arts’ sixth publication and arguably their best. It was the first and only novel they produced, in the past; they concentrated on local history and poetry collections. They printed only 1,000 copies, but that tiny print-run created ripples that eventually had a massive impact. It attracted the attention of the black literary fraternity around England, created a wave of inspiration amongst the youth of Small Heath who were Norman’s friends and neighbours, and a lasting impression beyond; for example, it inspired Black British writers such as the highly acclaimed Author/Screenwriter/Playwright Courttia Newland.
Set in mid 1970s Small Heath, Birmingham against the back-drop of an economic recession, record unemployment and mass union strikes, Bad Friday follows the fortunes of Delroy Bell, a black school leaver and his friends. It portrays their search for a future, an identity and the respect they feel was denied their parents; and depicts the predicament in which Faye, young and pregnant finds herself; anxious about the possible rejection of her family and the baby’s father.
Bad Friday was shortlisted for the Young Observer Fiction Prize later that year, and in 1983, it motivated the youth of Small Heath to form a drama group, of which Norman was a founder member and became their principal playwright. Ebony Arts Theatre Group performed and toured his plays nationally to packed community audiences. His novel also inspired the emergence of young writers within the group, and during the development of the collective, under the umbrella of Ebony Arts, the Ebony Writer’s Posse also performed their works nationally by way of monologues and spoken word poems until the theatre group’s demise in 1989.
New Beacon Books (London/Port of Spain) republished Bad Friday in 1985. They announced it was the first novel to come out of the Black-British working class experience and Norman (Samuda) Smith was confirmed as the first Black-British born novelist to be published in the UK.
His modest presentation of the characters through their speech, builds a realistic fictional life. At one point, the main character Delroy says: “The reason why I’m in trouble most of de time is cos I’m quick-witted…” and the talk in the book are mostly like that: true-to-life, sharp.
The dialogue spoken by Bad Friday’s characters is an Afro-British patois, the vernacular of the author’s peers. It is a dialect that is originated from his West Indian roots; a tongue developed in the school playgrounds across Britain through the 1960s, into the 1970s and is still evolving as the second, third and soon fourth Afro-British born generations emerge.
It is important to understand and realise that Bad Friday was published a clear decade before X-Press, (now the largest publishers of black fiction in Britain), launched their first publications.
This third edition, with new characters and additional chapter which were left out by the editors of the previous two editions, is published in celebration of Bad Friday’s 30th Anniversary.
