By Sue O’Sullivan
The Sheba collective outside the Bradbury Street Office. From left to right: Lee Esbenshade (volunteer), Sue, Menika van der Poorten, Rae Ann Robertson and Araba Mercer. Michelle McKenzie is missing from this photo.
When I joined Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1986 its office was on Bradbury Street in Dalston, which we affectionately called the Street of Many Co-ops. In good weather we kept our front door open for air and light, as there were virtually no windows. We had four or so decrepit desks around which we gathered for regular collective meetings, clutching mugs of bitter instant coffee. Open clanging metal stairs bisected that room and led down to the layout tables and eventually our bulky and clacking 1980s Amstrad computer. By the time I joined, the collective was made up of a majority of Black women who had decided that the collective should remain ‘racially mixed’ but always with Black women in the majority. This new collective grouping kept the original commitment to new and working–class authors, while adding a sharper focus on Black women and lesbian writing.
Until its final demise in 1994 Sheba delightedly published American writers no one else in Britain wanted, including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, June Jordan, Jewelle Gomez, Joan Nestle, and Sarah Schulman. It created its own anthologies like Through the Break: Women and Personal Struggle, Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, Girls are Powerful: Young Women’s Writing from Spare Rib, Positively Women: Living with AIDS, and two volumes of Serious Pleasure: Lesbian Erotic Stories. All featured an eclectic range of diverse contributors, always drawing on the creativity of old and new Black and ethnic minority writers.
Our book launches and meetings were often broad political interventions as well as literary events. The authors and books were the main draw, but the elaborate food we prepared also helped. We were all food obsessed, whether from Queenie’s café across the road or the Rio Cinema’s take out café, and Ridley Road Market stalls including its then excellent bagel shop, not forgetting Centerprise Bookshop’s café, or nearby Leo’s for pittas stuffed with falafel, tahini sauce, salad and chilli.
Food was the focus of one of my most pleasurable Sheba publishing experiences. At the Feminist International Book Fair in Oslo in 1986, Pratibha Parmar (then still a collective member) and I began riffing about an imagined feminist cookbook. Turning the Tables — Recipes and Writing from Women came hot and fragrant off the press approximately a year later! The book included a few famous contributors but was mainly made up of us ordinary feminist and lesbian feminist women. I laugh now when I remember Kum-Kum Bhavnani’s anti-recipe piece.
Looking back, I am so grateful I was part of the Sheba project in a time when radical, Black, lesbian and feminist politics were in creative and challenging interaction. We encouraged each other to rise to the occasion, to make a difference, to think outside the usual publishing box — and to do it collectively. I miss Sheba. I miss working with my Sheba sisters and writers.
Reprinted with permission from Write women into history, Hackney Howlers