“Black person on the telly!” was a familiar cry in excited black British households in the 1970s and 80s whenever someone who looked like us appeared on screen. Clive Myrie, the BBC news presenter, recounts the same sentiment in Everything Is Everything. But in 1994, when it came to reporting on the Notting Hill carnival, if Myrie had his way, that black person would not be him. The ambitious journalist’s reluctance was not a disavowal of his blackness but a manifestation of his unwillingness to be defined – at least in terms of BBC jobs – by his colour.
In the early 1960s, Myrie’s working-class parents had moved from Jamaica’s tropical sunshine to “the sleety slush” of Boltonian downpours. At university he studied law but, inspired by watching the broadcasters Alan Whicker and Trevor McDonald, Myrie joined the BBC as a trainee radio reporter in 1987. Opportunities quickly opened up for him. Within a decade, he’d become “the BBC’s eyes and ears in Asia” with a posting to Japan. “I was doing all this,” he marvels, “despite being black.”
To locate himself in the bigger story of the turbulent, social and political landscape of his times, he begins in 1964, the year of his birth, contrasting British and American attitudes towards race relations. Superficially, the US seemed more enlightened. While landmark civil rights laws were being passed in Washington, here in an election in Smethwick, in the Midlands, the Tories’ unofficial campaign slogan was: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, Vote Labour.” All of this is true, but the brevity of Myrie’s reflections mirror news bulletins or extended headlines. They’d benefit from greater context; arguably the US, then as now, was much more overtly racist than the UK.
Everything Is Everything is more satisfying when exploring the enigma of black diasporic life. “A giant bear wandering around aimlessly in an unfamiliar forest” is Myrie’s description of his father’s frustrations about the prejudice he encountered that stymied his job prospects. Myrie senior came to believe he’d made a mistake in coming to the “motherland”. “[My father] hated England for taking him in,” he writes. But later, when ruminating on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and the present threat to the black population in the US relative to the UK, Myrie concludes: “I’m glad my slave ship steered south.” Delving further into such contentious sentiments would have made for a more rewarding book.
Throughout, there’s a sense of Myrie wrestling with his BBC training. The anodyne tendency of that organisation’s guidelines hovers over the prose. He is more impactful when he bursts free from self-censorship. It’s clear that Myrie is an unusually humane reporter when he recalls the violence he has witnessed over several decades. There’s a particularly devastating account of “[headless] bodies piled high outside the hospital” after ethnic atrocities in Borneo. In Japan, hearing the testimony of people abused because of their leprosy, he recalls how “the pain leaches into you”. And embedded with British commandos in Iraq, he remembers the pitiful aftermath when an Iraqi bunker was “mercilessly shelled”.
The battle-hardened correspondent is unsure whether he has suffered post-traumatic stress through work, but confesses that when triggered “my eyes will well up with tears and I will weep and then, as suddenly as it starts, it stops”. At such times, Myrie writes peculiarly, as if he were a tourist in his own life. Equally, though, there are frequent glimpses of the capacious empathic traits of the son of Caribbean migrants. “As a black man, I understood their sense of being rejected,” he says of interviewees at the Japanese leper colony.
His writing edges closer to poignancy when reflecting on the sacrifices and stoicism of the “Windrush generation”, highlighting his mother, Lynne, whose thwarted ambition to transfer her teaching skills from Jamaica to the UK have been offset by the vicarious pleasure she’s taken in her son’s career. “Everything is everything”, a wise saying that Myrie attributes to Lynne, is a humble statement of acceptance, fate even, that “everything is going to plan”. And when, daily, the news suggests the opposite, there’s at least some succour to be drawn from Myrie’s appearance on our screens, and in this memoir, as the measured messenger of tragedy and harbinger of hope.
Colin Grant’s memoir I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Jonathan Cape) is out now
• Everything Is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate & Hope by Clive Myrie is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
