SOURCE: “Difficult Subjects: Black British Women's Poetry,” in Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon, edited by David Murray, B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1989, pp. 108-26.

In the following essay, Williams discusses approaches to the work of Black women poets in Britain and the possibility of including them in the British literary canon.

How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an...