Clive Myrie
Clive Myrie in conversation with Professor Sasha Roseneil
Clive Myrie with students Dharma Seneviratne and Adwoa Boateng
Award-winning BBC journalist and University of Sussex alumnus Clive Myrie was in conversation with Vice-Chancellor Professor Sasha Roseneil to discuss his memoir.
“Sussex is the place where I grew up, where I was opened up to different points of view. I was soaking up ideas and that was really important for me.”
Clive Myrie, one of the most familiar faces in the BBC’s newsroom, with more than 30 years’ experience of reporting on major events across the globe, is reflecting on his law undergraduate days at the University of Sussex in the 1980s.
To a packed auditorium at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts (ACCA), and in conversation with Vice-Chancellor Professor Sasha Roseneil, the 60-year-old was on campus this week (14 October) to talk about his memoir Everything is Everything.
At one point he was reminded about his first visit to Brighton and an encounter in a record shop with a man dressed in white stilettos, tight white trousers, and with a white poodle on the end of a dog lead.
“I realised that that if someone like that is accepted here, then a guy who says [in a northern accent] bath and castle, and is black, can be accepted here too. I will never forget that moment.”
Inclusive
He went on: “I loved that sense of Sussex being a place of radical politics and pushing the boundaries and being inclusive of everyone – creed and colour.”
Clive’s book, which travels from his childhood in Bolton as the son of Jamaican Windrush immigrants, to the frontlines of Afghanistan and Ukraine, to hosting BBC’s Mastermind, has been made available free to the Sussex community as part of the shared-reading scheme, The Big Read.
In describing his memoir as “an incredibly astute analysis of geopolitics, all through the lens of your own experience”, Professor Roseneil asked Clive about his ability to quickly zoom in on the stories that need to be told.
“Stories about the human condition are universal,” he said. “If you’re an Afghan, a Palestinian, a Jamaican, an American… you all want a decent life. You want the basics of what it means to be human; the right to speak freely, the right to educate your children, to work and to make a living.
“What I have always tried to do is explain why this person is seeking refuge or seeking a life that we all want simply because they are human beings. I take that universality into every single story that I do.”
Since early summer, the University’s Library has organised opportunities for the book to be shared and discussed by the Sussex community. As part of the ACCA event, two students read excerpts and explained why Clive’s writing resonated with them.
Adwoa Boateng chose a passage in which Clive talks about his emotional reaction to frequently reporting on the violence and aftermath of conflicts. He describes finding a distraught woman in a refugee camp in Borneo after her village had been massacred and how it is the image of her face imprinted on his brain “that makes me weep and crowds my nightmares”.
Identity
Adwoa said: “I related to that, especially about seeing more suffering and pain and feeling less desensitised.”
Another student, Dharma Seneviratne, referenced a chapter in which Clive reveals his deeply religious mother was refused access to her local Catholic church in Bolton (Clive this believes this was because of her colour) and how it made him think about identity and belonging.
“Your identity can be an oasis of hope, which really touched me,” said Dharma.
Clive talked about the relevance of his skin colour in terms of his career and his sense of self – initially refusing to cover ‘black stories’, while at the same time frequently receiving racial abuse from many he encountered in his job.
“As a journalist, you don’t want to be defined by your background – someone else’s terms. You want to be able to define yourself. I just happened be born black. “
He also didn’t want the memoir to be defined as a ‘black book’. “The original title of the book was going to be from the famous speech by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice about us all being warmed by the same summer. I was trying to get that idea of universality in the title.”
But he realised he could not divorce himself from his colour. “I ended up with a title that is indicative of the Caribbean – you know [in a Caribbean accent] 'everyting is ok', everything will be fine. I realise now, writing the book, that all my reporting is through the prism of me being ‘othered’ and my family being ‘othered’. And that’s a great thing to realise.”
Questions from the audience ranged from his views on the sensitivities raised by a documentary series he made about the experience of hospital workers during the pandemic, to how he could improve the ratio of black people working in journalism.
In response to the last question, he said: “I am still one of the few black journalists travelling the world to do big international stories. That’s a shame because it was the same situation when I joined the BBC in the late eighties.
“I’ve heard people say they don’t want to work for the BBC because it’s full of white people. That doesn’t make sense. The only way to change it is to get in there.”