LITFEST: Malik Al Nasir: Searching For My Slave Roots

In conversation with Rebecca Joy Novell

‘I suspect that in ten years’ time, we’ll look back at the study of slavery and try to remember what it was like before we’d heard of the Sandbach Tinne dynasty. That we’ll struggle to imagine how we tried to understand Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade without this huge dynastic epic at the centre of it’ DAVID OLUSOGA 

Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool, a mixed-race kid formerly known as Mark Watson – he changed his name when he converted to Islam in early adulthood. Bemused by memories of racist chants baying for him to ‘go back to where you came from’ – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look in detail into his ancestry. 

This book is the result and charts the twists and turns of his journey into the past, exploring an untold chapter in both Black and British history. Largely set in between Liverpool, Glasgow and Demerara and Berbice, Searching for my Slave Roots is a quest for identity, through the genealogy of Malik’s family and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of humans, all to feed our insatiable desire for the sweet stuff. 

Malik Al Nasir unravels not just the legacies of enslavement but also plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty that he himself is descended from through the exploitation of those they enslaved.

Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool to mixed parentage, with a white mother and a black father. He is an author, film maker, performance poet, and an award-winning academic from Liverpool. 

Rebecca Joy Novell is the co-founder of Lancaster Black History Group. She is the County Council lead for refugee resettlement and has a passionate interest in forced migration.

Photo credit: Malik Al Nasir by Bradley Ormesher