For years I laboured under a delightful cognitive shortcut, the kind the brain builds when it decides two people are essentially doing the same job and therefore need only one filing cabinet between them. In my mind there lived a composite figure: formidable, telegenic, fond of a well placed intellectual demolition on live television, and, crucially, British by adoption rather than birth. I called her, in the privacy of my own head, “the Greer.” It never once occurred to this internal editor that there were, in fact, two of her: one African American, one Australian, one from Chicago’s West Side, one from Melbourne, sharing a surname, a sharp tongue and, apparently, my short term memory.
This is the sort of error democracies quietly permit citizens to make about public intellectuals. Nobody audits your mental filing system. You simply go on, decade after decade, enjoying two entirely different women’s insights while crediting them jointly to a single imaginary Greer, an amalgam built from hue-blind admiration and lazy pattern matching. It is, I confess, a very particular kind of respect. You do not misfile people you consider unimportant.
The Alert
Then the phone buzzes, as phones do, with the flat, indifferent authority of a notification that has just rearranged your afternoon. A death. A Greer. And because the composite Greer in my head skewed older, I assumed, with the swiftness peculiar to half formed grief, that it must be the Australian one. I told my wife. She had already heard it from the television, which had, with its usual talent for accuracy that I had apparently not inherited, got the correct Greer the first time.
It was Bonnie, not Germaine. Bonnie Greer, playwright, critic, broadcaster, cultural commentator, dead at 77 on the evening of Tuesday the 15th of September, her husband David Hutchins delivering the news the following day with the sort of restrained dignity that made even the announcement itself feel like one last piece of good writing. Germaine Greer, Australian, feminist provocateur, remains alive, presumably still capable of saying something that will annoy someone by dinner time, which is really the highest tribute one can pay her.
Correcting the Record, and Myself
I record my own confusion here not as an act of self flagellation but because it says something about how public memory is assembled by ordinary, distracted people rather than by careful archivists. We build our public figures out of impressions, television appearances, half remembered panel shows, and we sort them by feeling rather than fact. It took an obituary to force the filing cabinet open and show me two entirely separate women who happened to share a surname and, apparently, my unearned habit of collapsing them into one.
Bonnie Greer deserves better than to be a footnote in someone else’s mix up, so let the record show what it should have shown all along. Born on Chicago’s West Side in 1948, she moved to Britain in 1986 and stayed, became a citizen in 1997, and spent the following decades doing the unglamorous, unfashionable work of being present: on Question Time, in the pages of her memoirs, on the stages where her plays were performed, in the committee rooms of institutions that wanted a Black British voice in the room and, to their credit, got a formidable one. Her 2009 appearance alongside the British National Party’s Nick Griffin, an evening she later described in terms that suggested “creepy” was the polite word available to her, remains a small landmark in British television’s uneasy relationship with giving extremists a platform and then discovering, too late, that someone at the table intends to actually answer them.
The Epitaph I Accidentally Wrote First
There is a strange comfort in the sentence I reached for before I had even confirmed the facts: that her remains here in England shall forever remain Chicago. I meant it as elegy and it turns out to double as biography. Bonnie Greer never stopped being from Chicago even as she became, unmistakably, British public life’s property. That is not a contradiction. It is simply what it looks like when someone successfully colonises two identities instead of surrendering one for the other, which is more than most immigration paperwork is designed to accommodate and rather more than most obituarists bother to notice.
I am left, as one is, glad the other Greer remains available to be annoying in public, sad that this one no longer will be, and mildly embarrassed that it took a death notice to sort my mental filing system out. Grief, it turns out, is an excellent proofreader. It is just unfortunate that it edits after publication rather than before.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 