I Am Nobody’s Nigger

I Am Nobody’s Nigger is Dean Atta’s 2013 poetry collection, the debut book that established him as one of the more interesting young Black British poets of his generation. The collection takes its title from the central poem, which became one of the most discussed pieces of British performance poetry of the early 2010s after Atta read it at various poetry events and published video versions that circulated widely online. The poem, and the wider collection, takes up questions about race, sexuality, identity, and the various ways that Black British men have been positioned by the wider society they live in.

Dean Atta is a London born poet of Greek Cypriot and Jamaican descent whose work has consistently engaged with the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity that have shaped his own experience and that of many other Black British men of his generation. His poetry combines the performance poetry tradition with more conventional literary verse in ways that give his work both immediate emotional impact and the kind of careful craft that rewards repeated reading. The collection includes poems about family, about coming of age in London, about the experience of being a Black gay man in contemporary British society, and about the wider political and cultural situations that shape contemporary Black British life.

The title poem itself is a direct response to the use of the racial slur and to the various ways that the word has been deployed against Black people across the long history of the African diaspora. Atta’s response is both personal and political, refusing the term and the wider system of racial subordination that the term represents while also engaging with the complicated history of how the word has been used both by white speakers as a tool of racial violence and by Black speakers as a reclaimed term within the African American hip hop tradition. The poem became widely read and shared partly because of the way it engages this complicated linguistic and political territory.

Dean Atta has continued to develop his poetry across the years since I Am Nobody’s Nigger. His later work includes the YA novel in verse The Black Flamingo, which won the Stonewall Book Award and has reached an even wider audience than the original poetry collection. The wider trajectory of his career has shown him developing his voice across multiple forms while continuing to engage with the central themes of race, sexuality, and identity that the early collection established.

For readers interested in contemporary Black British poetry, in the performance poetry tradition, in the intersection of race and sexuality in contemporary writing, or in the wider development of British poetry across the past decade, I Am Nobody’s Nigger is essential.