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How 'Keisha The Sket' Accidentally Decolonised Literature

At 13, I sat down and began mindlessly writing a story about a girl who, despite the ways in which she was deemed socially undesirable, found love.

At the time, my household had no internet but I had just been gifted an eMachines desktop computer by my mum and granny for my 13th birthday. I remember exploring the empty machine for the first time searching for Microsoft Paint, hoping to fulfil my childhood dreams of spending all day drawing on the application. Of course, there was no Microsoft Paint. But there was Notepad, and this was where what was and is popularly known as Keisha The Sket began to take form. This was 14 (three months shy of 15) years ago. I couldn’t predict its popularity nor did I anticipate that the story I wrote at my desk in my bedroom out of boredom, would serve to break as many barriers as it did.

Keisha The Sket and many a project before and after it have been pioneered by black creatives from ‘ends’ the world over operating with an almost blindness – creating without an ability to fully conceive of the depth, gravity and influence that what they’re making may have. In layman’s terms: more time, we don’t know what we’re doing, but our spirit carries and affirms. That being said, almost a decade and a half on, I feel it pertinent to look back retrospectively now, with different eyes, and deep how my creativity disrupted the status-quo.