Annie Yellowe Palma

Annie Yellowe Palma (18 April 1962 – 3 December 2022) was a British poet, author and child protection advocate. She wrote about her experiences growing up as a black woman in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.[1]

Biography

Palma was born in Liverpool, England, to an Irish mother and Nigerian father, the only girl among her mother's six children by various men.[1] She grew up in her mother's native Portadown, County Armagh, in a staunchly Protestant family. Her parents separated when she was four; she never saw her father, who died just two years later, again.[2] Palma was regularly bullied at school because of her mixed race, while her alcoholic mother frequently neglected her children.[3]

Palma moved to London in 1986 and became a qualified social worker with a Diploma in Social Work and a BSc in Applied Social Science.[2] She later believed that had she not left Northern Ireland, she might have contemplated suicide.[4] Palma worked with several children's centres and helped improve their child protection services. She criticised the government's austerity cuts against public services, believing that they would leave child protection services with too much work.[5]

Palma died on 3 December 2022, at the age of 60.[6]

Writing

Palma published several collections of poetry and an autobiography, For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster (2017).[7] The book documents her growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, and how her black family coped with the sectarianism and violence at that time.[2]

Published works
  • For the Love of a Mother : The Black Children of Ulster. Cloister House Press. 2017. ISBN 978-1-909-46556-5.

References
  1. Palma, Annie Yellowe (16 April 2017). "Growing up in Ireland, I scraped my black skin hoping to be white". Irish Central (Interview). Interviewed by Niall O'Dowd. Retrieved 15 September 2022.
  2. McStravick, Sheena (28 May 2017). "Woman pens book about impact of being racially abused growing up in Northern Ireland". Belfast Live. Retrieved 16 March 2018.
  3. "It was very lonely being the only black girl in the class". News Letter. 31 August 2017. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
  4. Sinclair, Leah (13 March 2017). "An Insight Into Northern Ireland's Black Community". The Voice. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
  5. Garboden, Molly (11 August 2011). "Will children's centres reduce the number of children in care?". Community Care. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
  6. Morier-Genoud, Eric (4 December 2022). ""Black Children of Ulster"". Queen's University Belfast. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  7. "Africans in Northern Ireland". Queen's University, Belfast. 7 June 2017. Retrieved 17 March 2018.

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