Blonde Roots/ Audio Book

Blonde Roots is now available as an unabridged audio book.
Published by Whole Story Audio Books on 1/12/09.
http://tinyurl.com/blonderootsaudio

My Grandmother: Zenobia Evaristo

Zenobia Evaristo, second wife of Gregorio (below). Born Zenobia Sowemima in Ibadan, Nigeria. Died 1967, Lagos, Nigeria.

Brought back to life as ‘herself’ in the new LARA. (Love the hair-do!)
Bloodaxe Books, October 29, 2009
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248319

My Grandfather: Gregorio Evaristo

Born Brazil. Lived Nigeria. Died Cameroon 1927.
Brought to imaginary life in ’Lara’ revised & expanded (Bloodaxe Books, Oct 2009)
Literary Editor Boyd Tonkin, writing in the ‘Independent’ on 30th October 09, responds to the appearance of fascist Nick Griffin on Question Time (BBC 2) that week with a look at how writers such as myself challenge his ridiculous notions or racial purity and anti-miscegenation: ‘At a time when raucous public voices want to shout us back into boxes, it takes writers to remind us of the pleasures and the virtues of impurity’. For the full article click here:
http://tinyurl.com/tonkinlara
To buy ‘Lara’:http://tinyurl.com/laraamazon
My interview in the Voice newspaper 3/10/09
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=16553

Diana Evans: The Wonder

Diana Evans’ first novel ‘26a’ was a huge success and won, among others, the Orange Prize First Novel Award in 2005.  ’The Wonder’ is her follow-up. A beautifully written novel set in Notting Hill of both the 1960s and today.

I asked Diana to write something about her thinking behind the novel. Here it is.

‘The Wonder’ was inspired by Les Ballet Negres, a dance troupe who took Europe by storm in the 1940s and whose founder was later mysteriously found dead in his home.  It was further inspired by the biographies of Alvin Ailey, Lucia Joyce (James Joyce’s daughter) and, most profoundly, the eccentric Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who is now on the wall in my kitchen (Vaslav, for a while, became an obsession). I wanted to capture the glamour, the passion, the anguish, the strangeness, and most of all the movement of the dance world, while also telling the real story of Notting Hill (not the one Richard Curtis told us).  Lucas Matheus lives on a canal boat, feeling increasing alienated in an increasingly gentrified Ladbroke Grove, and decides to research the once famous, now forgotten dancing lives of Antoney and Carla, the parents he never knew. In the process he discovers some dark and unsettling secrets.

And the critics say:

‘Fizzing, sexy…incredibly entertaining…the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes’
The Times

‘This follow-up to Evans’s acclaimed debut, 26a, is also a serious work of art, with sentences like ribbons of silk winding around a skeleton of haunting imagery…Evans was born to write this novel’
Maggie Gee, Independent

Interview with Helen Oyeyemi

Helen Oyeyemi is a bit of of a wunderkind. Well, no, she IS the Ultimate Wunderkind and I doff my cap to her. Born in 1984 she has already published three novels, the first written while she was doing her A’Levels at 18, as well as two plays. Her novels are ‘The Icarus Girl’, ‘The Opposite House’ and ‘White is for Witching’. Her plays are ‘Juniper’s Whitening’ and ‘Victimese’. Born in Nigeria, she moved to London aged four and grew up on housing estate in Lewisham, south east London. Helen studied Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge and has been a full-time writer ever since.

At a time when many aspiring writers are struggling to find their own voice (or voices) and still only dreaming of publication, Helen’s writing is thoroughly original and enigmatic – no mean feat when you’re still only in your mid-twenties.

‘White is for Witching’, published Summer 2009, is described thus:

As a child, Miranda Silver developed pica, a rare eating disorder that causes its victims to eat nonedible substances. The death of her mother when Miranda is sixteen exacerbates her condition. Nothing, however, satisfies a strange hunger passed down through women in her family. And then there’s the family house in Dover, England, converted into a bed-and-breakfast by Miranda’s father. Dover has long been known for its hostility to outsiders. But the Silver house manifests a more conscious malice towards strangers, dispatching those visitors it despises. Enraged by the constant stream of foreign staff and guests, the house finally unleashes its most destructive power.

‘Unconventional, intoxicating and deeply disquieting.’ Publishers Weekly, USA

Helen kindly agreed to a somewhat lighthearted email interview.

So, Helen, what magic potions do you use to summon the muse? I mean, most aspiring writers your age are just thinking about publishing books, not producing them out of a hat while doing a fancy twirl in top hat and tails. Explain yourself!

I think I have a problem! Story-bulimia. It’s a terrible thing. Basically you read lots and lots and then you regurgitate everything in different configurations. They’re saying there’s no cure for it, so expect more books….

What books do you wish you’d written, if any?

Sabina Murray’s The Carnivore’s Enquiry, Rebecca, Peter Pan, Wide Sargasso Sea, Affinity, Bonjour Tristesse, The Known World, Home, For Coloured Girls who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, Susanna Moore’s In The Cut… o and…Little Women…I would have got the Laurie and Jo romance right! there’s more. Am in a constant state of deep envy.

What are your non-literary influences? Gothic films? Murder mysteries? I knew it! I knew it!

Ah you’re psychic…yes, those (though some of my favourite murder mysteries are brilliant literature – am thinking of ruth rendell’s a judgement in stone, frances ile’s before the fact and john dickson carr’s hollow man) but i get inspired by psychiatry manuals and The Fortean Times, and primary historical sources, too. I love first person accounts of women’s lives, the glimpses you catch while reading them describe other events – sixteenth century exorcisms and demonic possessions, for example.

What would your life be like if you weren’t a writer?

Bare! So bare!

You’ve been traveling a lot lately. Been anywhere nice?

Paris and New York are the ones for me. Leipzig was lovely too.

If you could be Benevolent Dictator of the United Kingdom for a year – what laws would you implement?

I would ban chewing gum! Urghhhhh chewing gum…can’t bear people going chack chack chack with it.

Yeh, me too, and people who eat with their mouths open and I’d ban other things too, like, er,  the recession….So, moving swifty on – are you afraid of anything you’re not afraid to admit to being afraid of? Mice, rats, spiders, snakes, losing the telephone number of your muse etc etc?

I have to sleep with a light on. Just in case…just in case what? I don’t know. But it is non-negotiable.

Now, are you a black writer or a female writer? Aw! Only kidding. When I get asked that I want to hit someone – in a very non-violent way because I do not approve of violence of any kind – for the record.

But what do you tend to answer? Hahaha, no rilly, you first. Which would you choose if you absolutely had to? I know which I’d choose. Though if either of us says it sets back the mission of writers just being writers back by another fifty squillion years or so, doesn’t it….

I can’t choose and I rilly don’t expect you to, either.  And so, moving swiftly on again -Nigeria – what do you think?

O…I don’t know much about the place.

Where do you see yourself in twenty years time?

In a locked library somewhere in Moldova, dancing cheek to cheek with my first love, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo (yes, I will be quite, quite cracked by then)

Thank you, Miss Helen.

Pascale Petit: Poems & Pictures

I am proud to present Pascale Petit as my Guest Blogger.
A fascinating poet and former artist…

A Suitcase-full of Hummingbirds

After nine years’ search I’ve finally found this photo – the trigger for my opening poem ‘The Strait-Jackets’ in The Zoo Father. I originally came across it in an out of print book on South American wildlife during one of my obsessive trawls through Canning House’s Latin American library where I did much of my research. I photocopied it and kept it as a talisman then lost the copy, but now, thanks to the internet, I have it back. Here are over forty live hummingbirds dressed in pyjamas and packed in a suitcase. This is how the Brazilian ornithologist Augusto Ruschi used to transport his birds in a torpor by lowering their temperature and straitjacketing them to go in the plane’s hold. I immediately saw how I could take the suitcase to my father who I hadn’t seen for thirty-five years and who had recently contacted me, dying of emphysema. I wrote the poem in one go:

The Strait-Jackets

I lay the suitcase on Father’s bed
and unzip it slowly, gently.
Inside, packed in cloth strait-jackets
lie forty live hummingbirds
tied down in rows, each tiny head
cushioned on a swaddled body.
I feed them from a flask of sugar water,
inserting every bill into the pipette,
then unwind their bindings
so Father can see their changing colours
as they dart around his room.
They hover inches from his face
as if he’s a flower, their humming
just audible above the oxygen recycler.
For the first time since I’ve arrived
he’s breathing easily, the cannula
attached to his nostrils almost slips out.
I don’t know how long we sit there
but when I next glance at his face
he’s asleep, lights from their feathers
still playing on his eyelids and cheeks.
It takes me hours to catch them all
and wrap them in their strait-jackets.
I work quietly, he’s in such
a deep sleep he doesn’t wake once.

I’m particularly pleased to have the image back because I’m working on my first novel, which is an expanded and fictionalised version of The Zoo Father. I don’t know what the hummingbirds meant to me, but the fact that there were over forty of them and that I was forty-two when my father reappeared seems significant. On that first dreamlike meeting with him in his tiny Paris flat with its smoke-yellowed walls I brought him a large photo album containing snapshots from my life, the photos pinned behind incubators of sticky cellophane which he asked me to remove so he could look more closely at my brother, my mother and myself. When I saw Ruschi’s hummingbirds they gave me the same feeling as watching my father with the photos, the intense hunger of his gaze for the life he might have led.

I recently discovered a new image of straitjacketed birds, this time sparrows, in a piece called ‘Le Repos des Pensionnaires’ (The Boarders at Rest) in The Messengers exhibition at the Hayward by the French artist Annette Messager.

These dead Parisian sparrows in their knitted capes and crocheted bonnets remind me of Ruschi’s hummingbirds. Messager’s original installation included various rituals where she made her wards go on morning walks, take dustbaths, and those who wouldn’t nap received punishments – very much like a girl playing with her dolls and china animals in that powerful otherworld children can inhabit, and where I spent most of my time during my difficult childhood. My father’s enthralled gaze had sinister undertones.

When I left school I went to art college because I knew I would be able to create my own worlds in the studio and it has remained necessary for me to continue to create those worlds in poems even though I am no longer a visual artist. Birds and thorns were key elements of my sculptures. For example, I embedded a bird, a nest with eggs, thorns and embryos inside a polyester resin cast of a woman’s body.

When I was at the Royal College of Art doing my MA in sculpture, one of the visiting Fellows suggested I visit the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul because my studio reminded him of her house. I didn’t know her paintings well then, or her story, how she had suffered a serious accident in her teens which made her a lifelong invalid.

I have since visited her house several times. Then, ten years ago I started writing poems in her voice, where each poem has the title of one of her paintings. These are gathered in my next collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo (May 2010), which has allowed me to inhabit an artist’s world again, to have adventures with readymade paintings, and create my own versions of hers. Kahlo incorporated hummingbirds and thorns in her portraits.

I’ve written three poems after this painting ‘Self-portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird’. Here is an excerpt from one of them:

From Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (III)
after Frida Kahlo

Into my studio my hummingbird comes.
Through the whirr of his body the life force surges.

My father’s creative breath blows
through his feathers

to make my art live
long after my death.

My hummingbird is an Aztec war god
and I give myself to him daily.

His bill is the sword
that once pierced my vagina.

His tongue sucks the juice of each hour
(he drinks light)
(he never knows thirst)

My hummingbird has a turquoise face
and in it I see my reflection.
He guides my brush as I paint

and I work only when he sings.

(The complete poem will be published in a forthcoming issue of the US magazine Cimarron Review.) The rhythms of this poem are influenced by the Navajo curing chant ‘The War God’s Horse Song’. In Aztec mythology the hummingbird is the war god Huitzilopochtli. Hummingbirds are fierce dynamos of hyper-energy which valiantly attack pygmy owls. It’s Kahlo’s vitality in spite of her disabilities that I most want to capture in this collection, how she made vibrant art from pain.

To find out more visit Pascale’s website. http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk/

African Writers @ British Library: RECOMMENDED.

‘Over the past ten years, the Caine Prize has done a great deal to foster writing in Africa and bring exciting new African writers to the attention of wider audiences.’
JM Coetzee.

This tour of exciting new writers from Africa will launch next Saturday.

Chaired by novelist Aminatta Forna with an introduction by Ben Okri, the four writers appearing will be Chika Unigwe (see my earlier post on her impressive novel ON BLACK SISTER’S STREET – down side panel), Brian Chikwava, Binyvanga Wainaina and EC Osundo.
Sat 10th October 2.30-4m
British Library
Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Tickets: £6/£4
Box Office:01937 546 546
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events95570.html

For more information on this event AND the nationwide tour visit the Caine Prize website at http://www.caineprize.com/10th_anni.php

Chika Unigwe was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004 for her short story “The Secret” and was awarded a PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, in the same year. She won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition for her story “Borrowed Smile”, a Commonwealth Short Story Award for “Weathered Smiles” and a Flemish literary prize for “De Smaak van Sneeuw”. Chika Unigwe’s stories have been broadcast on BBC World Service, Radio Nigeria, and other Commonwealth Radio Stations. Her second novel, Fata Morgana, was published in Dutch in 2008 and is published in English as On Black Sisters Street by Jonathan Cape.

Brian Chikwava won the Caine Prize in 2004 for his short story “Seventh Street Alchemy” and published his first novel Harare North (Jonathan Cape) in April 2009 to critical acclaim.  He was a Charles Pick fellow at the University of East Anglia, and his work has appeared in short story collections published by Weaver Press, Jacana, Picador Africa, Umuzi and in the journals World Literature Today, Wasafiri, Moving Worlds, Literary Review, The Literary Encyclopaedia and others. Some of his stories have also been broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and Worldservice and is currently working on a short story collection.

Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize in 2002 for this short story ‘Discovering Home’ and famously used his prize money to set up the literary journal Kwani, now in its fifth issue. He writes a weekly column for the ‘Mail’ and ‘Guardian’ in South Africa and his writing has also appeared in the ‘New York Times’, ‘Granta’ and ‘National Geographic’. He is the newly-appointed Director of the Chinua Achebe Centre for African Literature and Lanugages at Bard College, New York.

EC (Epaphras Chukwuenweniwe) Osondu was born in Nigeria and worked as an advertising copywriter for many years before moving to New York to study for his MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He has won the Allen and Nirelle Galso Prize for Fiction and his story “a Letter from Home” was judged one of ‘The Top Ten Stories on the internet’ in 2006. In 2007 his story “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes” was short-listed for the Caine Prize and in 2009 his story “Waiting” won the coveted prize. He now teaches at Providence University on Rhode Island. A short story collection will be published by Harper Collins in 2010.