Born Brazil. Lived Nigeria. Died Cameroon 1927.
Brought to imaginary life in ’Lara’ revised & expanded (Bloodaxe Books, Oct 2009)

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

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.

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/

‘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.

20, 464 visitors, and counting…

(Copenhagen)

I’ve just completed a British Council writers’ tour (Sept 09): 11 days, 5 countries, 30 readings, talks, workshops, meetings & engagements. Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland, Denmark. It was a wonderful trip. Lots of good work and so rewarding in so many ways. I’ve posted shed-loads of photos on Facebook so if you join me there you’ll be able to access them. (Norway) Guro Sibeko and Sarah Osmundson, Norwegian writers Hannah Woseme Kvam, Norwegian poet (Lithuania) Lithuanian poet Eugenius Alisanka, who hosted an event in Vilnius, Lithuania, and who has translated some of my writing. (Latvia) We did 3 events together – all of us from abroad: Jamshed Masroor (Pakistan-Norway), Alen Meskovitch (Bosnia-Denmark) and Sulaiman Masomi (Afghanistan-Germany)

(Finland) Anni Sumari, Finnish poet and the translator of ‘The Emperor’s Babe’.

My essay on the book ‘Black Like Me’ (pbd 1959) by John Howard Griffin appeared in the ‘Times’ (of London) newspaper on 12/September/09. I think this amazing story is still a must-read. See below.

My essay begins thus: In 1959, a white American writer decided to turn himself into a ‘Negro’, with the help of a dermatologist. John Howard Griffin would venture alone into some of the Deep South’s most virulently racist hotspots and experience life on the other side of the tracks. Black Like Me is the record of his experience.

To read on: http://tinyurl.com/timesevaristogriffin

19,807 visitors and counting…

My forthcoming titles:

A verse novel about my family history spanning 150 years, 7 generations and five countries: England, Ireland, Nigeria, Brazil and Germany. Published by Bloodaxe Books, October 29, 2009. Click on Bloodaxe link for more information: http://tinyurl.com/larabloodaxe. A novella about teenage knife crime in London, 2009. Suitable for teenagers and adults. Description: It’s a hot summer afternoon. Tension is in the air. A gang of youths gather on bikes outside a chip shop. A teenage boy is stabbed and left bleeding on the street. The boy’s mother wonders how this could have happened to her son. She’s full of questions, but when the answers lie so close to home, are they really what she wants to hear?

Published by Penguin, March 4th, 2010. (More information on this book forthcoming.)

I am available, over the next year, to give readings and talks and run creative writing workshops, both in the UK and abroad. I have gone on nearly 70 international writer’s tours since 1997, doing the above in a huge variety of settings. I can be reached via bernardine_evaristo@hotmail.com. (I live in London.) These are my three latest books. For more information on these, my other books and on my work visit: http://www.bevaristo.net

A prose novel in which the transatlantic slave trade is turned on its head and Africans enslave Europeans. Published by Penguin UK (2008) and Penguin USA (2009). For more visit my website: http://www.bevaristo.net

Paperback version, USA.

In 2006 I was one of three judges of the Poetry Society of Great Britain’s National Poetry Competition. The winner that year was Melanie Drane, with her exquisite poem ‘The Year the Rice-Crop Failed’. Since then we have become friends. Melanie is a wonderful poet, a deep thinker and a great woman. I recently asked her to guest on my blog. Here is her post. If anyone wants to publish any of her work, please let me know and I’ll put you in touch.

Over to Melanie!

It was a late winter afternoon in 1993, and I was lost in Tokyo. Apartment-hunting alone, I was learning how it feels to be illiterate as an adult—continually scanning faces, body language, and landscape for cues. People in suits pushed past me on pavement shadowed by the Shuto Expressway. I turned down a side street, and smelled smoke. A man was singing. His tune sounded mournful and reverent, the same insistent phrase, over and over. It consoled me. For a moment, I thought that I must be near a temple.

Then I spotted a small truck edging along the kerb, with a wood-burning oven in back. The song came from a speaker mounted on its cab. The driver was not a priest, but a sweet-potato vendor, announcing himself with the words “Yaaaaakiiii iiimmmooooo, yaaaaakiiii iiiimmmooooo,”—the syllables slung so long and slow in the winter evening that I’d mistaken them for prayer.

For the decade that followed, I associated the sweet-potato man with relief: his fragrant oven swinging through the traffic on cold days, and the steam rising from the potato when I finally unwrapped it and split open its red skin, to the brilliant orange inside. In Japan, this is an unremarkable scene. Yet when moving into an unfamiliar culture, even the ordinary details summon both uncertainty and arousal. Expectations are mostly rendered useless. One becomes susceptible to surprise, and the imperative for revision or re-vision of assumptions.

“Throw away the lights, the definitions/And say of what you see in the dark/That it is this or it is that,/But do not use the rotted names” Wallace Stevens wrote in “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” Language is chronically under threat of misappropriation, perhaps most egregiously in the service of politics and advertising. Words can lose their grip – to borrow an image from Nietzsche, like coins on which the profile has been rubbed flat, and the value no longer be discerned. Writers must constantly push for ways to elude the flattening of language, so that readers may enter a novel or poem as an unpredictable terrain that beckons with capacity to jolt, confound, or thrill us.

Exposure beyond our own boundaries blows the lid off cultural containment, and the vocabulary with which we articulate meaning grows more varied and agile. In The Atlantic Monthly Fiction 2009 issue, Monica Ali muses about the UK citizenship test and the government-published book, “Life in the United Kingdom”—noting the unruly, complex reality of national identity: “Even our core values are being questioned daily.” The loss of stable identifiers makes possible a radical freedom; one is at liberty to cast off names and definitions.

Still, in the global era, the petty defense of boundaries remains a hazard, and at times, this holds especially true for poetry, which in the last century has receded from public consumption. At its worst, poetry retreats into a cloistered, self-referential existence. Bernardine recently wrote here of the perception that “much of it [is] too obtuse and inaccessible.” Yet poetry has always been charged with the essential task of attentiveness—it makes us witness to what might otherwise go unseen. To fulfill that mandate, it must defy confinement. At a time when efficiency and convenience reign as supreme, market-driven values, the act of paying attention challenges the status quo.

I have always been nourished by reading and translating outside the culture in which I was raised. Unexpectedly, a decade in Japan also brought me closer to my father. At age 18, he was drafted into WWII and sent to the Pacific.  When he disembarked in Tokyo, the city was in soot and rubble from firebombing. After the war, he was offered another tour of duty, this time to Bikini Atoll, where the US Army was conducting nuclear tests. He declined, and returned to the US a pacifist, who later took his daughters on anti-Vietnam War marches. But he was a silent man, until I moved to Tokyo, and we shared stories of the same places—separated by a half century. When Alzheimers took hold, he lost the names of old friends. He sat with the newspaper, pretending to read. The entire 1970s were erased for him (no loss, we tried to joke). Somehow, Japan remained vivid and urgent to him to the end. And so I listened, again and again, until its landscape was no longer exotic to me, but an essential part of home, of both his history, and mine.

Climbing Mount Yoshino

What do people dream about
when they’ve lost the names
of what they loved: my father
who mistook his dog for a horse -

my father, who on the day before
his death, asked me where the little girl
had gone when my mother left
the room? Suddenly she was tiny

and I could hear her singing
and skipping down the dark
hallway, while our old daschund
trembled and snorted steam.

What strange choices memory makes -
my father who forgot his hometown,
but insisted on telling stories of Japan.
This Spring, I go to see Mount Yoshino,

light a candle for him at Kimpusenji Temple
where angry, blue-skinned warriors
stand with their hair in flames,
and the priest washes his face

in the smoke from an incense urn.
Higher on the mountain,
men are praying to stones.
I cannot name the gods there -

will they protect me, or should I be afraid?
Who did my father meet those last days, climbing
the mountain alone, struggling to recognize
the couriers to another world: sacred deer

waiting to be fed, a conch’s shell’s whisper
that promised him the sea – my mother
sitting at his bedside, her song wordless
but familiar as the sound of rain?

Green Tea in a Black Bowl

I.

The day before the earthquake, a monk announces
that the turtles have abandoned the temple pond;
the water quivers with emptiness. The following night,
neighbors sift through what remains of the house
next door. In the dark, crows are hoarse from trumpeting
over tangerine peels curled like chrysanthemum petals,
the black peat of tea leaves still moist, and pickled
white radish, gone limp and bitter with salt.

II.

Three years later, our house rocks us as we sleep;
we wake into a blackness ingesting itself:
black turned inside out—a tarry mucous
membrane, these mushroom gills of darkness
through which our longing whistles with too little
air. The earth coughs; its sides heave. We turn in bed
and touch beneath the blankets, our limbs
like fingertips meeting in prayer or in parting.

III.

We dream of what is missing before it leaves us. We taste the dust
in wine before it’s gone blood-brown. Our mouths are dry;
this night’s an arid, wind-swept place. We’re clinging to the husk
of things, cicada song still droning in brittle, abandoned shells.
In Tokyo University archives, three hundred empty human skins
unfurl with neck-to-ankle tattoos: all the reds, greens and blues
of lust and loss translated into dragons, snakes, tidal waves,
and Fudo, Hell’s fanged guardian, wreathed in a halo of flames.

IV.

Kichizaemon Raku XV turns his family’s 400 year-old
tea bowl round and round in his hands.
He says that black holds within itself all colors:
it is as if this tea bowl has thrown away its own blackness,
and gone beyond what we could perceive as black.
April is here now. The black-eyed willow
in our garden is starting to bud again,
and the stones are green with moss.

The Knifemaker

Sanjomachi, Niigata Prefecture, Japan

I was born in a city of blademakers,
in a neighborhood where days
are consumed by cleavers, scissors,
saws, swords, and paring knives.

My father taught me that iron
and steel are tissue like human
muscle; tools become part of the body,
our hands serve the blade—

it takes the life from our fingers.
His sashimi knife could cut the wings
from a fly, peel flowers
and fishnet from a white radish.

After the Niigata earthquake in July 1964
my father drank shochu while trimming
salmon, and lost three fingertips,
pale as pickled ginger on the cutting board.

He stopped making knives then,
and sent me to sharpen razors
for old Kawashima, a master
swordsmith during the war

whose peacetime blades mowed stubble
from the chins of survivors,
their hair gray as cigarette ash,
their faces shut like folded hands.

In the workshop, I learned to dip steel
blades in murky green baths of nitric
acid, the metal flashing—gray carp
that surface hungry in a mossy pond.

Today on the Vernal Equinox, I eat red rice
and beans, salted with black
sesame seeds, hundreds of eyes
peering up from the bowl of my hand.

Can you imagine
the loneliness: what I love I cannot
give to another. People talk
as if a knife could steal from us—

as if the blade were a thief, thin and cool,
hiding in the kitchen of our homes,
lying among utensils that deliver
the food to our mouths.

We’re warned of the risk of a knife
as a wedding gift, the threat of a blade
coming between friends, lovers,
neighbors, a knife as a promise

of departure, the danger
that what we cherish
will become smaller—
the fine dice of our lives.

I can tell you if your eyes tear
when cutting an onion, the knife
is not sharp enough, that the onion flesh
weeps from being bruised

and a good blade will make even poisonous
blowfish taste delicious—fugu sliced
as thin as petals, translucent as the skin
of a woman’s eyelids fluttering in sleep.

The cat leaps in through an open window,
my father prunes a tree in the yard.
His garden blossoms under the subtraction
of excess, that equation of denial

in which not all absences are meant
for reprieve. My knife understands
silence, separation and loss—my knife
creates by what it takes away.

I first met Roger in the mid 1990s when he was performing with a poetry outfit called Chocolate Art. We’ve known each other ever since and I have to say that Roger is one of the nicest people I know. He’s also an incredibly generous person, offering advice to other writers, being supportive and sharing his contacts in a way that is quite rare in this business.

Now Roger has a powerful new collection of poetry out called  Suckle.

Roger was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago and this book is about his childhood . His poems are deeply personal and honest explorations of what it was like to grow up male in this part of the Caribbean. At heart, Roger is a storyteller, and each poem is a little narrative: vignettes that together create a mosaic of his past. The  poems are also very visual, written with the cadences of the Caribbean and suffused in the culture of Trinidad.

Fear not – if poetry is not your bag because you find much of it too obtuse and inaccessible, then you’ll find Roger’s poetry an elegant, easy read, while avoiding the pitfall of being simplistic.

Many of the poems in Suckle are about family:

In The Cures, there’s the mother: ‘My mother’s got prayers for cousins in cults, prayers for families whose fathers moved in with other women./ My mother’s got prayers for diabetics,/ for the creeping blue ice of cancer,/ for stiff arthritic claws, for the droop/ of the impotent and the blood of the infertile…/

Then there is the  father whose absence leaves the household vulnerable to an intruder in The Power:

‘All year the news has been rife with forced entries/ and gruesome slayings of whole families.
Trinidad is in the white grip of cocaine and criminals/ are emboldened by guns – and numb highs./ …He’s probably been watching, squatting in the bushes/ just outside the yard. He knows there is no father/ of the house. My thirteen year old hands grasping /a carving knife, a dumbbell’s steel pole…

Yet there is also the intimacy of his parents before his father left in Snowdome:

‘Parting the dense brush of her hair/ into equidistant parts, exposing/ a thin track of skull… / My father, the farmer, plows her head / and they gossip about their friends,/ the flakes of dandruff floating slowly down/ surrounding my mother like a snowdome.’

There is the younger sister who defends her brother against a mocking crowd in Haircut: ‘…her eyes said battle and defend./ She sat next to me and gave the crowd/  a double-barelled middle finger, cursing out / people’s mothers. Trash’.

While at school, a seductive teacher flirts with her boy pupils in Miss Jagroop: ‘The heavy curve of your breasts grazed our shoulders / as you checked over our comprehension homework./ You’d pull some pouting pose every five minutes/ with your butter fat rear spreading all over our desks./ Did you smell our musky adolescent scent?/ Did you breathe us all in? All our stale breaths?’

And in Griffiths the school bully is beaten up on the playing field by his father while the whole school watches from the windows, until the principal ‘paunch bobbing/ quickly towards the scene’ stops it and ‘Griffiths collapsed into the principal’s hug.’

The wider society is evoked too. There is the effect of sugar and rum  on Trinidadians in More: ‘The smell of molasses from Vat 19 Distillers/ as I drive past on the Beetham Highway…./ It’s all iron and ash and flaming cane syrup./ It’s the smell of my mother throwing brown sugar/ into hot oil as it bubbles to a rich brown caramel. /….The stale breath of cigarettes, rum and coke on uncles/ who stab themselves with needles of insulin./ It’s the aftertaste of rum that gave my grandmother / a stroke…’

At the Rum Shop ‘These men drink white rum like soda,…/ They watch young girls walking home/ from school and talk about how many women/ they’ve had. One talks about he likes/ his women young – before their breasts turn/ from rubber to sponge – and boasts about/ sometimes having to sex a mother/ to get to her fourteen-year old daughter’.

In Rum, Sugar and the Lash: ‘The cane, the cutlass, the sugar./ The translucent reflection in the bottles/ from cane cut by Indian men in the fields/ sitting cross-legged eating their roti/ at lunchtime, listening to the cricket/ on a light-green transistor radio hissing static’. And later in the poem, the deeper history of the island, ‘The whipping, the screams, the criss-crossed,/ raised keloid scars like a tangle of snakes./ The rope, the noose, the burning.’

My personal favourite is The New Diablesse  (for the sex tourists of Tobago).

‘I wear my long white cotton skirt/ so no man will see my cow foot. / I can smell the death on each man who looks/ at me with that lustful eye. It’s a scent/ much like the smell of mould, semen /  and wet earth. That smell is what I live for…/…. I am the bait for hell, the ecstatic funk of death. / Perverted doom, freaky eternal suffering heat. / I am La Diablesse. Burn, burn with my love.’

In an earlier post on this blog (http://bevaristo.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/why-should-britains-poetry-books-be-999-white/), I talked about how under 1% of all poetry books published in this country are by poets of colour. So I am especially delighted that Suckle has been published by Waterways, a new imprint of Flipped Eye Publishing. I hope Suckle gets the attention it deserves and that the poetry establishment takes seriously a poet who is writing from outside the parameters of what they usually choose to publish (99.9%). If you’re a critic reading this, why not buy the book and perhaps offer it to a literary editor for review? Because Waterways/Flipped Eye is a relatively new and small publisher it will be very hard to get mainstream attention for this collection.

We need poets like Roger Robinson. We need to hear his stories. His is a fresh, daring, sensitive, clear-sighted and big-hearted poetic voice.

I highly recommend the book and urge you to immerse yourself in a Trinidadian childhood for a few hours.

(Amazon is your best bet cos you know it’s hard to find most poetry books in bookshops.C’mon, folks, it will set you back £6!     http://tinyurl.com/amazonsuckle

If you do buy the book, or indeed have read it already, why not post a comment here?

About the Author

Roger Robinson is a writer, skilled performer and lecturer on poetry and performance. Listed by Decibel as one of fifty writers who have influenced the black-British writing canon over the past five decades, he has toured with the British Council in Vietnam, the Philippines, Argentina, India and the Czech Republic and his workshops have been shortlisted for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries. Roger’s oeuvre encompasses the one-man shows: ‘Shadow Boxer’, ‘Letter from My Father’s Brother’, and ‘Prohibition’; a book of short fiction, ‘Adventures in 3D’ (Lubin & Kleyner, 2001); an album of spoken folk, ‘illclectica’ (Altered Vibes, 2004) and two poetry collections: ‘Suitcase’ (waterways, 2004) and the recently completed ‘Suckle’ (waterways, 2009).

Roger Robinson can be found on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/rogerrobinsonmyspace