When 15-year-old Nathan’s older brother Al (17), kills himself, Nathan is distraught. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to his brother’s act. And The Stars Were Burning Brightly follows Nathan as he navigates his grief and tries to uncover what pushed his brother over the edge. Framed this way, And The Stars follows the classic ‘victim-of-crime’ crime novel genre dynamic as expounded by two masters of the genre  Boileau and Narcejac (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boileau-Narcejac for more on them). As they put it: ‘One becomes a victim as soon as one is present at events whose definitive meaning one is unable to decipher … The crime story, instead of signalling the triumph of logic, has then to consecrate the failure of rational thought: it is precisely for this reason that its hero is a victim’.  The victim-of-crime novel is a study in the anguish of the loved ones who survive the victim’s death.  And the survivors’ attempts to find a reason why is of course doomed to be unsatisfying since, on an existential plane, nothing discovered can ever bring the victim back. Specifically, Nathan’s quest is a means for him to wrestle with his sense of culpability: he had not noticed trouble brewing in his brother’s life. What part did I play in his death? Nathan asks himself: could I have done anything differently and prevented it? The tale is told in the first person through three viewpoints: that of Nathan, of Al’s close friend, Megan, and, using phone messages and other epistolary devices, that of Al himself. It is a victim novel, but there is also a very sweet love story swirling around the fraught issue of Al’s suicide, a love story delicately stitched and sensitively developed. As the plot thickens, some topical Young Adult themes come to the fore. On of those is the nature of identity, particularly, the strange way in which one person can know and yet completely not-know another person. In the eyes of Nathan, Al was perfect. Yet, in the eyes of his school peer group,  Nathan learns, Al was a geek: too brainy, too remote, uncool. The reader discovers that Al was a talented painter and had a wide-ranging curiosity for subjects as diverse as Astronomy, Biology, Botany and Maths. Al was ostracised by the working-class youth culture he lived within. Are working-class communities (or, perhaps, on a different analysis, all youth cultures) inherently hostile to gifted yet introverted young people? If so, how do young dreamers and thinkers navigate that? Other themes developed in the novel include how social media can make bullying more intense and inescapable; and the dangers of online identity deceptions such as catfishing. The novel is set in Wythenshawe, Manchester, and the characters speak at times using Wythenshawe-inflected language patterns and phrases (such as using ‘proper’ as an intensifier as in: ‘that’s proper good’). Nathan, the main protagonist, is of mixed heritage, his absent father black, his mother white. The conjunction of blackness and Wythenshawe speech may be a departure of sorts in that I cannot recall that any writer before has given voice to such a character. Across town (ie Manchester), the crime writer, Karline Smith has delivered a series of novels and stories in the voice of inner city South Central Manchester where West Indian Englishes still infuse third generation black language codes. Jawando is doing something different. I recognised the Wythenshawe speech (I went to school in Wythenshawe). It quickly becomes normal within the novel, and so invisible after the first few chapters, and it is a deep pleasure, a small but important act of assertion, to see this set down in a book.  One of the bravest and most difficult things a writer can do is take their own trauma and explore it through art. Sometimes, by doing so, the artist tames the trauma. I say, sometimes because it is not always possible, the process can kill you (see arguably,  the life story of Van Gogh, an artist whose life and its relationship with his art  is featured significantly in And The Stars). But go into that trauma, an artist sometimes must.  It was a risk that, for Jawando, proved very much worth taking.  And The Stars Were Burning Brightly is a compelling read, dealing with difficult subjects deftly and compassionately, and wholly without any sense of...

    On February 20, 1910 in Philadelphia, a black man (Edward), drove a railroad trolley into a department store, killing a number of people, injuring others. Why did he do it?  This is the plot premise of Remembered, a superbly evocative and moving novel by Yvonne Battle-Felton. The novel looks at America during the time of plantation slavery and at sixty years of slavery’s long-tailed aftermath there. Remembered is written primarily in the voice of Edward’s mother, Spring, and oscillates between events in 1910 and the formative years of Spring’s life, including Spring’s enslavement, her life as an enslaved person and after emancipation  in the early 1860’s. The narrative stitches the connections between these different times to deliver a haunting  tapestry of the horror, jangle and stink of the era. Narrator, Spring is shadowed by her dead sister, Tempe. Early in the novel, Edward is lying in a coma on his hospital death-bed. Spring and the ghostly Tempe argue over what happens next. If Edward dies, they agree, he needs to die right: to come to the afterlife with full knowledge. Tempe points out he does not know the full story of his mother. Spring says she will tell him, but ‘Either I’ll tell it my way or it won’t get told.’  Spring proceeds to do just that. We learn the story of Spring’s origins and wider family. The telling is Spring’s, and of Spring’s family,  but the novel also opens out as an act of remembrance for all those individuals who endured through slavery. Their stories are not captured in official documents. White writers and administrators did not see fit to record their lives. Pen and paper stories were not written down by enslaved Africans for obvious reasons. Addressing this historical erasure and recovering the stories of people like Spring is a path embarked upon most determinedly by Toni Morrison (eg. Beloved). Of course, there is much unearthed by these stories that white society might –  then and now – want to look away from. The cruelty that the Philadelphian Walker plantation Patriarch meted out in Remembered parallels the degradation forced upon enslaved  Africans working on Jamaican plantations such as those of James Robert Wedderburn ( https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146643591) and the notorious Thomas Thistlewood  (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146651067).  In venturing into these waters, Battle-Felton joins Morrison in a commitment to ‘speak the unspeakable’, to borrow a Morrison phrase. As a writer, I was interested in some philosophical questions that Remembered had to work through. What was it like in those times – not on the poetic or epic scale – but on the level of the day-to-day, the level at which the novel as a form excels? Can these horrors be described and at the same time juxtaposed and made to seem an organic part of the wider world of that time? How do you balance horror and the everyday? Who were we then, as human beings?  How did we see the world? The writer, Henry James, in a letter, wrote that the task of recreating the consciousness of those who lived in long-ago times was ‘almost impossible’. Is it?  The other large question I was interested in concerns how the novel as a form is employed by black writers. A novel establishes a world and in doing so constitutes a world view. Is that world view necessarily Western?  Remembered sits in conversation with Beloved by Toni Morrison,  The Famished Road by Ben Okri and Their Eyes Were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. In all three there is a sense of Africanist cosmology running through, signalled most strongly in Remembered by the ease with which the dead sister, Tempe arrives in scenes where her sister, Spring is present.   Moving to a radical black arts type critique, another question raised by such novels, though much less spoken about, is the Malcolm X-esque question: how did white people manage to do this to us? Were we complicit? Weak? Fools? In that mode, Remembered stirs, within a black reader at least, an incandescent rage, and for moments, as the degradation, rape, humiliation is described, there is a reader-character unity with the black characters in Remembered  as  explanations are bewilderingly advanced, including, in a moment of splitting, the idea advanced by the patriarch slave master Walker himself, that white people got ‘nothing but the devil’ in them. There are harrowing scenes in Remembered. But also moments of sublime transcendence. One of the most delightful is Battle-Felton’s answer to the question, what was that moment of freedom like for enslaved Africans in Philadelphia when slavery was finally abolished?  Of course, the news of abolition does not filter to everyone all at once, but in bits and pieces. And there features in Remembered an almost dazed phase of drifting and wandering of the newly free, an assuming of new names, a beginning of new directions. Battle-Felton renders this numinously and imaginatively: I’ve not encountered in literature this moment expressed so evocatively before. I’m always interested in a novel’s stylistics: the particular technical choices made by the author to bring a story to life.  Here are some tentative notes on Battle-Felton’s choices for Remembered: It is written partly in the first person ‘I’. This sets some limits on prose style with these sections (for more on this, see, for example the first five short sections of James’ Wood’s  How Novels Work on ‘free indirect speech’) so the...

Dance Away The Spiders took place at Home, Manchester, UK. on 22nd January 2019. Ask theatre professionals what group might be the hardest group to work with from the point of view of simple logistics, and asylum seekers / refugees would be right up there. They often live precarious, indigent lives in which even turning up to a meeting can require expense and movements beyond their capacities. To attempt to organise a group of seven into a solid dance corps and to create a work of art to be staged live in a major theatre is to embrace therefore the utmost uncertainty.  Yet working with Sheba Arts, a refugee-led arts organisation, this group managed it. On the night, the performance was preceded by a short video providing glimpses into the women’s lives, the difficulties they have had, some reflections of their selves outside the rehearsal studio, off-stage: their daily lives, the private joys they find there and the challenges they face – the video makes an explanatory and humanising counterpoint to the live performance. The stage was set. The lights came up.  Dance Away The Spiders began as individual dances, each performer expressed her own tradition of dance – Latin American, South Asia, Eastern European and West African – while also delivering those moments of individuality that bring such dances alive. The individual dances segued into a group dance in the round. To a vibrant soundtrack, a narrative emerged of the hardships some of them have faced and escaped, and how, by coming together in solidarity in Manchester, they have managed to build hope, both individual and collective.   The power of Dance Away The Spiders comes not from the competence of the dancers (and they were wonderfully expressive) but from the sense of an important moment in their lives taking place.  The opportunity to express themselves, to produce and share something of aesthetic value with the audience and in that way bridge the gap between refugee on brightly lit  stage and authorised citizen in the comfort and dark of the theatre seats; for all  to slip labels and become in the moment of the performance and sharing, a community of people uniting in a shared will to a fairer, kinder future for all. They took to the stage to dance away spiders, to chase away fears. The dance shone with life and vibrancy; the costumes were upbeat, from bold red, flamenco dresses, to the kathak-influenced, to aspects of folk and Western contemporary. There was a delicacy and tenderness between the dancers. If one faltered, another would step closer, pull them through. In this, there was a template for us...