Blog | Peter Kalu

Book Review: Tell No-One About This, by Jacob Ross (Peepal Tree)

These stories are page turners: tautly written tales, concerning subaltern characters, in real crisis, their backs to the wall against some external threat, some foe, their choices harsh. The stories grip. You want to know whether the characters emerge intact from their crisis. And emerge they usually do, though rarely completely intact. The stories are quietly moral – something hovers above them, holding out the promise that there is such a thing as justice, as a social contract, and that when it is broken by the powerful, then the ‘small’ people can and do have a right to fight back, and they have the intelligence and resources to do that, sometimes in surprising ways. De Laughing Tree is my favourite for this strand of storytelling, closely followed by A Different Ocean, both featuring resourceful, female protagonists: JR has a particularly deep commitment to creating space for women’s voices and his work often fuses technical craft with a quiet, caustic shaming of misogyny. There is rarely a lazy line in Ross’s stories. He generally uses the third person, ‘He/She’. It better allows that barely perceptible oscillation between author and character – the sense that within one paragraph you are at once hearing the voice of the character and the almost imperceptible pulling away towards some quiet, allegorical, authorial statement. So Walking For My Mother begins: “Old Hope turned out their children to watch Nella go. It was wonderful and frightening because the quiet in the air was all for her. All for her, the gifts, the utterances of pleasure, the sideways glances and sweat-rimmed smiles. Like they were seeing her properly for the first time.” JR has the attention to language of a poet. One example will have to suffice. In Giving Up On Trevor, a woman walks past an alley and sees three young people. She notes they are ‘cowled.’ It’s a beautiful choice of word. I would have gone with hooded; but cowled, with its echo of a monk’s habit, quietly invites you to re-see, adds an undertow of religious piety to the troubled events that take place from this point. Of course, those events confuse and complicate such initial purity, but the starting point is important. Most of the stories in the collection are set in what I take to be the Caribbean island of Grenada, JR’s country of birth, though Grenada is never named. Why that preponderance? The Canebreakers seems to provide a clue. When the young narrator discusses his leaving the island on a scholarship – a passport to the wider world – his sister sharply tells him: ”dem offerin you a ticket so you could up and leave – like your modder – alone – and never come back. Leave everybody else behind.” And later adds: “Learnin to escape cane not enough. How to break it – break out ov it, is what you have to learn. You unnerstan?” I understand this as somewhere between a plea and an admonition for those who leave to remember those people left behind, and to “break cane” for them: to speak of their lives, both internal and external. The Canebreakers is one of my favourite stories in the collection. Tell No-One, is a collection of short stories. It is therefore, arguably, less commercial than a novel (for a novel try JR’s recent, prize-winning, The Bone Readers), but the stories here are flecks of gold. And through them JR shows himself a short story writer of the first order. Hesitations: The dateline of the subtitle (“Collected short stories 1975-2017”) suggested for me that the order of stories would be chronological, by date of creation. But there are few clues to what was written when. I found myself guessing which were the early works and creating my own meta-narrative of the movement from young Jacob Ross to mature Jacob Ross: was it a movement from optimism to cynicism, from dense syntax to short clear sentences, from ascetic realism to the numinous? Or maybe JR gets rich and the move is from a Marxist alignment with the voices of the oppressed to a concern with the lack of parking spaces in Chelsea? None of the above. I gave up guessing. The style and themes are remarkably consistent. Whether this is because everything has been given a contemporary edit or simply that the author’s concerns have remained constant, I can’t tell. Even in JR’s description of villages, there is this sense of atomisation – of characters facing great danger and crises fundamentally alone. I ached for a story that showed a collaborative endeavour – a modern day Fuenteovejuna that might suggest the power of waging battles collectively, as well as individually. But I understand a writer is not a juke box: writers write what they write! Why do short story collections not get reviewed much? I came across the blog of a retired professor of literature who did a six-paragraph critique of each of thirty stories in an anthology. It took him four blog posts to get through them all. I doff my cap to that professor. Full disclosure: I met Jacob Ross this year while on a writers’ visit to Portugal & Spain. As far as I can recall, he did not buy me any...

Reading the Come let Us stories is like stepping into an hallucinogenic dream. A woman gives birth to geometric shapes in Love Silk Food. In Pals, there are two schoolfriends, one of whom coincidentally has no head. Echo begins with the line: ‘The young man dies like flower’ and is a story, told staccato, of pain, of a restrained, loving anger, as much a psalm as a story. In Breathing, a dead wife comes back to life, re-entering her husband’s life by the simple expedient of ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night. In Art, For Fuck’s Sake an artistic collaboration takes on multiple dimensions. Phone Call To A London Rape Crisis Centre voices a desperately sad call from someone who is being abused; that call ends with the plangent, ‘We do have fun. / We do.’ Velvet Man features a ghost ‘with clean, well-shaped fingernails’, who shows hope of a better life to a lonely, divorced woman. The brilliant, The Woman Who Lives In a Restaurant maps how people are weird but can reach vital, love-affirming arrangements around each other’s idiosyncrasies – a paean to acceptance and to love, however strange. There’s more. Mrs Neecy Brown, centre-stages a woman, drained by a faithless husband and needy, grown daughters. It’s a narrative that produces at its end three simultaneous, contradictory feelings: a vicarious, bemused cynicism – at the pious woman suddenly cast in a wanton shadow; a surge of pathos – aching for poor Mrs Brown to get some of the love she deserves; and a more distant, reflective vibe – on the strange twists life can take and how there is a piece of Mrs Brown in us all, the optimism of that thought. There’s more. Drag stars a young woman who at the story’s beginning feels more male than female and is writing a thesis on advertising. She picks up Michael in a Soho porn shop. They have sex and Jo insists Michael fucks her as if Jo were male not female. There are three sections to this story, each divided by a centred asterix – a favourite marking device of LR’s to denote shifts in time and space. The story becomes Pinter-esque in its working through the personas. We see the duo again. In the second section, Jo / Josephine is masturbated to orgasm by Michael as she closes a business deal in a restaurant. Jump cut to seven years later and there’s a wedding. Jo/Josephine dons a Cinderella-like wedding dress and, prior to the ceremony the couple make love. ‘We have never made love before,’ Jo tells him. This comes across not as judgemental or sonorous, but as a distinction observed. So another sexual identity is introduced, another aspect of Jo’s identity opens up. At the end of the story she runs off, abandoning, it feels like, all three identities – a defiance of conventional romance but also a refusal to be set down as one type, one way of being. I can imagine this story being filmed. It would work well. Though I doubt any Renee Zellweger – Hugh Grant type shctick would do it justice. My favourite story is Roll It. Set in Kingston, it begins with the line, ’The woman has fifteen minutes before she dies on the catwalk.’ I loved the deft weaving of Caribbean folkloric references (to the White Witch of Rose Hall, to the Rolling Calf myth etc). By turns, mysterious sweltering, shocking, macabre and phantasmagorical, the story trembles with ambiguous meaning. ‘Before she dies’ has many reverberations: the catwalk show theme is vampiric and there is lots of blood around, so it sounds metaphorical, not literal. And yet. As an attention grabber, it’s a brilliant first line and the rest of the story charges on in a blaze of righteous indignation, weary journalism, with the promise of redemption signalled by the transcendence metaphor allows. The main character is fashion designer, Parker Jones’s favourite model. Tellingly, she is never given a name. She’s beautiful and clever. She’s also dyslexic. She is vibrantly alive and wholly exploited by fashion industry celebrity, Parker (the story fore-shadows the 2017 furore that began around Weinstein and Hollywood). The triply horrific ending involves the macabre staging of Parker’s ghoul-themed catwalk parade, the heart-wringing horror of the young woman’s self-immolation and the moral horror of Parker’s indifference to the model’s fate, instead ‘swearing for his precious dress.’ Roll It shows beauty without warmth. It’s a mercilessly beautiful story. I could go on. The stories flik-flak between Kingston and London. Other stories include a woman recovering from bariatric surgery…and… and… I now realise that reviewing short story collections is tricky. Nobody wants a reviewer to plough through every story in the collection offering a morsel from each one. So, stepping back for the larger picture… LR’s collection blends realism with a fabulous and at times astringent surrealism. She uses sharp, pithy, often simile-based images (“face like a streamed pudding.” “Hands a wedge of flesh”) that tend to cue up the transition from the real to the surreal. While the tones can be surreal, the stories are highly individuated, and often nightmary/dreamy. Taken together, the stories feel like an assertion of the richness of ordinary people’s internal lives, a richness that is often in stark contrast with their material struggles and with the way others’ see them. JR is a fabulously inventive, egalitarian writer. ...

Some Reflections on a Brief Visit to Seville, November 2017

I was invited to Seville (with the writers, Yvette Edwards, Colin Grant, Irenosen Okoije, Jacob Ross and Leone Ross) as part of a Speaking Volumes Breaking Ground: British Writers of Colour visit to the 9th ASWAD (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora) conference. The different nature of European nations’ black populations was not something I had considered in any detail so visiting Seville threw up quite a lot of ignorance on my part, both about the English early black population and about the early African presence in Spain. I began chasing answers in Seville. This is a snapshot of what I’ve learnt so far, all quite tentative. Seville’s history from the 15th century onwards for some four hundred years includes the presence on Spanish soil and therefore the deeds of enslaved Africans. That presence is everywhere – if you know where to look. Most of the Seville ‘front’ – the statuary of its buildings etc proudly boasts of its Golden Age of Empire, conquistadores and gifted writers. “The sun will never set on this Empire” was originally a Spanish boast, subsequently adopted by the English. Many of the old buildings of Seville are gloriously imperious, glistening with Empire gold. Where, among this oro, is the black presence? Almost everything I found out on this was thanks to the excellently inventive book by local historian and writer, Jesus Cosano called, ‘Los Invisibles’ (Aconcagua Libros Sevilla 2017 ISBN 978 84 94643958) which reinscribes the black presence in Seville and is a cornucopia of information and inspired, evidence-based imagining. Seville, like London, is a river city. The river Guadalquivir is deep and broad enough for a hulking, five storey cruise liner to be moored there (the Aegean Odyssey, registered, Panama) when I walked some of Guadalquivir’s length. The same river once bore the hulks of flotillas of slave ships that would come stenching up the river and offload their ‘piezas’ – cargo. It was fashionable in the 15C for the wealthy white elite and the upwardly mobile of Seville including clerics, artists and merchants to keep enslaved Africans. Drawing on his research, Cosano imagines one such person, Oliva, working as an assistant to a doctor and becoming highly regarded for her knowledge of medicine among the African community of Seville. Documents suggest Spanish slave-traders (negreros) and owners often bought and sold enslaved Africans and moved them from place to place, even from colony to colony, and Cosano speculates the enslaved community may therefore have picked up botanical knowledge from the West Indies as well as from their African homelands; on an ancient map of Seville there is a plot of arable land named ‘huerta de la mulata’ – literally orchard of the black woman, where Cosano speculates medicinal herbs, as well as crops, may have been grown. He also imagines an enslaved African named Domenguillo, an assistant to a printer, who becomes skilled not only as a typesetter but as a linguist: it might not have been uncommon for enslaved Africans to know several languages – the language of their homeland, Spanish and then any of the many other languages around at the time, which included Portuguese, French and German. Of black people living now in Seville, I saw few. A woman squatting near the hotel selling paper handkerchiefs. A man on a makeshift mat sleeping under a coat. A man playing a drum in a square. A couple of street stall holders. A delivery bike guy. From the 15th century,then onwards for some four hundred years, there was an imbalance of military power that violently tilted the African population towards the colonies and Europe. In the 21st century there is a similar imbalance of (economic) power, causing a similar tilt and bringing the new black migrant presences to Europe. My general impression of Seville was that the people there had become used to Seville/Spain no longer being the centre of the universe. They appeared to suffer less than the English from what the academic Paul Gilroy described as ‘post colonial melancholia’. Yet the invisibility of the black presence in Seville makes me cautious in this view. Until Seville publicly acknowledges the less glorious stretches of its past, I suspect it must still suffer from some similar, self-deluding amnesia. PS/short advert: My short story, ‘The Keeper of Books’ distilling some reflections on the British involvement in the 18C slave trade is in the forthcoming bluemoose anthology Seaside Special (ed Jenn Ashworth; provisional publication date: 2018.) PPS. One interesting difference in English and Spain legislative approaches to slavery is exemplified through the English ‘Somerset’ case. In Somerset v Stewart (1772) the judge, Lord Mansfield invoked the concept of haebus corpus in his judgement freeing the African, Somerset. Mansfield declared the institution of slavery so ‘odious’ it could never be a part of English common law. The Somerset case eased the conditions of the the min. 10,000 people in England at that time whose status was akin to slavery. This is not to say England treated enslaved Africans any better, merely that, after the Somerset case at least, English slave traders and merchants never risked bringing Africans, as slaves, onto British shores: Slavery in British (and Spanish) colonies continued until well into the 19C…...

The Audre Lorde Compendium (Audre Lorde 1934-92)

I came to this book seeking the solace of poetry. There is none in it. Instead it contains the prose writings of the phenomenal writer, Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde speaks of how she wrote poetry to try to fix or conjure feelings, thoughts, phenomena which seemed impossible to express through ordinary speech. She only began to write in prose very late in her writing. The essays combine to tell her remarkable journey as a feminist, lesbian writer. Her most famous exhortation is for women to speak out about their lives – even though this is a fearful process when the opposition to their voices is great – so that they learn what issues and experiences women share and how best they can combine to address them. ‘Silence will not protect you’. I was particularly interested in her descriptions of her relationship with her mother, her time in Mexico City, how she found her way to teach at Tougaloo, a Black college in Mississippi and how she got the impression that the Harlem Writers Guild thought she was ‘crazy and queer but that she would grow out of it all’! Now to find her...

Review of ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison

I got the book from Benji Reid, a dancer –director friend of mine, having bought it for him a couple of months beforehand from the poet Mark Mace Smith because…. it’s a long story, too long for here! Invisible Man features in its first chapter a ‘Battle Royale’, a macabre practice from US slavery/post slavery times in which black men were placed blindfold in a boxing ring where they were to attack each other, with the winner getting a prize, often a pittance. Abjection. Humiliation. Exploitation. Ellison delivers it with irony rather than rage. The novel is ‘an innocence to experience’ story, with a political subtext. A black college student gets wise. The story begins with him knowing his place, expressing humility and deference to the white man, abiding with the whole Booker T Washington ‘anti-revolution/ pull yourself up by bootstraps and keep your head-down’ philosophy. He moves to college where he encounters rich white college sponsors. There are aspects of A Tale of Two Cities as the black narrator shows a rich white sponsor how the black poor live – the shacks and the day to day deprivation. He then takes the sponsor to a club-brothel, where mentally ill blacks from an asylum are on the premises. As ‘crazy’ people this group can tell it as it is – they have the spark of rebellion and not much ‘step n fetch it’ in them. The story weaves its way back to college and another classic black genre trope occurs – the church scene. Except instead of church it is the University assembly speech. The Dean figure is black guy who learned to keep his head down and accumulate power by getting rich white donors on board. This Dean tells the protagonist he has to learn how to do this subterfuge, how to lie, how to fake humility. So Invisible Man starts to explore black consciousness of the times (1920’s/30’s), the complexity of black psychology when interacting with whites. Ellison’s explorations of consciousness call to mind the double-consciousness ideas of Franz Fanon. I read somewhere Ellison was encouraged to write by Richard Wright of Native Son fame. The riffs and streams of consciousness in Invisible reminded me of Ishmael Reed’s The Free-lance Pallbearers. I’m not sure about this book, for me it was a little uneven- brilliant in parts, in other parts a little stodgy. Ellison was of course way ahead of his time. PS I read in Wiki while checking the publication dates of Invisible Man that Ellison was influenced by TS Elliot and Dostoyevsky. Small...

Review of ‘Black Men, Invisibility and Crime’ by Dr Martin Glynn

Dr Glynn suggests the experience black men go through when entering the criminal justice system is one of discrimination based on the official invisibility of racial factors within the trial process and subsequently within the prison system and probation service. This, he argues, unfairly slants the justice system against them. Upon leaving prison, black men’s chances of not returning to crime are affected by two factors: agency and structure. Agency here describes those things black men can control themselves; structure describes those circumstances that are beyond their control as individuals. While criminology in general does not factor in issues of race in its analysis – race is invisible in most studies – Glynn’s ‘Towards a Critical Race Theory of Desistance’ asserts that it is essential to study what effect race has on the chances of any prison leaver taking a successful trajectory of desistance and conformity and to listen to subordinate voices that are rarely heard to gain a true understanding of the difficulties black men face in this area. Glynn explores how, for some black men, crime is their way of resisting the racism of society; for others structural racism (jobs, housing, youth provision etc) sees them slide back into ‘on road’ life; the absence of fathers can be another significant factor according to Glynn: the surrogate family system that the ‘on road’ community offers succour (as well as a path to recidivism) to black men and youth. Black masculinity is also investigated. Reasons are suggested for the hyper-masculinity adopted by many black men. Among possible reasons advanced are: (a) the benefits in status for such masculinity ‘on road’ (b) racist society’s stereotyping of black men as a threat and the conscious or unconscious adoption of this stereotype; (c) the absence of alternative models of masculinity especially those grounded in a knowledge and appreciation of black culture and history (d) absence of fathers for these men. More widely, Glynn’s Towards A Critical Race Theory of Desistance brings to the fore the structural causes of black criminality. It offers a deeply meditated reflection on the lives and dilemmas of black men entangled in the criminal justice system. PS. Before Dr Martin Glynn became a criminologist he was one of Britain’s leading black...