Blog | Peter Kalu

Lyric To America

America: Land of the Overstayers. Of Maya’s Travelling Shoes. Panthers. Richard Feynman & The ‘O’ Ring Investigation. Of Chomsky. Angela Davies. Milwaukee wild growing marijuana. Barb of Peoria (her smile). City size fridges. Of New York pizza. Hot dogs. Hollywood. Of brown paper bags. Of the Brown Paper Bag rule. Of 9/11. Of #BlackLivesMatter. Silicon Valley. Of lynchings. Of the Iroquois. Of the compass-challenged Columbus. Of touchdowns. NASA. Jimi. Mae West. Henrietta Lacks. Breakfast pancakes. Of The Bluest Eye. Amiri Baraka. Texas drawl. Chappaquidick. Jonestown. Motown. Disneyland. Star Wars. Scott’s Packing Crates. Milton Friedman & The Chicago School. Al Capone. Convergence. Citizen. Slaughter. The Simpsons. Drive-bys. Gimme Five. Bug Juice. Watergate. Cornfields. Country bars. Walter Mosley. Wall Street. Enron. Sesame Street. Air-con. Aunties. Uncles. Suitcases. Sojourner’s Trails. The Prison Industry. Broadway. Harlem. The Nuyoricans. Marlboros. Yard Sales. Limos. Emory Douglas. Cindy Sherman. Peace pipes. ICBMs. The Dust Bowl. Tumbleweed. Snipers. Waffles. Constellations. Into this America, I flight my YA novels…...

Book Review by Pete Kalu In the 60’s and 70’s there were so few black people on television that whenever a black face hit the small screen, the shout went out in my house, ‘there’s a black person on the television!’ and everyone would gather round, fascinated. It was the same with footballers – few were seen until Brazil and the 1970 World Cup(*1). I’ve often wondered what those early solitary black British footballers felt as they moved from training ground to dressing room to manager’s office to pitch, to life –after-football . This is the greatest reveal Onuora’s book holds. Finally, we hear from them. Onuora has had the ear of most of the highest profile black footballers. They have spoken to him frankly and their stories often hold great poignancy. He’s also recorded the experiences of journeymen black footballers (all of whom had more talent in their little toe than most of us have in both feet). It makes for a revealing read and a courageous book. Onuora shows how back in the days it was a widely held opinion that black players had no brains and lacked courage. This view, often shared by Chairmen of clubs and team managers- people who could put those prejudices into practice, had a pernicious effect on team selection all the way up to the highest level. As a kid I often wondered why certain players were not in the England football team. Onuora quotes an explanation that is alleged to have come from the former England team manager, Graham Taylor (Taylor has subsequently denied making the statement) – that the then FA powers-that-be did not want too many black players in the England team. Whether hypothesis or fact, the explanation provides a simple, “good-fit” logic for some of the glaring omissions of that era at England level. (I have no room here to show Onuora’s excellent dissection of the appalling treatment at England level of Britain’s greatest ever black football player, John Barnes.) Looking back, the 70’s and 80’s black players’ heads-down approach mirrored the heads-down approach we kids had to adopt to racism in those times. Banana throwing. Name-calling. Monkey noises. As on the playground, so on the pitch. My heart sank when I watched a match at Man City’s old ground and saw the treatment City supporters meted out to John Barnes. I never went back to Maine Road. Yet, according to Onuora, City’s supporters of that time were by no means as racist as those of Everton, Chelsea, Milwall, Leeds… it’s a long list. Football was often described then as a man’s game. Players glorified in nicknames like ‘Chopper’. Getting fouled and not complaining was how you proved you had hairs on your chest. Getting racially abused was a badge of honour to a real man, black footballers were told by senior (white) players. This hyper-masculinity cult carried into the manager’s office and the dressing room. The typical manager had a box of insults and swear words to throw around when needed. So a black player of the opposing team might be called a ‘black bastard’ or a ‘fucking nigger’ and players be exhorted to kick shit out of him. It wasn’t just a tactic. Former football manager turned pundit, Ron Atkinson’s 2004 broadcast description of Marcel Desailly as a ‘fucking lazy, thick nigger’ when Atkinson thought he was off-air was revelatory of ingrained attitudes not mere mind games or verbal slips. All in all, what the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s players went through is a sorry tale. Perhaps it sounds ludicrous to young ears some of the stereotyping – that black people could not endure the cold, that they had no tactical brains, that they hadn’t the cool head needed for playing midfield or centre of defence. And yet this was the dominant thinking. Of course it affected black footballers at professional level, but it also had an impact all the way down to schools football where young black footballers suffering the same stereotyping – they were natural wingers or strikers, not defenders or midfielders, magicians not artisans. Thank God for Brazil. The significance for black British footballers of the Brazil World Cup victory 1970 is well highlighted in the book. For many black players pre-2000, Brazil provided the alternative narrative. Pele’s poise, technique and intelligent link-up play was light years ahead of the European times. Onuora argues how, strangely, the sea change in British attitudes at Board and Administrator level, appears to have been ignited by a complete outsider: Eric Cantona. What many black footballers must have been tempted to do, Eric Cantona did. The enigmatic Frenchman Cantona, who transformed Manchester United into the world beating side it became, was not a ‘heads-down’ kind of guy. He skipped the class in deference. And drop-kicked a racist fan after being taunted one time too many. Onuora takes us through the subsequent official agonising and the final commitment to change that sparked off the climate of anti–racism that virtually eliminated racist name-calling and behaviour on the terraces. In the final section of the book, Onuora holds the mirror up to the game’s current administrators. He asks whether the earlier (for the most part successful) commitment to change fans’ behaviour has been replicated at boardroom and administrator level. Has the racism of the institutions that run football been challenged? He points out how few black managers get appointed...

Teach Secondary Book Review of Being Me by Pete Kalu

Teach Secondary Being Me Book Review: Being Me (Pete Kalu, HopeRoad, £6.99) “How does it feel to be a young girl whose passion and talent are invested in what tends to be seen as a man’s game – football? What does it really mean to be ‘black’ – when you look ‘white’? Will a spot or two of shoplifting always come back to haunt a person? And why can’t adults be more… grown up? These questions and more are tackled in Pete Kalu’s fresh slice of life in modern Britain, as star striker Adele Vialli attempts to impress an England scout, negotiate a relationship with her boyfriend Marcus, and work out what on earth her city banker dad is doing flirting with her best frenemy Mikaela’s mother. As Adele herself warns from the start, there are no neat, happy endings here – but there is plenty of honesty and everyday heartache with which many young adult readers will be able to identify.”...

Short Book Review: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist who set out to write about medical phenomena from a humanistic viewpoint. So, unlike with academic texts, he did not excise the ‘I’ – the personal – from his writing. On the contrary, in his books, Sacks often describes how he builds a rapport with his subjects and attempts to understand from the inside what it feels like to experience life with various conditions. Some facts I picked up from Hallucinations: (1) Oliver Sacks took a heap of drugs in the name of research early on in his career – to understand their effects, of course. (2) He says his doctor father could, upon entering a patient’s home, tell by his sense of smell only, some medical facts such as whether they were diabetic, but that, as his father aged, he lost this ability and had to rely on other diagnostic methods. (3) On blindness: some elements of the human seeing equipment gets bored when not used and so begins to fire its own messages off – these are perceived as hallucinations. (Charles Bonnet syndrome). Until diagnosed, the subjects sometimes think they are going mad. Charles Bonnet hallucinations have no relevance to events or issues in these people’s lives. As such they contrast with traumatic hallucinations, within which category “especially common are hallucinations engendered by loss and grief”. Sacks explores the aetiology of traumatic hallucination, both visual and auditory. There are similarities in effect between hypnotism and hallucination (and prayer, according to Sacks). Hallucinations is an incredibly informative, insightful read, written in a tone that is simultaneously forensic, insightful, compassionate, enquiring and always respectful of the patients he describes. You finish the book feeling, damn, I wished I’d know this guy, he’d have been a great...

Book Review The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Picador 2006)

The Road is a great Gregorian chant of a novel. A man and his young boy are on the road. What has put them there? Something’s gone horribly wrong. The world as we know it has been destroyed. The earth itself is dying. Trees crashing at the two traveler feet. There are no communities, only nomads and clusters of individuals who have formed bands. Man and boy are crossing this bleak landscape trying to make it to the Coast, a place where possibly, just possibly, there may be some temporary relief. It is written in an intense, poetic style that flickers in and out of the consciousness of the nameless man. There is a brittle urgency to the task of reaching the coast and its the man’s unshiftable, indefatigable love for his son that impels them. The man avoids reflecting on the past – it has become irrelevant. This keeps the reader speculating as to where the man and boy came from, what is their background, and what ended the world – a good page-turning plot device. Here’s a sample extract: Did you have any friends? Yes, I did. Lots of them? Yes. Do you remember them? Yes, I remember them. What happened to them? They died. All of them? Yes. All of them. Do you miss them? Yes. I do. Where are we going? We’re going south. Okay. They were all day on the long black road, stopping in the afternoon to eat sparingly from their meager supplies. . This purity of line is enhanced by McCarthy’s stylistic device of no speech punctuation, only line breaks and, wherever possible, the removal of apostrophes (so dont rather than don’t etc). It gives a sense of leanness in keeping with the pervading sense of deprivation in the novel. The ‘objective correlative’ technique is used often – placing the emotion in description or action or surrounding rather than merely expressing it as ‘I was tired’ ‘I was fearful’ etc. The ending is surprisingly upbeat. The man dies but not before finding some ‘good guys’ to look after his son. Where, philosophically, does the novel stand? What, if anything, is the author trying to say? The novel has a feel of the Absurd to it. There are similarities with The Plague by Albert Camus. Camus there focused on the striving -of groups as well as individuals – in the face of apparent futility. Elsewhere in the Absurd School, say, with Samuel Beckett in Waiting For Godot, there is a form of hopeless optimism; people trapped by circumstance and having to take life or death decisions with no certainty that they are the right ones also resembles the plight described in Les Mains Sales/Dirty Hands by JP Sartre. The Road‘s resonance today is clearly due to a great extent to its prophecy of a doomed landscape – a warning of the consequences of, well, my chief suspects are global warming or nuclear Armageddon. The pervading hostility of the surviving individuals suggests a rugged Wild West individualism is core to human beings/human society. Yet the collaborative, redemptive ending gives hope that such a vision, though pervasive, might not prevail. (Imagining the author: he might be some old guy at a bar late at night close to chuck-out time, who tells you we’re all doomed, but makes sure you have the taxi fare...

Book Review: The Outsider by Albert Camus

The Story In Brief: A French Algerian office worker in his 20’s, Mersualt, learns his mother has passed away. He goes out to the retirement home where she spent her last days and attends the funeral. Later, he makes friends with a petty white criminal, Raymond, who lives in the same apartment block as himself. This man beats his Arab girlfriend up and the girlfriend’s brother seeks revenge. There is a fight on the beach. The brother has a knife, and cuts Raymond, who seeks to retaliate with a gun. Things cool down. Mersault is walking alone along the beach some time after the initial confrontation when he spots the brother, lying in the sand. Mersault remembers he still has the gun, given to him by Raymond for safekeeping. He shoots and kills the brother. Mersault is arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The novel has two parts: events leading up to the shooting; and events subsequent to Mersault’s arrest. I’ve been reading A Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon at the same time as The Outsider. The two authors have much in common. Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and spent his formative years there. Fanon was born in 1925 in Martinique and spent time in Algeria as a doctor. Camus was active in the French Resistance to the German Occupation. Fanon was active in the Algerian Resistance to the French Occupation. Some of the riddles of The Outsider: Why did Mersualt kill the Arab? Why is he so calm about the consequences afterwards? Why does he not better his defence by pretending the death of his mother affected him profoundly – boost his chances of avoiding the death penalty by being more emotional about it? The Outsider is a short book, only 120 pages, written in a plain, easy to read language. The world of the book is seen through the consciousness of the main character, Mersault. The text is written in the first person ‘I’. Its innovation at the time was to set down on paper aspects of human consciousness and feeling that were would not at the time of publication have been conventional. The character Mersault displays an emotional honesty that can shock: examples range from Mersault not dwelling particularly on his mother’s death to being relatively unperturbed by the thought of his impending execution, to killing the man and not dwelling particularly on the act nor feeling particularly guilty about it. In thinking in this manner Mersault moves ‘beyond the pale’ of conventional society around him – he makes himself a stranger to these conventions. Camus seemed to want to arrive at a point in the novel where a man faces death by execution and to suggest that, if life is an infinite ‘now’ then we are most alive who understand how precious each day, each moment, each sensation in each moment is. Reservations: The Outsider seems to elevate Mersault, other characters are erased. The girlfriend of the Arab hardly features. There seems thematic maladroitness to Camus’ lack of engagement with her plight or that of her brother, respectively beaten and killed. (I accept the counterweight to this argument is that the character, Mersault is similarly disengaged at the death of his own mother). In contrast, Fanon’s discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism and his brilliant description of the changing role of Arab women in the resistance movement and how the veil was used by them as part of that resistance is magisterial. I would argue that there is an implied judgement rendered by the author that today would be impossible: the causal sidelining of the world of the Arab in Algeria and the use of the two Arabs- the brother and sister – as plot devices for whom no sympathy is lent by the author would not work for today’s global literary audience. That said, The Outsider is a great work. Thought-provoking. Poetic in its ordinariness. Here are some of my favourite lines from it: P115 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] The priest was beginning to bore me. P117 [On belief in the afterlife] Everybody had that wish at all times, but that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better-shaped mouth. It was in the same order of things. P118 [ On the priest visiting prior to Mersault’s execution] None of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. P119 All alike would be condemned to die one day. P120 [thinking about his mother’s last days] Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom P120 I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the...