Blog | Peter Kalu

Book Review: Citizen, by Claudia Rankine (Pete Kalu)

In Citizen, Rankine focuses on moments of discordance when black and white citizens interact. These moments seem to hold no weight in the blind charge of the day, or seem to be simple misunderstandings; but upon reflection, they unpack troubling, raced contents. The book begins with the author lying on he bed at night, going through her thoughts on what happened in her day, as we all do. In that liminal darkness, she arrives by a chain of association at a troubling, distant memory: The girl in class who paid you the compliment that you are almost white. This is typical of the reflections in Citizen. They are a sifting of the author’s consciousness, a slowing down of hurried moments, and in that slowing, a dissection of them, and a revelation of their hidden contents and associative echoes: A white friend who accidentally calls you by the name of her black housekeeper. A colleague who confides in you his department is being forced to hire a person of colour when, he says, there are so many talented people out there. Your neighbour ringing to say a menacing black guy is casing your home and the guy turns out to be your friend who you asked to babysit, taking a breather outside, phoning you. The key text is written almost entirely in the second person – the ‘you’ voice – and the use of this voice is the making of the book. It does several things. It brings the black reader in close to the author. It reflects the research Rankine did with her black friends – so the experiences described are owned by the community – black citizens in general – rather than being a testament of one individual. It gives the sense of a conversation, where that storytelling mode use of ‘you’ is often found, though this conversation is not colloquial, trivial. The first line of the book begins: When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices… The ‘you’ here is not that winsome kind of you, nor the jokey vernacular; it contains an urgency. The line is not “when you’re alone” but “when you are alone”. The difference matters. It’s there also in the use of the term, ‘devices’ – at once a 21st century term, yet retaining formality. It suggests the serious language – of the courtroom, of earnestness. The language of weighting, sifting, defining and naming. It’s beyond post modernist playing or the egocentric shout of ‘I’. I wonder also, of the effect of that ‘you’ on the white reader. Now, for once, they ride along, they become the Other, they wear the shoes; as they read the book the white reader intermittently becomes the black ‘you’. Rankine is saying, this is how it is. How it is is laid out quietly. Impressively. The ways these small episodes dull the life out of you, snatch your breath, wear you away slowly, increase your sigh rate. The myriad resonances and meanings of these discordant encounters, the alternative ways of responding emotionally and intellectually, the power structures they reveal and the way a black person must select an option to move through them – accommodation, adjustment to your own sense of self, anger, disappointment, confusion, denial. You are forced to choose one. Just so you can get along, put food in the fridge, petrol in the tank, do your job, pay your bills. The moments occur around cars, in public spaces, on streets, in offices, in restaurants – in all those places citizens encounter one another. Citizen is a lyric but there are no cascading strings of love here. It’s an essay in Civics. How we get along. The messy complexity of that. Interspersed in the book are essays, artwork, photos and cut-ups. They provide a breathing space between the encounter descriptions; and further context. As far as I know this is the first time this has been done. It is a novel of the middle class black person getting along in the city. It radiates a quiet intelligence, a questioning strength, a submerged rage. The descriptions are in their nature descriptions of water torture- of the small daily stresses endured, their never-ending-ness. It brought to my mind Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. There is in Citizen a similar nod to the moral courage needed to endure in the face of absurdity: in Sisyphus existential, in Citizen racial. Hell is other people, Sartre wrote. Oftentimes, hell means white people, adds...

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...