Eileen Pun interviews Pete Kalu about the green shoots of his new book, Act Normal Eileen: Pete, I applaud the way this book outright talks about how societal norms are absurd at its most innocuous… Or, stifling to a point of exasperation, at its most frustrating, however… what I feel is being exposed in ‘Act Normal’ are conventions that have consequences for a black person that are more sinister than mere absurdity or frustration. Am I right to read a certain amount of alarm into this work, particularly for black people? In the sense that… does your writing in some way ask us to be vigilant once we come to the realisation that pressures to conform to normality can be detrimental if we comply, but also dangerous if we don’t? Pete: Thank you for your kind words. Black anger is suppressed. It has to be. If we are to get through life, we have to accommodate discrimination. Take the kidney function scandal ( Racially biased kidney function text exposed ) in which software had an in-built, coded bias against investigating Black people’s kidney issues. Do all those Black people with kidney ailments who were ignored by the doctors because of that biased software now rage? That’s just one example. Rage is exhausting. You burn out. Instead, for the most part, we keep our head down. We joke. We riff. We act normal. If we are artists, we sublimate that rage in works of art, we plant this bitter seed of Absurdity and allow it to grow a tree of strange artistic fruits for the world to sample. The sinister of the past and present is recycled as song. Eileen: I have my own conclusions about the way in which post-colonial attitudes are responsible for a long-standing alienation and disrespect for nature, I wonder if in your reflections, whether themes about normality and the environment surface, even if indirectly? Pete: My take on it is that modernity and its rally call of progress was a movement out of the rural into the city. Away from nature and into the built environment. At the same time, Empire and the ‘scramble for Africa’ was articulated as European civilisation upgrading backward, savage societies. This set the framework for the disparagement of the natural environment and of living close to nature and a normalisation of the city as the default mode of existence. We’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid of that one. We all aspire to be city dwellers rather than country folk. Eileen: Due to my own rural disposition, I have often felt ‘abnormal’… a kind of outlier among ‘country folk’ but at least I can find solace in the non-human world… On the other hand, in cities it doesn’t take much for me to lose my bearings, I was drawn to several entries. ‘Getting your bearings’ the weight of the word-choice is apparent… the passage from Black Boy Pub to Sambo’s Grave and the middle passage. Then the town mission is undermined before it is even started, a taut emotional taunt… It is powerful, can you talk more about what inspired these pieces? Pete: ‘Getting your bearings’ is a dizzy piece. The movement in the text mimics the dizziness of memory, our ability to get lost and forget what is inconvenient because memory, many neuroscientists argue, serves the present. The British in this present period of time have a postcolonial amnesia for all the invasions they (or is it ‘we’ – why do I now switch to ‘they’?) conducted across the world. When questioned on this, their reflex response is that it was simply a small moment in British history not something to create a song and dance or a work of art about. In essence, hush! Yet the built environment speaks and remembers. I found it both absurd that humans forget Empire stuff even though the signs and labels are chiselled into the road signs, building names and the folklore all around them. This contradiction between the two forces, the wilful blindness and material signs is what provoked me to write ‘Getting your bearings’. Eileen: On the other had, Getting Lost 1 is confident and relaxed about what might happen unprepared in a forest… there is the thrill of nature, but underlying this is the sanctuary of civilisation. I feel unsettled by this message, even knowing that most people feel exactly like this… The forest is not for living in. What you can share about your experience or the black experience in a rural context… With so much of the black demographic in the UK being urban… I have had conversations with you where rural landscapes are a part of your life experience and have informed your thinking, but to what extent do you feel an urban identity shapes who you feel you must be… how you write, or write about? Pete: Yes, the ‘Getting Lost 1’ passage surrenders to the trope of countryside as a site of horror – the version seen in the magnificent Get Out movie, and the equally scary, earlier movie, The Blair Witch Project. I was a keen gardener from the age of seven and my visits to the countryside – on church camps in the hills of Castleton or to Ulverston in Lake District where my adopted grandparents retired to – were always happy occasions. The spark for Getting Lost was driving with my youngest daughter through Derbyshire when she was 15. I got lost. Like, I’d follow a bus thinking it would take me back to the city and...
