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The Long Song by Andrea Levy – a writer’s notes

Writing about historical trauma How can you write about harrowing events in a way  that does not traumatise readers, causing them to reject the text? Writing about plantation slavery poses this problem for Andrea Levy.  She answers  it in a unique way. The Long Song is a deeply researched, deeply felt story of black lives in Jamaica during a 50-year  period that straddles the parliamentary abolition of slavery in British colonies in 1834. The Long Song is a compelling, beautiful work, which follows the lives of Kitty (pre-emancipation) and her daughter July.  It is replete with the  details of everyday life of the time that only serious research can provide. Yet is a nimble text, not over-burdened by the weight of that research.  My greatest interest as a writer is in the narratological devices used – how Andre Levy keeps the readers (and herself, the author) from becoming mired in the trauma of reliving those times. Levy uses a succession of narratological levers: Distancing by time: the older woman who is the teller of the story, has survived all the battles and lets us know she is determined to tell the story her way, only partly paying heed to her more earnest son’s instructions on what to write and how to write it.   Use of the third person.  Most of the novel is told in the third person past  – which puts a cooling distance on events unlike the ‘hotter’ first person, present.   Occasional direct address  – the narrator is not averse to Charlotte Bronte-like steers (“Dear reader…” is a common address in The Long Song). This ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ (to borrow a theatre term) also adds flavours of playfulness as per eg Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy etc. Which leads us to.. Distancing by use of farce, humour, narrative switches and perspective breaks – the telling of the story sometimes switches from mother to son, else switches from a ‘showing’ of the character’s emotions and dilemmas to  the more insulating ‘telling’ mode.  Such switching breaks tension: the reader is never immersed totally of for long  in the misery. Levy avoids the sustained “close consciousness” technique seen in e.g. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.  Other distancing techniques include the choice as main protagonist of July.  July  is aware of but does not suffer the worst of the depredations of slavery; in The Long Song  that is the dungeon – a prison where enslaved Africans who are being punished by the plantation owner for one reason or another, are kept); Levy “tells” of the dungeon experience rather than “shows” it, and this elliptical rendering is delivered in part by means of a plantation children’s rhyme (which made me reflect on  how so many children’s songs –  Ring-a-ring a roses, Mulberry Bush, Rock-a-Bye Baby, Oranges and lemons…. – describe horrors but delivered in sing-sing voices and becoming all the more macabre for it). This avoidance, ellipsis and filtering is explained by the narrator: “’I know that my reader does not wish to be told tales as ugly as these” (p191).  The narrator is adamant she is going to write a story that emphasises the beauties of life and of her own personality. She is a consummate storyteller, aware of how different voices and tellers produce exaggerations, hyperbole flat inaccuracy and contradictory versions of events. One example must suffice:  when Miss Kitty (July’s mother) kills the plantation master, the narrator tells us plainly that nobody witnessed it and that there are various versions of how Kitty did it; she gives us all versions and acknowledges them all  as part of the folkloric record of what happened.   Farce  – physical humour and improbable situations are within Andrea Levy’s narrator’s repertoire. For example, she describes how the main character July hides under the plantation master’s bed with her boyfriend as the plantation master blows his own head off. OK, it’s not funny written up here in cold prose perhaps, but it’s funny in the book, and that fierce humour is part of the genius and audacity of Andrea Levy – to deliver this tone at such a dramatic moment. When I remembered that Andrea Levy has passed away I was saddened. I would love to have met her, for her ingenious storytelling smarts, her humour, her empathy, and her resolve not to let the miseries of life drag you down, whether those miseries be in the past or the present, and to stay in touch with joy and beauty. Andre Levy, thank you for this song. PS. I found out recently that this form of historical writing that attemtps ot fill in the gaps, silences, opperssions, occlusions of majoritorian history, is called ‘critical fabulation’ – a term used by Saidiya Hartman in...

Dreaming in Black and Green

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...

‘Bigger and closer…’ – the David Hockney exhibition, review by Pete Kalu

I love Hockney and I hate him. I went to see his Bigger and Closer exhibition at Aviva Studios. True to form, his art there shines with joy, brightness, playfulness and innovation. It’s not ordinary oil-on-canvas paintings. Instead, it’s a giant light show. Film and images are channelled onto four giant screens that scroll through his work in fifty minutes – landscapes, his opera backdrops, his California evocations: it all rolls over us -sometimes even showing him in the act of creation. As we watch we are piped classical music else Hockney’s own, rolled Yorkshire voice provides commentary. I went with my nonagenarian mother, and initially she was irritated. Where are the proper paintings? she asked. She has a point. We lose the ability to pause where we want, to examine a particular element at the speed we want, to obsess over some detail or other. Instead, at Aviva, we march to Hockney’s chosen beat. I realise that, with the disembodied voice and the huge scale artworks, Hockney here is God and we are in Hockney’s church – this viewing chamber is like an Evangelist tent for Hockney worshippers, pitched up at Aviva. We crane our necks, gawp at the friezes as the disembodied God, Hockney himself, delivers sermons on how to view art, what his art means. The collection plate (tickets £24) has already gone round and shucked the shillings out of each of us (there are concessionary prices too*). The choir is the raised viewing platform within the chamber. They don’t sing, just look down on us lesser beings as we sprawl on the floor else sag in our fold-out chairs and benches, or prop up the walls. Hockney radiates sunshine. Born in Yorkshire, he escaped the driving Yorkshire rain (unlike his doom-mongering Yorkshire compatriot, the poet, Ted Hughes and the equally bleak, trapped-in-Hebden Bridge poet, Sylvia Plath). Hockney slipped away to California in 1964 when he was in his late twenties, and hit all that Cali sun and light and blue swimming pools, and loved it and you can see that love in the art. Bigger and Closer showcases Aviva Studio’s excellence at huge, immersive installation art – where else in the Northern England can you put this bright cinematic four-screen show the height of two double decker buses? You know too, how adverts come at you at higher volume and in brighter colours? Same here with Hockney. I was enlightened by some of Hockney’s voice-over analysis. For instance, he points out how Chinese paintings employ multiple perspectives unlike singular Western perspective techniques, and he incorporates this into his art; this observation helped me understand some of the fascination I have with Hockney’s work – I have a print of his on my wall — it’s partly how he shifts perspectives within a painting so that ‘you don’t just view them you walk through them,’ to paraphrase Hockney himself. A dream of Hockney Good art stays with you. The night after visiting the exhibition, I had a dream of Hockney. He came to Aviva to be interviewed by me. I know he is deaf now and would be lip-reading. In the dream, I was at Aviva with one of my daughters and about to interview him when the lights went down for a film screening by some professor. I quickly approached the professor and explained. She laughed and agreed to bring the lights back up but by now Hockney had wandered off with my daughter to do the interview elsewhere. I’m trying to ring my daughter to tell her to record it, but she’s unreachable and I know she’s having a whale of a time with Hockney. What does all this mean? I don’t know. The Salford-Manchester Hockney corridor Next day, still under the influence of loving Hockney, I was in a taxi going from Salford to Manchester and kept G.L.I.M.P.S.I.N.G. brilliantly** bright lcd advertising hoardings through the rain — the hoardings were being made to flicker by the speed of the car and the foreground of leafless, young Winter trees planted in Salford roadside verges — the effect was totally Hockney — the illumination, the flickering, the colour — I realised it would take a hacker ten minutes to reprogram all the hoardings. Then everyone across Salford and Manchester could jump in a car and drive through the Hockney exhibition for free! Hockney, Walker and Basquiat By night, I’d flipped and I was hating Hockney. For his erasures. There are no black people in his exhibition: we are not ‘seen’ by Hockney. I contrast this to the Barbara Walker exhibition, (‘Being here’ at Whitworth, 4 October 2024 – 26 January 2025)*** and I imagine the Walker exhibition all neon-ed up, scaled up and transferred to Aviva. We are seen by Walker. Totally. We are seen by Basquiat – even if his seeing is through his mirror. And this is why I hate Hockney. He never sees non-white people. I’m thinking, Jeez, he never takes any political stand, does he? What if Hockney suddenly clenched his fist and said, “Black lives matter!” Wouldn’t that be great? But he’s a no-politics painter. That’s a choice. There’s a sixteen -panel Gilbert and George back-lit artwork at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester of a young black man. That’s a choice. Hockney by contrast — or at least all the Hockney I’ve seen so far — has no black people...

‘Your words flow like water’ by Jasmine Gardner – art review (Pete Kalu)

Jasmine Gardiner “Your words flow like water’”  Esea studio, Manchester August 2024 I enter the gallery and find the artwork installed in the high ceiling of a corridor. I’ve had problems with my roof and my mind is very much in that mundane, worldy, jumpy frame, and so my first thought is it resembles a roof leak. I settle and the writer in me -another first instinct I have- imagines the squiggles make up shapes that could be writing in an unknown script.  It’s in the colours of my team – Man City – sky blue, with a touch of Yves Klein Blue, and it’s a blue that, I recognise, is a favoured colour in Chinese culture.  The installation has a fluid, clean feel to it; it is and yet it is not rainfall: rain does not fall in such playful shapes; or does it? I stare and settle, and it starts to feel like a spill and suddenly I’m seeing Kandinsky and his swirls.  Then I switch to blue menstrual blood; I notice that, taken as a whole, the installation has a vaguely heart shape. In the next breath, it’s moving, some form of migration, a steady trickle downwards.  I imagine hair tresses, they suggest some fairytale, maybe smoke dragons.  It’s vertical, vertiginous — pinned to those steep, stairwell walls — it makes no claim to be central, to occupy the whole of the gallery. “I am ‘noises off’” the installation says, “I am the subaltern voice; I am also beautiful.” I’ve visited Esea gallery with a visual artist friend; one other person is here – the gallery attendant, sitting unobtrusively behind a small reception desk. I sit and absorb, it’s how I like best to be in galleries, to let my mind and heart continue to wander with the image. What comes next to mind is a complete and sudden shift in scale to the microscopic:  the pieces become mitochondria – the dyed interior of cells. Then, in another jump, they become springs, sprigs, some rococo music score, a disorderly textile.  I imagine programming code – the installation is too beautiful for JavaScript, it’s closer to Python, but too human even for Python. My mind springs again and I land on the thought of a silk textile, loosely woven, bunched, handmade, without algorithm, in the raw, blowing in the wind with all its flutter and backflow. The artwork is actual material – i.e. it is not something projected onto the wall, nor etched, nor stencilled. Not Banksy-d. I get up close and see it is held by pins. The DIY-er in me calculates  six hundred and fifty 2.5 cm steel pins are keeping these blue drips approx. 2 cm from the wall. The lowest drip is pinned fully onto the wall: nailed flat. The material is tissue paper not textile – like the red dragon designs of Chinese New Year in Chinatown trinket shops. I’m astonished to see close up that each piece must have been cut individually  — they are too unique for anything else surely? — the sheer intensity this knife-wielding requires, the focus for each incision, the many hours spent. Up close, you see shadows thrown on the wall by the gallery lights.  The light source is from up high and the shadows fall downwards. I avoid the little cardboard square that holds the gallery’s (or is it the artist’s?) interpretation. I feel more at ease with only the title as a frame.  In  my heart, ‘Your words flow like water’ expresses something like beauty in fragility, and in flow. I imagine there is something there too about how such beauty is hard-earned: a thousand cuts and more, produced this art. Ceramics Ceramics The wall installation is accompanied by a set of ceramic moon flask vases called, ‘‘Take your Chinese and shove it up your ass, you chinky pig!”  This is a jolting disordering of Ming Dynasty ceramic traditions; the vases are beautiful-ugly.  They will age as well as the original Ming vases....

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Small Circles

    Small Circles   Remember Me   Windfarm   Keep the faith   Abas   Voice of whiteness   Jasmine Fletcher -Telling My Truth            ...