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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...

Book Review: Come Let Us Sing Anyway by Leone Ross (short stories)

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.  ...

Deyika Nzeribe (1966-2017) A Tribute

Deyika Nzeribe (1966 -2017)  Tribune of the People The first visual memory I have of Deyika is from close to a couple of decades ago. It’s Summer. He’s coming towards me, crossing Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester’s city centre, a white bedsheet wrapped round him in the style of a Roman senator. He was celebrating a graduation – I can’t remember whether it was his own or his friends’. As you can guess, they were in high spirits. He stopped to chat with me a few seconds then they sailed on. There’s a good friend, I thought, and a guy who knew how to party! It is little known that Deyika was a fine poet. He had a poet’s sensibility for emotional nuance, for divining people, a poet’s generosity of spirit. We ended up working together for what was then a small community writing project, Commonword. He had so many callers at Commonword that sometimes the reception room at Commonword filled up with people wanting to see Deyika. I doubt he ever ate lunch alone during those times. Years sailed by and I got to know him. And it was from the cramped store-room / kitchen of the Commonword project that a second stingingly sweet memory comes. He called me in there to tell me something important. His hands came up, fingers spread in a gesture of openness yet uncharacteristic inarticulacy. ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ he said to me. ‘You’re going to become a father,’ I completed for him. He burst out laughing, amazed that I’d guessed. ‘How did you…?’ ‘Lucky guess.’ Actually he’d been brimming with a barely containable happiness all week, and this made it easy for me. Afterwards, I thought maybe I should have let him squirm a bit longer trying to find the words. He took as naturally to fatherhood as he did to riding a bike. You can run out of fingers and toes counting your fair-weather friends: there’s an endless supply of them ready to celebrate your lottery win, your prize, your financial or status-achieving victory, large or small. When the going is good, you never lack companions. Deyika was that rarity – a friend for all seasons.  Life has a way of finding which part of you will hurt most and then kicking you there, repeatedly. Whenever I got kicked and I was at my lowest, Deyika was one who would roll up in that kinetically intriguing open walk of his and put an arm around me. Pick me back up. Simple as. Only after he had attended to the human, to the humanity within a situation did he turn to the political, to the fight. And what a fighter. He was resolute. Uncrushable. Yet he didn’t believe in bombast. He had charm and he boxed his opponents in with the polite rigour of his arguments. He once floored me with a question that remains my favourite inquisitorial line: “Is there anything you know that I ought to know but which you have not told me?” How do you answer that question except with a full confession! This acuity wrapped in charm – the fist in velvet glove -he used instinctively to help others. I’m sure he died poor because he gave everything: time, mind and money. To the rejected. The indigent. The outnumbered. The out-gunned. You were never alone if Deyika was with you. You were never beat if Deyika was by your side. He was running for Mayor when he died. He would have made a fine Mayor, a great Senator for the people, a great Tribune – a real Voice of the People. I met him first in robes. It is in robes I see him ascend to the...

MCM Manchester Comic Con July 2015

The Skip of Conversation

  Remember in your childhood playground when kids did skipping – up down, up down, jump in, jump out. Sometimes they’d do two ropes. Up down. In out. Up down. Out in. Down in. Up out. Like that? And you say, ‘Let me have a go.’ ‘You can’t,’ they reply. ‘One go.’ ‘Fine, go ahead.’ Up, down Ugh – you’ve tripped straight away. The girls look at you: ‘See? You useless!’ For me, conversation goes along similar lines. So it’s an early evening with a nice faded sun. There’s four women and me, chilled around a table, talking, and the conversation flows nicely. ‘I swam in this river.’ ‘Really? I swam in that river!’ OK I can contribute here, you think, I’ve swum in a river. Which one? You remember the one. OK, I even got the name, I’m ready. ‘I swam in a river.’ ‘What? We’re not talking about rivers, we let go of that ages ago.’ ‘Oh OK.’ They go back to talking. Two more women join them. So 1 & 3 are talking peach juice. 2 & 4 are talking wood glue. You try to read one conversation or the other. You’re just about got the flow of one, the wood glue one: you know something interesting about glue, it used to be made from cow bones, and you go to say that, but, just as you are about to open your lips, you notice somehow they’ve switched and it’s not 1 & 3 and 2 & 4 holding conversations now: it’s 1 & 4 and 2 & 3. They switched without missing a beat! So, you think, which one is the wood glue conversation now? You hear ‘drying time’. It must be 1 & 4 you decide, and you can make a contribution: ‘I love that superglue dries in seconds,’ you offer. ‘What? We’re talking about tears, when you’re upset. The drying time for tears.’ ‘Superglue dries like tears..?’ you mumble, lost. All four women stare at you. You hide behind you...

Book Review: ‘Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’: Autobiography of Audre Lorde

I read some of Lorde’s essays and wanted more so I got hold of this autobiography. She was born in 1934 to a poor Caribbean family in New York, grew up with a stern mum and a distant dad. She was very short sighted, designated blind early on, and until she had glasses stumbled around in that blurred world. As adolescence arrived and she began to explore her sexuality, she found there were no templates at the time for Lorde that gave any take on how to live your life as a Black lesbian, there were no support groups, no books, no nothng. In those times it was an act of great courage to sail out into the world while remaining true to your nature, your feelings. And sail out Lorde did. In Zami, Lorde writes of her life in her late teens to early twenties with great emotional candour, pathos, not a little humour and with a rich, aching sensibility of others’ vulnerable circumstances. Two moments: I love how she lugs her typewriter around from place to place (those things were heavy in those days, not like IPads etc). I also love her ‘hanging in the corner with her gay gals at the club’ descriptions, the subtleties and inside humour she reveals. Audre Lorde gets under your skin. I’ve been reading her late night for about 8 days now. I can usually whizz through books. I read her carefully. I’ve just learnt that, in Western film, conventionally, heroes enter from the left, villains from the right. (It reverses in Japanese film.) I wonder if Lorde’s prose style is an aspect of where she’s coming from, a similar flip, such that I have to slow down in order to understand her fully. The book as tangible object. I’m taken by the many underlinings, circlings and scribblings in different pens, biro, ink, pencil, faint, heavy in the text (this is a tree book I’m reading). Usually around her lesbian awareness, her Black awareness. I start imagining uniting around a table on a sunny terrace all the previous readers. They’d need to come in their contemporary clothes – from 80’s geri curls, disco flares, dungarees, weaves etc. There would be the furtive not-yet-out lesbians reading for courage or to understand an alternative, the current generation of young out black lesbians, peering back into history… What I got from the book. The biggest thing I’m getting is Lorde simply remained true to herself. Eg at the time she describes there was within lesbian culture a big binary of Dominant/Submissive. The dominant females looked for ‘femmes’ – submissives to walk with, to show off. The ‘femme’ image, Lorde explains, was imported lock stock and barrel from contemporary patriarchal views of femininity and therefore, racism meant no black woman could be femme, they all had to be butch. Lorde simply ignored the binary. She also talks about how women could be ‘reaching out across our differences’. I am drawn also to the subtlety with which Lorde paints relationships between women. Enter conclusion here. This is a great book. And the copy I have read is even greater in my mind, for all these markings and circlings and underlinings from previous readers. It provides almost a history of a community. You just can’t get that from an e-book. Sheba Press 1982...