“Beckham”: a poem

May 17, 2013 Football, Poetry, Sport No comments

With the news of David Beckham’s retirement, here’s my new poem, “Beckham”; I’m recording it for the BBC World Service, to be broadcast on the morning of Saturday 18 May.

Beckham.
He went from a football man
To a global brand;
From Manchester United,
To, maybe, a knighthood;
To get there, he did two things; first he ran, and he ran, and he ran;
And secondly, he made a weapon of his right foot.
If you were a target on which its red dot was placed
Then not until you’d marched back seventy yards
Were you safe.
Madrid, LA, Paris, Milan: his career sounded like a catwalk;
He had charm and the national armband,
Was one of the few men that women might cat-call.
His style was
James Bond meets sarong.
As if they were blond curtains,
He brushed aside his harsh critics;
You could trust him to bring home cups
Or free-kicks in last minutes.

BDS, and why manners may be overrated

May 15, 2013 Politics, Society No comments

Lately I have been thinking that maybe manners are overrated.

Yesterday, on Twitter, I was having a vigorous yet polite online debate with someone about the right of same-sex couples to adopt. My opponent was unsure about the wisdom of letting gay people raise children, and wanted to see research that children would not be adversely affected by the experience. I was in the process of patiently deploying my arguments when, all of a sudden, someone else who had become furious at my opponent suddenly interjected.

“Fuck off”, he tweeted.

After a short and angry exchange, their conversation ended, and we returned to ours.

Here’s the thing. I was raised to believe that he who loses his temper loses the argument. But every now and then I’m not so sure. As I continued the debate, it rapidly became clear that my opponent wasn’t as interested as I’d hoped in the empirical data that I was offering him. There was ample and recent research, after all, that gay people can raise kids just as well as straight ones. What my opponent seemed to be doing, in the face of the facts, was expressing his discomfort at the rapid pace of social change. Yes, same-sex marriage was absolutely fine; but same-sex adoption just seemed a bit much, a bit too soon.

In my gut I felt rage at the implication that my sexual orientation, of itself, made me less fitting a parent than someone else. Nevertheless, I chose to argue my case with remorseless logic. However, I am not sure what I achieved. I don’t think that I came remotely close to changing his mind. And I fear that my relatively placid tone may have made him feel that this was merely an energetic disagreement, an abstract matter for elegant after-dinner debating contests. I may, in my own way, have enabled an enduring and casual prejudice.

In the hours that followed, I long wondered whether “Fuck off” is sometimes the most eloquent response. Fury can be a tool for progress. It may not score intellectual points, but it may have a greater value in certain cases: it lets people know in the most visceral way of the daily oppressions and disadvantages that people suffer.

This is why, though I can’t bring myself to embrace the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign against Israel, I can see its power; and, moreover, its value. Temperamentally, I don’t really do boycotts. My instinct is always to engage in conversation, to drive relentlessly towards consensus. After all, at least these sides are interested in meaningful conversation: as opposed to, say, the bloodbath in Syria, or the situation brewing nastily in Bahrain. The problem with my approach, though, is that it presupposes a desire for social progress, as opposed to what increasingly looks like the eternal delaying tactic of vigorous, polite and elegant after-dinner debates.

By contrast, the academic boycott of Israel represents a “Fuck off”. It represents a refusal to deal in any intellectual way with a state that refuses to address adequately the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. I believe that the longer this refusal continues, the more that the gangrene of anti-Semitism will continue to fester in the wound, taking that land further from a peaceful long-term solution. I have also believed for much of my life that constant engagement in debate is the best way to address this problem. But I look at the urgency with which BDS is being received, at the speed with which it is shaping the public conversation, and increasingly I am not so sure.

Paul Scholes: a tribute

May 11, 2013 Football, Poetry, Sport One comment

In his first few years at United,

He wasn’t seen as the danger.

It was just Beckham, Keane, Giggs -

And some ginger.

Sometimes, he seemed to bring his shyness

Onto the field of play,

Waiting politely for everyone to enter the box

Before he did:

After you, after you,

Letting his other team-mates approach,

Then sending ahead the ball, and, last of all,

Silently slipping in at the far post:

Head down, always down, in an aggressive burst,

Like a fervent worshipper arriving late for church.

I don’t know how he managed

To stay so long out of the media’s sight.

Perhaps because his shots travelled faster than the speed of hype.

Perhaps it was his playing style, elegant and minimal,

Often seeing even two-touch as too much.

Whatever his ploy, it was several seasons till I heard his voice,

Since those quietly great have others to speak for their legend:

People like Zidane, who considered him an equal.

He was a man of erratic passion,

Followed by fiery confetti

Throughout his career, conjuring plumes of red and yellow

From topmost pockets:

But those sins are forgiven

For all the rhythm he brought to endless games,

Over which on YouTube we can cast our endless gaze.

Paul Scholes: twenty-odd medals, all told:

He came, he saw;

He scored goals.

Stephen Lawrence and the chase

April 22, 2013 Race, Society No comments

Stephen Lawrence died 20 years ago today, and as I remember that period my chest is again hollow with fear. You see, the thing is with Stephen Lawrence was that it actually happened, that thing you were always afraid of as a kid. You were always worried that, no matter how pleasant and patient and courteous you were, someone whom you filled with fury just by being black would come after you. And it actually happened to him. I cannot imagine the terror when he first realised that they were giving chase.

I grew up in the town of West Drayton, which is a place many if not most people have never heard of. It is the last station in Zone 6 on your way out of Paddington, near Hayes and Hounslow. Back then, in the early to late Nineties, racism was a problem both visible and tangible. I’m not one for taking photos, but the one snap I regret never taking was that of the wall of the local car park, next to the Tesco supermarket. There, overnight, a team of graffiti artists had sprayed a racist tapestry ten metres high by forty metres across. The scale and detail of their work takes my breath away, even now. There were stencils of red stars, within which were emblazoned the letters “KKK”. There were long thin black paint trails, proclaiming NF. On the way down to the train station, you could find stickers on the traffic lights next to Barclays Bank, with the warning “Pakis Beware – West London C18 in the area”. One time, a BNP flyer, printed over in Welling, came through our front door.

How big was the presence of racists in West Drayton? Sometimes I felt like I imagined it. After all, that BNP flyer was for a by-election in which the BNP and NF combined only narrowly got more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party – 410 votes to 396, if I remember rightly. On the other hand, it’s striking how well I recall the fear. The fear was not about the raw statistics of racial prejudice. The fear was that one day, like Stephen Lawrence, you would be subjected to the chase.

Perhaps I was an unusually paranoid teenager. At one point, I would walk the long way home, looping back on myself so it would not be readily apparent where I lived. One time I noticed that a pub on one side of the railway bridge had what appeared to be a swastika chalked on its walls. A few years later, having left West Drayton, I found that the far-right band Skrewdriver had played there. Maybe the threat was more transient than I thought it was – you never quite knew. But all I can say for sure is what I thought at the time if I was ever approached by those who hated foreigners. “You’re black. Be strong, or be quick.” I was never strong, so I tried to make sure that, if needed, I would be quick.

I was never that quick of stride, but I was thoroughly watchful. I will never forget one particular afternoon. I was walking with my sister to the opticians one summer afternoon – it was T-shirt weather, it must have been about 2pm – and we walked past an otherwise nondescript man who was wearing a heavy jacket, which must have been unusually uncomfortable in that heat. We made brief eye contact and something about him gave me an inner shiver. We walked past him under the bridge, and I told my sister that when we came out of the opticians we should cross straight over the road and walk back on the other side of the street, so as not to brush past him again.

I think she might have been bemused by my insistence, but we did so.
We came out of the appointment about twenty minutes later, crossed over the road, and went back under the bridge and towards the train station. No sign of the man. We then got on the double-decker bus to Uxbridge, since we wanted to do a bit of afternoon shopping, and as we came out of the station, back to towards the bridge, we saw the man. He had been looking for us. He looked up to the top floor of the bus, saw us, and smiled wryly, widely at us. He had been waiting in almost exactly the same spot where we had passed him on the way to the opticians, tucked behind one side of the railway bridge just across from Heff’s Bike Shop. And then he opened his jacket.

From armpit to armpit, the lining of his coat was a patchwork of swastikas. All different sizes and colours, carefully stitched into its fabric. There was one that was purple, black and yellow, that’s the one I recall most clearly. I even numbly wondered if I could see one in the traditional red, black and white, and I eventually found it, tucked away low in one of the corners. I had never seen racism with such care, such craft. The man, grinning now at the discomfort he had caused us, turned and walked away back under the bridge.

In the end, of course, the chase never came for me, but it came for Stephen Lawrence; just another black kid who was just going about his business. Still, twenty years later, my eyes water with the horror of it all. I’m not going to say anything as pithy as “never again”, because even as I write this there are young black boys just like Stephen somewhere in the world who are alert to the threat of the chase. I suppose I am just writing this because I heard this morning that it had been twenty years since Stephen Lawrence died, and I thought I would give my most immediate and honest response to that news.

“Zooming In, Zooming Out”: a conversation with Shannon Hardwick, poet

April 16, 2013 Books, Culture, Poetry No comments

humming

Shannon Hardwick is a fantastic poet whose acquaintance I was lucky to make several years ago. Hailing from Texas, drawing her influences from science, music and a keen study of the world around her, her work exudes a rare grace and optimism. On the eve of the publication by Mouthfeel Press of Hummingbird Mind, her second chapbook, I caught up with her for a conversation about poetry, the prairie, Tchaikovsky and more.
—
Shannon, how have your experiences influenced you as a writer?

I grew up in an interesting household. My parents were not happily married. I grew up with four siblings…but I was the second oldest, so even though I grew up in a big family I always felt like kind of a loner. I rode horses, and so I spent most of my time away from the home and at the barn.
I remember this one memory when my parents had just separated and my mom was busy, she couldn’t take me to the barn. And I felt trapped in my home, so I called my father, which was kind of a desperate measure because I didn’t usually call him; and I asked him if he could take me to the barn. And he couldn’t do that, and he said, ‘why can’t your mom take you? Why do you have to go at this hour?’ I think it was probably eight o’clock in the evening. And I just said, ‘I want to see my best friend.’ ”
So horses were a really big deal to me – I spent a long time with her, not around other people – and so writing was a way of communicating my thoughts and feelings at a time that was very confusing. Every major event of my life I remember always running to pen and paper, to figure out how I was feeling. A lot of times I wrote to God. Maybe I felt like that was my friend in the sky as a child.

You still write to the sky, don’t you, if that makes sense?

Yeah, I know, to the bigger picture, the bigger thing out there, the Universe…yes, I still very much write to that.

I’ve been reading your work for a few years now, and each time you manage to marry imagery and narrative better and better . What I really liked about Manaquest [Shannon’s first chapbook] is that you sank completely into a different world. It reminded me of the old Coyote stories, the Tricksters and so on. I’ve always seen a bit of the prairie or the wilderness in your work, if that’s fair.

That makes sense. As I’ve gotten older, people point that out to me a lot. I grew up in West Texas in the middle of nowhere, where we were five hours from the biggest town. So it’s just plains and prairies and tumbleweeds and cows. Flatland. So yes, I think that influences my work a lot.

It’s funny reading work influenced by the geography; you read work by, say, Cormac McCarthy, and the prose feels very windswept. And reading your stuff as well, you can sense the geography which it has inspired. That’s a great strength of yours. There’s a lot of space in your work; there’s a lot of air, even in the way you use the punctuation. The words definitely breathe. Without that the imagery would be quite dense and, I think, overwhelming…But despite that space, there’s also a sense of optimism. Do you think that’s a fair comment?

Yes, I think that’s fair…I think that might come from some sort of spirituality in my work. Maybe, I don’t know. [Laughs]

The Hummingbird Mind – why the title?

I wrote most of [those poems] when I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College [a liberal arts college in New York]. Some of those I wrote when I visited home in Texas, but I think I was a little overwhelmed in New York and it was definitely a new landscape.

Maybe it was the disconnect of living in New York, I’m not sure, but one day I was at the library at Sarah Lawrence and I was researching schizophrenia, thought disorders, and I came across this woman’s blog. And she mentioned this disconnection of thought, and she called it ‘Hummingbird Mind’. And I loved that. So that’s how I came up with the title: of thoughts jumping from here to there.

It’s a beautiful image. And it’s funny because although it seems a particularly singular condition, I think it’s actually one that we’re living in now. In this era of urbanisation, a lot of us have ‘hummingbird minds’. Even looking out the window, we’re all dashing about. And there’s a sense of speed for the sake of speed sometimes, and not thinking where it’s taking us.

Oh, definitely. And just today’s culture of being connected to the Internet. If you go out anywhere and look at young people, they’re not even connecting with their surroundings, they’re just looking at their phones, which in itself is a whole other world. We’re just looking at the Internet and living these weird double lives, or triple lives.

It’s very weird having to define yourself with reference to the Internet. Now, for many people, being online is almost the default option.

Right.

But your work is a real departure from the world of the Internet, which is why I like it. It’s very contemplative and reflective. There was one poem of yours I was reading, where I loved this line: “There are nights when I discover universes packed in a suitcase”. What inspired that particular image?

I do a lot of work with memory learning. With the image of a suitcase, you’re travelling physically, but also back in your mind.

I had the vision there of Men In Black, where they have universes inside marbles.

Right! [Laughs]

There was also your Tchaikovsky poem earlier, which seemed to be about having to proceed despite what was overwhelming. What did that piece mean to you?

Well, right before I moved to New York I started getting into classical music and studying composers’ lives. And what really moved me was that Tchaikovsky didn’t even start writing or composing music until he was, I think, forty? His mother had died, and he was probably unhealthily connected to his mother. And she died, and he became an alcoholic. And at one point he even threw himself down the stairs, in a suicidal attempt, and that moment [in reading about that] I felt this overwhelming sadness, that everything in your whole world was out of control. And yet out of that, as a way to maybe contain or control that emotion, he created beautiful music. And not until he was 40. And I just thought that was fascinating, and that’s where that poem came from.

It’s a beautiful piece; and there are lessons there for all of us more broadly, I think, that it is never too late to create. So much of life, as that shows, is just hanging in there; because Tchaikovsky now, even for a casual listener to classical music like me, is such a frame of reference. There’s a powerful sense of resilience.

Right.

Let’s go into other themes in your poetry, beyond that surface level of optimism. What are the key things that you think characterise, that drive your work?

Zooming in, and zooming out. Quantum mechanics; the very large, and the very small. The self, but also getting out of the self, and connecting with the Universe. How to explain this?…Well, one time I was kind of a troublemaker as a teen and I got sent away to this programme – I think in the UK they had a show about it, it’s called ‘Brat Camp’? [laughs]

Yes, hahaha!

I went to that same Brat Camp – I think, the one in Utah – and I was out there and every night before we went to bed I would lay down on my sleeping bag, and basically you would see shooting stars, you would see thousands of them before you went to sleep. And I got this feeling of feeling so connected to something so large, yet at the same time feeling so small. So at once feeling insignificant, and at the same time feeling connected to all that is significant. And I like to explore our feeling of disconnect – of feeling small and insignificant and yet feeling connected to everything and everyone, of that largeness and that smallness.

—

You can pre-order a copy of Hummingbird Mind for $8.00 here. You can read more of Shannon’s poetry and thoughts on her blog, which you can find by clicking on this link.

East African women on FGM: “Sometimes they just call you lazy.”

April 6, 2013 Africa, Religion, Society 7 comments

“Sometimes they just call you lazy.”

On the last day of my Easter holidays, Dr. Phoebe Abe (or, as I know her, my mother) sat down in her living room with me and several women from Somalia, Egypt and Sudan.  My mother, a GP, had for some time been looking at the issue of female genital mutilation, or FGM, with Dr Comfort Momoh MBE.  However, this was the first time that I had ever met people with whom she worked.  Each of these women had undergone FGM early in their lives, and now, encouraged by her, they were talking frankly about how they felt.   One of them spoke of the agony that the procedure still caused her three decades later.  Frequently, when bent over with pain, she would receive little understanding from those in her community who did not know what she had experienced.  “Sometimes they just call you lazy”, she explained. “Most Somali women are very big,” she said, swiftly outlining the curves of her hips with her outstretched arms.  “‘You need to exercise, you need to lose weight’, they tell you.”

When going to see doctors, she had met with an attitude that was no less frustrating.  “Sometimes you feel like maybe they don’t care”, she said.  On several occasions when she went for an appointment, complaining of severe backache, she was prescribed painkillers without further examination, which merely led to complications elsewhere: most notably, the ibuprofen that she was given led to stomach pains, only compounding her discomfort.    The true problem lay deeper, and was only diagnosed after she fainted on one of her weekly visits to her GP.  As a result of the removal of her clitoris as a child, she now had incessant trouble with her back, and found it very difficult to hold her urine, which she found “very embarrassing”, as a result of which “we have isolated ourselves”, she said, looking round at each of her friends in the room.  They nodded in agreement.

Part of the problem, she continued, was that Somalis were a people whose daily lives went mostly unnoticed in the UK.  “The British call us the ‘invisible community’; we are there, but we are nowhere to be seen’”, she said.  Not only were there lingusitic and cultural problems to contend with – the thought of her talking this openly with English people was unthinkable – it was also “very, very rare” for women like her to speak out about these issues, and so I said that I would maintain their anonymity in any article that I wrote.

This, she said, is how it typically happens.  When you’re six years old, girls in the year above at the local school, or madrassa, go and have the procedure done; after that, they return to school and they tell you that you’re dirty for not having gone through it.   “We look up to them like they’re big girls”, she said. At that point, the young girls will go to their mothers and ask when they can have it done too.  Then they go and have and it done; and, she says with a wry laugh, “then you get disabled”.

Having gone through this, their male agemates will look at them with renewed respect, telling each of them that “you’re a good girl, you’re clean now eh?”  By the age of 14, most if not all of the girls will each have been paired off with a man, “and you’re expected to have your first baby at 16”.  One of the women got married at 16 to a 36-year old man, and one of the others recalled that, when she got married, “I was 18, he was 43”.

“Back home, men can have wives in another country”, one of them noted, revealing that “when my father died, we [found that] we had Indian sisters, [and] sisters in Norway”.  Having said that, due to the extreme discomfort that is the legacy of FGM, they took a very pragmatic approach to these affairs.  They would rather that they fulfilled their needs elsewhere.  “Why don’t you just have another wife?  “Go and get yourself a minyire [a second wife, pronounced min-year-ray]”, one of them told her husband.  “Sex for me is like a chore…We were not meant to enjoy sex.  We were supposed to be machines to have babies.”

Another woman described how she felt when her husband returned from work in the mood for sex.  “You are scared when your husband is coming to you,” she said.  “I hate sex…When I come home, I find myself a lot of things to do. I make a lot of jobs for myself.” The terrible pain caused by vaginal intercourse was little surprise, my mother pointed out to me, given that the clitoris was exceptionally sensitive, with eight thousand nerve endings.  Following the removal of the clitoris, the vagina would then be sewn back up so tight that it would be difficult to urinate, let alone have penetrative sex.

Often the women would just pretend to enjoy it, so as to get it over with.  “You don’t want to disappoint him, so you lie”, one of them said.  “You say, yes, yes, yes,” she panted, rolling her eyes theatrically as the others laughed.  It was after sex that the complications always arrived.  “I have been married for 10 years and have only had sex seven times,” said another woman.  “[After sex], I cry for two hours and then have paracetamol.  You can use hot water, to soothe yourself [between the legs] with a shower.  The first time is the worst, because the skin [which has been sewn back up] gets ripped.”

Every now and then, there would be women for whom these sensations came as a particularly unpleasant shock.  “Sometimes women don’t know if they’ve had FGM because they’ve been cut so long ago – [as long ago as] four years old – and they have to ask their parents”, my mother explained.  “‘Have you been circumcised?’ I ask them, and they say, ‘Oh, what’s that?  I don’t know…let me call me call my mum.  And they’re told, ‘oh yes, you were done when you were four years old.’…‘One woman’, my mother continued, ‘saw her daughter’s clitoris, and she was shocked.  She’d never seen one before.’”

The dearth of resources in this area had dangerous consequences, said my mother, who saw one or two cases of FGM in her local surgery each week.  GPs throughout the UK needed training so that they were aware of this problem.  “These women might die from renal failure without anyone knowing that they are suffering”, she said.  Moreover the numbers were sobering.  In the UK, there are 20,000 girls at risk of this procedure every year; in Africa alone, that figure is 3million.  An estimated 66,000 young girls and women in the UK have gone through it; in Africa, the number is thought to be more than 90million.

My mother recommended that several centres, or “pain clinics”, should be set up across the UK, whose staff should include a gynaecologist and urologist who each specialised in FGM. That way, she said, “we can make their lives a little bit better, and see if there is any way they can have a more enjoyable and comfortable sex life.”  She said that local MPs and Mayors should be made aware of this problem; and, noting the Government’s recent announcement of £35million to address FGM in ten countries, she also proposed arranging FGM conferences in Africa, where women who had undergone this procedure could talk openly about their experiences.

What was it, I wondered, that had emboldened these women to speak out about this now, of all times?  “Mostly people are [now] on our side,” said one of them.  “And there are a lot of women who are now coming from Africa, who are talking about it because they don’t want it to happen to their children.”  How public, I asked, did she want to go with her story?  “I’m not going on Somali TV!” she laughed.  “‘Why, they will ask, ‘is she on there talking about her vagina?’”

The women noted the social stigma that was now emerging around FGM.  “Men in this generation don’t want to marry women who are cut,” said one of them.  “The men are angry, they don’t want their daughters to be done.”  As the conversation drew to a close, one of their husbands arrived to pick them up, and I took that opportunity to ask him what influence Somali men could have in this area.  With regards to FGM on a day-to-day basis, he said, “men are on the sideline.  This is not their thing.  They wouldn’t interfere – they wouldn’t even talk about it.”  Instead, he said, it was something presided over by the female elders in the village.  However, he said that “male politicians – Parliament, and the Minister of Health – can change the law,” and that this was vital.  “[FGM] affects the whole family”, he said.  “If the mother is not happy, then the whole family is not happy.”

For their part, each of these women saw no basis in Islam for FGM, which originated in Egypt from the times of the Pharaohs.  “It’s haram – it is prohibited – in our religion to do anything to your daughter”, one of them said.  “It’s completely unnecessary.  There’s no medical evidence that it helps.  [After FGM] you’re physically disabled, in a way, but you’re also mentally traumatised, hating yourself.  Every time you go to the toilet and you look down there, you know that there is another woman out there who is normal.”

However, though they had endured this, the women were clear that this was not an exercise in recrimination.  “I would not blame my parents for this”, said one of them. “They didn’t do this because they wanted to torture us.  It’s time to educate our people.   [And] what we want is not sympathy.  What we want is to be heard.  As we are sitting here talking, this minute there is a child who is being taken to the mountains to be done…It is a crime against humanity.  We have daughters: are we going to do exactly the same to our daughters?”

 

Regulation, not immigration, should be the new black

March 28, 2013 Society, Uncategorized No comments

Our Prime Minister is talking a great deal about immigration – and not all that accurately, as it turns out.  David Cameron would doubtless argue – as would Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband – that he is merely addressing the concerns of voters.  Yet, with every day that he and his political peers continue down this path of either reckless or wilful disinformation, they are avoiding a subject of the greatest importance.

Ratings agencies have still not been fully scrutinised for their role in the financial crisis.  As a former worker in that industry noted last summer, speaking to Joris Luyendijk for his excellent Banking Blog, “Now here we are four years later, and the most incredible thing has happened – we’ve learned nothing from the whole thing.  Everybody pretends it’s all OK.”

And, of course, it is not all OK.  Immigration is not so severe a threat to our society and economy as the unchecked promotion of new and bewilderingly complex financial products.  Yet, judging by the recent focus of our politicians, this topic is occupying a vastly disproportionate percentage of our airtime.

Immigration reform is all the rage.  Meanwhile, the better regulation of ratings agencies and other related areas of the financial sector is very, very far from being the new black.  Why is that?  Perhaps it is because the subject is difficult to reduce to slogans and other soundbites – perhaps it is too unsexy to sell to the floating voter on his or her doorstep.  Well, so what.  It is vital to the future financial health of our country, and the most responsible thing is to keep it at the forefront of our thoughts.  Sadly, though, I am not holding my breath.

 

Regret, and running in the rain

March 16, 2013 Uncategorized 2 comments

Whenever I come to make a pivotal decision, I remind myself of the same phrase.  “The hard thing is always the right thing.”  Very often, the correct choice is all too apparent: what’s often absent is the courage to make it.  That’s not to say that I continually pursue the appropriate course of action.  What it does mean, though, is that I should always be prepared for my progress to hurt a little.

I realise, just as I type this, that I could simply have expressed that last paragraph as “no pain, no gain”.  Ah well.  In any case, the exercise metaphor is a fitting one.  This morning, I was faced with the most pressing of questions; that is to say, whether I should go running through a cold, wet Leyton, or stay within the loving cocoon of my duvet.  As I peered out of the window, I knew what had to done: after all, the hard thing was always the right thing.  The last thing I wanted to do this Saturday was go out there into these miserable elements, and so it was the first thing that I should do.

I forced myself out there, and immediately felt the better for it; out the door, first left, and up the Lea Bridge Road.  Before I set off, I had been thinking about regret.  In fact, I think about regret a lot, and how I am not always honest when I answer questions about it.  It’s not that I mean to be deceitful, it’s just that I try to remain positive whenever I can about what’s in the past.  At 33, I’m not particularly old or particularly young, but like most of us I have already had to make a series of tough decisions to live the live that I want to.  And whenever I am asked “do you have any regrets?” I say “No: ultimately, I did what I had to do.”

That’s not true, though.  I do have regrets.  Plenty of them.  The ways that I acted, or reacted.  The places I lingered too long, or stayed too briefly.  All sorts of regrets.  I remember them all, of course I do; and, therefore, I harbour them. In doing so, I suppose I honour them. In many ways, they are the cost of my progress.

And that’s the funny thing.  People often ask me how, given that I do so many different things to earn my living, I manage to balance them all.  And the answer, which I’ve never really given until now, is that there is nothing more awful than to give up a passion.  There is nothing more devastating than to walk away from a dream.  Often it is the fear of further regret that forces me forward, just as I willed myself over those rain-greased pavements an hour or so ago.  Behind me I leave the anguish of countless sacrifices, of love, money and time; until there is so much wind and rain between me and my regrets, that I can scarcely hear their sighs anymore.

 

Love, the courage to stay still

March 15, 2013 Uncategorized 2 comments

As a writer, there are generally two main rules by which I have been taught to abide.  The first of these is to write what I know.  The second of these, as fellow poet Roger Robinson kindly instructed me a couple of years ago, is to write about that which I am most afraid of.  Looking over the many poems that I have written over the last few years, it strikes me that a couple of them are about love.

Love is something that I have always viewed with intense suspicion, like a security guard eyeing a hooded teenager in a crowded supermarket.  Every time the possibility of love enters my environment, I become wary about what it might be up to.  And then I realise what the real fear is.  See, so many of my best poems are about running, escaping, about making transition from one stage to the next – Accelerate, Plane, The Flight, Cooper Chimbonda.  But love means slowing down.  It means resting one place awhile with someone, and being happy there.

I’ve never seen life that way, though. At some level, I’ve always seen this world as one long dusty and deserted highway, and I suppose that love is the occasional warm inn that I stumble upon during my ill-lit way.  Every so often, the lights of such a happy place will glow out towards me as I approach through the endless brown dusk, the innkeeper will welcome me within; and I will gladly stop there for a moment, which becomes a month, then more.

Eventually, though, something shifts in me.  My eyes keep glancing to my soil-scuffed boots by the door, and then out towards the forgiving loneliness of the open road.  And then I have to leave, before I become more attached to this wonderful refuge I have found.  It’s something I have recognised more and more as I have grown older – that love means commitment, of course, but commitment also inevitably means disappointing people, and for some reason there is nothing more painful to me than disappointing a lover.

This is why I don’t write about love.  Because the love poems and the love songs that I read and hear are about joy and aspiration. They’re written by people who see the world as a sunny garden path, with Love as the charming redbrick cottage at the end.  Love, though, is the exam for which I fear that I have done insufficient revision.  It’s the test that I’m worried I am not going to pass.

I know very well where this worry comes from.  Having lost my father very early, at the age of four, I have no real idea what happy adult relationships look like.  I also became occupied, from an early age, with the terrible burden of manhood: of being a responsible male at all times.  For those reasons, then, I have believed that solitude is my default state.  The many departures that I have made since then from a more traditional path – be they leaving state school for boarding school, leaving the closet, or leaving the City – have confirmed that view.  They’ve all involved abandoning one place of relative comfort, or predictability, to walk another darkened path.

Of course, though, the time must come to stop running.  After all, there are only so many inns that any of us find on our journeys, and I must not so swiftly reject the hospitality of the next place that I come across.  There might be an innkeeper out there who would like me to stay, or who might even join me on that highway.  I hope that, when the time comes, I will have the courage to sit tight.

 

On being black: “Black Is”

March 14, 2013 Culture, Poetry, Race, Society One comment

I don’t write about race all that often; I rarely write about anything when I feel that I have nothing new or different to add.  I wrote this piece a while back, and then a good friend, Bridget Minamore, got in touch to say that she really liked it and that I should bring it out again.  I have only performed it twice but I’m looking to change that.  In the meantime, I’ve provided a free download below.  Here, then, are my short thoughts on media portrayals of being “black”, whatever that means.

 

“Black Is”

What is black?

 

Black is rap;

Black is jazz,

Tap;

Black is Hackney as a habitat;

Black is

“No backchat to your mum, she’s a battleaxe”…

Barack is the new black;

The old black,

Back when they sold black,

Was trapped in the shadow of the gallows…

Black is a straitjacket;

Black is a lower-than-average paypacket;

Black is not gay!

No!

Black is Man!

Black is a brag, a swagger;

Black is baggy jeans, an urban teen with a dagger;

Black is twice as long a wait getting through Customs;

Black is “I don’t know what it is about those boys on the corner, but I don’t think I trust them”;

Black is millions of Billie Jeans -

Single mums with sons whose dads were gone before their delivery;

Black is laughter and anger,

Richard Pryor and gangland pistol fire,

Black is hardcore, Darfur -

Black is a victim…

Black is a street-corner yelling evangelical Christian;

Black is a true story more compelling than fiction -

 

Black is black-and-white, always the extremes, it seems;

Either President or menacing,

Either thief or first-class degree in medicine…

But my black is grey -

Most, if not all warts on display;

My black doesn’t worship God, but his friends are saints;

My black is not on the Pele, Othello, Mandela level of melanin;

But every day, it’s a little more genuine.

 

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