On 29 February 2020, artist and author Ed Atkins gave a performative reading of Old Food at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. An audio recording of the performance, which features songs, is available to listen to here on Soundcloud.
Thanks to Sanni Pajula, Patrik Nyberg, Sonya Merutka and all at Kiasma. Courtesy Ed Atkins and Fitzcarraldo Editions. Copyright © Ed Atkins, 2019 and 2020.
Old Food is available to purchase at https://
photo by Margarita Corporan
On 17 July, we publish Filipino novelist Gina Apostol’s novel Insurrecto, her fourth book, all of which were written in English. Insurrecto follows several narrative threads, bouncing between the Philippine-American War in 1901, the 1970s and the present day. In 1901, Filipino insurrectos (as the rebels called themselves) attacked an American garrison on the island of Samar, and American soldiers created ‘a howling wilderness’ of the surrounding countryside in retaliation, murdering thousands of Filipino inhabitants in Balangiga. This real historical event is the backbone of Insurrecto, which also tells the story of the (fictional) American filmmaker, Ludo Brasi, who went missing in Samar in the 1970s while shooting a movie, The Unintended, inspired by these events. Meanwhile, in the present day, Ludo’s daughter Chiara and the Filipino translator Magsalin go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines. Chiara is working on a film about the Balangiga massacre, when Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version of the story. Within the spiralling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women – artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters – finding their way to their own truths and histories.
The novel, which was first published by the New York-based independent publishing house Soho Press in late 2018, was hailed in the New York Times as a ‘bravura performance in which war becomes farce, history becomes burlesque … Apostol is a magician with language (think Borges, think Nabokov) who can swing from slang and mockery to the stodgy argot of critical theory. She puns with gusto, potently and unabashedly, until one begins reading double meanings, allusions and ulterior motives into everything.’ Ahead of the novel’s UK publication, we caught up with Gina over Messenger while she was on holiday in Venice to get her perspective on gender in the novel, the depiction of war and the puzzle-like, non-linear structure which ‘hopscotches through time and space’ (Financial Times).
FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
Even though you write from the perspective of the American soldiers, the women in Insurrecto are the characters who drive the various narrative threads forward. For example, the filmmaker Ludo Brasi’s story is told by his daughter, his wife and his lover rather than in the first person. The key ‘insurrecto’ in the book is Casiana Nacionales, a revolutionary also known as the Geronima of Balangiga. Why did you decide to make women so central to the plot?
GINA APOSTOL
I really wanted to decentre men because they often get to be the story in stories of war. Centring women in all stories will give us a truer picture of anything, I think. If you think about any historical or personal story (from Herodotus to Homer to Hiawatha), if you begin imagining what women were thinking, you’d get a better picture. The world is in deep shit, as far as I can tell, because the stories have been about men, and told by men. We have to keep thinking of that when we consider the stories we tell. Not to say that women tell only ethical stories or only do ethical things – they do not – but the absence of women’s voices through the centuries – the lopsidedness of history – is telling in the way the world is run right now. I gave to this novel Casiana’s ethical figure. She was an actual woman whose name is inscribed in the Balangiga war memorial, but her story is not told in the war stories even though the Filipino women in that war were central – that’s just the way Filipinos are: women are central, that is how I have experienced the world. But their stories are hidden, not told. Regarding the filmmaker, I wished to centre the women’s grief, not the filmmaker’s death, which allowed me to focus on living, and loving, and surviving – I think that’s an important story in such deaths. But in terms of writing about history, I will be honest, at this point: I think men have fucked up humanity’s story.
FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
And yet, your depiction of most of the American soldiers is quite sympathetic. Nothing is black and white and even though we’re cheering on the insurrectos, we’re sad for the loss of young men on both sides. Why did you decide to show the soldiers’ perspectives? And why is an American soldier central to the filmmaker’s story?
GINA APOSTOL
My novels are about this idea that all of us have multiple sides, that we are not singular. It’s a healthy way of thinking, and this is important for those in power and not in power to keep in mind. I think of those soldiers as workers – also an exploited class – who do subhuman things and think like jerks, but who are also just drones. Of course, the imperial authority keeps all such positions in check, but that’s also the point, that we are all under the eye of brute imperial force – not just the Filipinos but also the soldier who has the Filipinos under his gun. I am on the side of workers, of the vulnerable; I’m not on the side of nations – or, I am not AGAINST nations, or white soldiers, or foreigners. I am against the effects of insoluble, unjust power – which is almost always one-sided, not multiple in its ways of desire and thought. We all have multiple sides to us – whether colonizer or colonized – and I was interested in showing that fact. This is true for the Filipino woman also – she has agency, too, and we needed to see her power over others as well. A key structural device in this novel about history and colonization is reversal – and considering multiple sides of people allows one to see how reversal of perceptions matter.
FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS
Insurrecto has a non-linear narrative and as a novel could be described as an act (or product) of decolonisation. The puzzle-like structure, the different narrative threads, the multitude of voices all build into something that is both outside of ‘traditional’ (read: European) forms and also a part of it. Do you think of your novels as part of the process of reclaiming narratives and histories? And why did you decide to structure the book that way?
GINA APOSTOL
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool (or banig) English major, so I am hugely aware of literary history – the history of the novel completely informs what I do. So it is unwise, in my view, to say that I could possibly write outside of the European history of that form. Of course, that history does include Tale of Genji and the looping non-linearity of Indian epics (in my view), and I do include such forms in my ways of thinking. I am in love with that Heian-era novel: I love Genji, and I still think of Krishna’s talking horse in the Bhagavad-Gita and that kind of stuff – the way time is so different in those stories – but I was brought up, being under a colonized world, with Austen, etc. And writers like Austen and Henry James absolutely inform Insurrecto. I love both of those writers, in fact I had reread them very closely and purposefully for the free-indirect discourse form, the moves from one perspective to another that I needed for Insurrecto. The great Filipino novelist, Jose Rizal, is also in my DNA – he infuses what I do. And he’s very instructive about the use of European forms as decolonizing weapons – a lovely irony about literature is that we reuse in order to fight, and art is like that. So I do consciously use those techniques of the novel to write against the brutishness of that history of white-identity-formation that in my view also informs the English-language novel. I’m very aware of the novel as a form that has enabled capitalist-power identity-productions. But how one does that is a trip. I used these various structural ploys – the puzzle, the use of reversal, the shifts in perspective, the cinematic cuts – for play, to have fun as a writer, but also to subvert. But to talk a bit more about how that works out would need another long essay – and right now I am going to have lunch at my favourite place in Venice!
Clare Bogen, July 2019
We’re delighted that Agustín Fernández Mallo will be in London for two events later this month:
Agustín Fernández Mallo will be in conversation with Isabel Waidner at Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, as part of the Goldsmiths Prize’s ‘Literary Laboratory’ event series.
7 – 8.30pm. Entry is free. RSVP via eventbrite.
LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building (PSH), Goldsmiths, University of London, London SE14 6NW
*
Agustín Fernández Mallo and Thomas Bunstead will be talking to the British Library’s translator in residence, Rahul Bery, about the Nocilla Trilogy, at the British Library.
7.15 – 8:25pm. Tickets £10 and available here.
Knowledge Centre, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB
Thursday 15 November: Patrick Langley at UEA Live
Patrick Langley will be reading from Arkady at UEA Live.
From 7pm. Dragon Hall, 115-123 King Street, Norwich, NR1 1QE. Entrance is free.
More information can be found here.
*
Monday 19 November: Alejandro Zambra at Oxford University
Alejandro Zambra will be giving a keynote speech based on Not to Read at the Political Histories of Modern Reading conference at St John’s College, University of Oxford.
5–6.30pm. St John’s College, St Giles’, Oxford OX1 3JP.
Booking is required. More information can be found here.
*
Wednesday 21 November: Alejandro Zambra at TANK
Alejandro Zambra will be in conversation with Adam Thirlwell at TANK.
7–8.15pm. TANK, 91-93 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7NX. Tickets £8 (price includes the latest issue of TANK and a complimentary drink).
More information can be found here.
*
Tuesday 27 November: Brian Dillon at Tate Modern
Brian Dillon will be chairing a panel discussion on contemporary approaches to narrative across different media and artistic forms at Tate Modern.
6.30–8pm. Starr Cinema, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Tickets £12.
More information here.
¶ Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it – the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned. I do not know you. I know your Turkish friend; he is one of ours. Little by little he is vanishing from the world, swallowed up by the shadows and their mirages; we are brothers. I don’t know what pain or what pleasure propelled him to us, to stardust, maybe opium, maybe wine, maybe love; maybe some obscure wound of the soul deep-hidden in the folds of memory.
You want to join us.
Your fear and confusion propel you into our arms; you want to nestle in there, but your tough body keeps clinging to its certainties; it pushes desire away, refuses to surrender.
I don’t blame you.
You live in another prison, a world of strength and bravery where you think you can be carried aloft in triumph; you think you can win the goodwill of the powerful, you seek glory and wealth. But when night falls, you tremble. You don’t drink, for you are afraid; you know that the burning sensation of alcohol plunges you into weakness, into an irresistible need to find caresses, a vanished tenderness, the lost world of childhood, gratification, the need to find peace when faced with the glistering uncertainty of darkness.
You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually, what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude.
So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.
A
¶ Three bundles of sable and mink fur, one hundred and twelve panni of wool, nine rolls of Bergamo satin, the same quantity of gilt Florentine velvet, five barrels of saltpetre, two crates of mirrors and one little jewellery box: that is the list of things that disembark with Michelangelo Buonarroti in the port of Constantinople on Thursday, 13 May 1506. Almost as soon as the frigate moors, the sculptor leaps ashore. He sways a little after six days of difficult sailing. No one knows the name of the Greek dragoman waiting for him, so we’ll call him Manuel; we do, however, know the name of the merchant accompanying him: Giovanni di Francesco Maringhi, a Florentine who has been living in Istanbul for five years now. The merchandise belongs to him. He is a friendly man, happy to meet this hero of the republic of Florence, the sculptor of David.
Of course Istanbul was very different then; it was known as Constantinople; Hagia Sophia sat enthroned alone without the Blue Mosque, the east bank of the Bosphorus was bare, the great bazaar was not yet that immense spider-web where tourists from all over the world lose themselves so they can be devoured. The Empire was no longer Roman and not really the Empire; the city swayed between Ottomans, Greeks, Jews and Latins; the Sultan was named Bayezid the second, nicknamed the Holy, the Pious, the Just. The Florentines and Venetians called him Bajazeto, the French Bajazet. He was a wise, tactful man who reigned for thirty-one years; he loved wine, poetry and music; he didn’t turn his nose up at either men or women; he appreciated the arts and sciences, astronomy, architecture, the pleasures of war, swift horses and sharp weapons. It is not known why he invited Michelangelo Buonarroti of the Buonarrotis of Florence to Istanbul, though certainly the sculptor was already enjoying great renown in Italy. Some saw him at the age of thirty-one as the greatest artist of the time. He was often compared to the immense Leonardo da Vinci, twenty years his senior.
A
¶ That year Michelangelo left Rome on a sudden impulse, on Saturday 17 April, the day before the laying of the first stone of the new St Peter’s Basilica. He had gone for the fifth day in a row to request that the Pope deign to honour his promise of additional money. He was turned away each time.
Michelangelo Buonarroti shivers in his wool coat; the spring is timid, rainy. He reaches the borders of the republic of Florence as the clock strikes 2 a.m., Ascanio Condivi, his biographer, tells us; he stops over at an inn thirty leagues from the city.
Michelangelo rails against Julius II, the warlike, authoritarian pope who has treated him so poorly. Michelangelo is proud. Michelangelo is aware that he is an artist of great talent.
Knowing he is safe in Florentine territory, he turns away the attendants the Pope has sent after him with orders to bring him back to Rome, by force if necessary. He reaches Florence the next day in time for supper. His servant gives him a thin broth. Michelangelo curses the architect Bramante and the painter Raphael, those jealous types who, he thinks, have served him a bad turn with the Pope. Pontiff Julius Della Rovere is a proud man too. Proud, authoritarian, and a miser. The artist had to pay from his own pocket the cost of the marble that he went to pick out in Carrara to build the papal tomb, an immense monument that would sit enthroned right in the middle of the new basilica. Michelangelo sighs. The advance on the contract signed by the Pope had been spent on furs, travel, and apprentices to quarry the blocks.
The sculptor, exhausted by the journey and his troubles, a little warmed by the broth, shuts himself away in his narrow Renaissance bed and falls asleep sitting up, his back against a cushion, because he is afraid of the image of death the outstretched position suggests.
(…)
An excerpt from Limbo by Dan Fox, published this week:
(…)
I imagine limbo as an extraterritoriality without walls, without corners, windows, entrances or exits. I can also cast it as ocean and desert wilderness. Or a blind-black void that has swallowed all light and matter and threatens a sublime death. ‘’Tis a strange place, this Limbo!’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge imagines ‘Time and weary Space / Fettered from flight, with night- mare sense of fleeing / Strive for their last crepuscular half-being.’ (As Ridley Scott’s Alien warned audiences: ‘In space no one can hear you scream.’) Limbo might bring to mind a zone of white nothingness. A space of minimalist perfection that looks like a giant infinity curve or the interior of a contemporary art museum. In his essay ‘Inside the White Cube’, the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty describes the effects of the ‘unshadowed, white, clean, artificial’ spaces of the art gallery, in which art ‘exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of “period” (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbo-like status: one has to have died already to be there.’ Limbo is at the apex of visual sophistication: an extra-dimensional loft done out in luxury-plain Jil Sander grey. Empty and placid, with not even a reproduction Eames chair to interrupt the anodyne tastefulness. No mess, no colour, no life. No hint of recidivist ornament – Adolf Loos would have loved limbo. In Harold Pinter’s words, a ‘No man’s land, which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, which remains forever icy and silent.’ (And full of dread: ‘Nomaneslond’ was the fourteenth-century name for execution sites to the north of London’s city walls.) No day, no night, no seasons. ‘Lank space,’ Coleridge called it. Or is it? By definition it stands for an in-between space. Limbo appears at the edge of daybreak and at dusk. It’s a cusp word used for conversations held in the golden hour.
Limbo; that corporeal first consonant, the symbolic, annular nothing at the end of its second, the deliciously dumb sound that both sing together. How do you define a secular nothing into which you can drop anything? This green zone’s permutations are many. For comics fans, Comic Book Limbo is where old or unwanted characters are dumped by their publisher, DC: Animal Man, Merryman, Ace the Bat-Hound, The Gay Ghost. In the final instalment of The Wachowski Sisters’ Matrix trilogy, limbo is anagrammatized into Mobil Avenue subway station, and in Christopher Nolan’s action flick Inception, it’s the name of an ‘unreconstructed dreamspace’ into which a pair of lovers retreat. The titular free spirit in Andre Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel, Nadja, announces: ‘I am the soul in limbo.’ When she is committed to the Vaucluse sanitorium, the narrator observes: ‘The essential thing is that I do not suppose there can be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanitarium and the outside.’ The Man From Limbo is a novel written in 1930 by Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore, later blacklisted as a Communist; limbo is the poverty from which the book’s hero tries to escape, and where Endore later found his career had slipped. The Man From Limbo is also the title of a 1950s noir detective story by John D. MacDonald in which a damaged army veteran on his uppers, coerced by his shrink to become a salesman, gets caught up in a political corruption scandal – limbo is where the anti-hero’s war trauma has consigned his dignity.
For the Danish game developers Playdead, Limbo is a quiet, puzzle-solving videogame about loss. In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film After Life, a drab administrative centre-cum-film studio processes dead souls on their way to heaven. Here, social workers help the souls identify their happiest memory. The dead wait patiently in limbo as this memory is recreated for them to experience for the rest of eternity. The subtitle to John Wallace Spencer’s Limbo of the Lost, written in 1969, promises ‘Actual Stories of Sea Mysteries’. Limbo District was the name of a a short-lived but influential band in Athens, Georgia, during the 1990s. I am told that in Marseille there is a neighbourhood bar with a sign in the window which declares: ‘Bienvenue dans les limbes.’ For the Long Trail Brewing Company in the US state of Vermont, Limbo is the name of an India pale ale. On the bottle’s label a skeleton sits beneath a blood-red tree, bringing to mind the one about the skeleton who walks into a bar and orders a pint of lager and a mop.
(…)
Tuesday, 2 October: Launch party for Limbo by Dan Fox
Please join Fitzcarraldo Editions for the launch of Limbo by Dan Fox at Tenderbooks.
6-8pm. Tenderbooks, 6 Cecil Ct, London WC2N 4HE.
The launch is free and open to all. Please RSVP to info@fitzcarraldoeditions.com
*
Wednesday, 3 October: Christina Hesselholdt at the American University of Paris
Christina Hesselholdt will be presenting her novel Companions at the AUP.
6.30pm. Room 103 of 6 rue Colonel Combes (75007). Free and open to all but please notify AUP at cwt@aup.edu at least 24 hours before the event and bring a photo ID.
*
Thursday, 4 October: Annie Ernaux at Shakespeare and Co.
Annie Ernaux will be reading from and discussing The Years at Shakespeare and Co.
7pm. 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005 Paris, France. Free and open to all.
More information can be found on the Shakespeare and Co. website.
*
Monday, 15 October: Launch party for Olga Tokarczuk at TANK.
Please join us for the launch of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones). Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones will give a short reading and there will be some drinks.
The event is free to attend but please RSVP to info@fitzcarraldoeditions.com
6.30pm-8.30pm. TANK, 91-93 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7NX.
*
Tuesday, 16 October: Screening of Spoor and Q&A with Olga Tokarzuk at Curzon Bloomsbury
We host an exclusive UK screening of Spoor (Pokot) – directed by Agnieszka Holland and based on Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – in partnership with the Curzon Bloomsbury. There will be a Q&A with Olga Tokarczuk after the screening.
6pm-9.30pm. Curzon Bloomsbury, The Brunswick Centre, London WC1N 1AW.
Tickets are £16 and available to book on Curzon’s website.
*
Wednesday 17 October: Olga Tokarczuk at Cambridge Literary Festival
Olga Tokarczuk will be in conversation with Kasia Boddy at an event hosted by the Cambridge Literary Festival at Heffers Bookshop Cambridge.
6.30pm. Heffers, 20 Trinity St, Cambridge CB2 1TY.
Tickets are £10 and available to book here.
*
Thursday 18 October: Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones at London Literature Festival
Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones will be discussing Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead at London Literature Festival, hosted by the Southbank Centre.
7.45pm. Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX.
Tickets £15 (£3 booking fee) and available to book here.
*
Sunday 28 October: Mathias Enard at the Festival of Italian Literature in London
Mathias Enard will be in conversation with Nicola Lagioia (chaired by Catherine Taylor), discussing the role of the European novel in the face of political turmoil. The event is part of the Festival of Italian Literature in London, and will take place at Print Room at the Coronet.
4.45pm. Print Room at the Coronet, 103 Notting Hill Gate, Kensington, London W11 3LB.
Tickets are £5 and available to book here.
*
Monday 29 October: Mathias Enard at the London Review Bookshop
Mathias Enard will be reading from and discussing his novella Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (tr. Charlotte Mandell, published 1 November 2018) with Elif Shafak at the London Review Bookshop.
7pm. 14-16 Bury Pl, Bloomsbury, London WC1A 2JL.
Tickets are £10 and available to buy on the LRB bookshop’s website.
*
Tuesday 30 October: Mathias Enard at Caravansérail
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Mathias Enard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants (tr. Charlotte Mandell) at Caravansérail, 5 Cheshire Street, London E2 6ED from 6.30-8.30pm. There will a short reading; there will be drinks. The launch is free and open to all but please RSVP here.
I. NOW PAY ATTENTION
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.
Had I examined the Ephemerides that evening to see what was happening in the sky, I wouldn’t have gone to bed at all. Meanwhile I had fallen very fast asleep; I had helped myself with an infusion of hops, and I also took two valerian pills. So when I was woken in the middle of the Night by hammering on the door – violent, immoderate and thus ill-omened – I was unable to come round. I sprang up and stood by the bed, unsteadily, because my sleepy, shaky body couldn’t make the leap from the innocence of sleep into wakefulness. I felt weak and began to reel, as if about to lose consciousness. Unfortunately this has been happening to me lately, and has to do with my Ailments. I had to sit down and tell myself several times: I’m at home, it’s Night, someone’s banging on the door; only then did I manage to control my nerves. As I searched for my slippers in the dark, I could hear that whoever had been banging was now walking around the house, muttering. Downstairs, in the cubbyhole for the electrical meters, I keep the pepper spray Dizzy gave me because of the poachers, and that was what now came to mind. In the darkness I managed to seek out the familiar, cold aerosol shape, and thus armed, I switched on the outside light, then looked at the porch through a small side window. There was a crunch of snow, and into my field of vision came my neighbour, whom I call Oddball. He was wrapping himself in the tails of the old sheepskin coat I’d sometimes seen him wearing as he worked outside the house. Below the coat I could see his striped pyjamas and heavy hiking boots.
‘Open up,’ he said.
With undisguised astonishment he cast a glance at my linen suit (I sleep in something the Professor and his wife wanted to throw away last summer, which reminds me of a fashion from the past and the days of my youth – thus I combine the Practical and the Sentimental) and without a by-your-leave he came inside.
‘Please get dressed. Big Foot is dead.’
For a while I was speechless with shock; without a word I put on my tall snow boots and the first fleece to hand from the coat rack. Outside, in the pool of light falling from the porch lamp, the snow was changing into a slow, sleepy shower. Oddball stood next to me in silence, tall, thin and bony like a figure sketched in a few pencil strokes. Every time he moved, snow fell from him like icing sugar from pastry ribbons.
‘What do you mean, dead?’ I finally asked, my throat tightening, as I opened the door, but Oddball didn’t answer.
He generally doesn’t say much. He must have Mercury in a reticent sign, I reckon it’s in Capricorn or on the cusp, in square or maybe in opposition to Saturn. It could also be Mercury in retrograde – that produces reserve. We left the house and were instantly engulfed by the familiar cold, wet air that reminds us every winter that the world was not created for Mankind, and for at least half the year it shows us how very hostile it is to us. The frost brutally assailed our cheeks, and clouds of white steam came streaming from our mouths. The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him.
‘Don’t you have a torch?’ he asked.
Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning, in the daylight. It’s a feature of torches that they’re only visible in the daytime.
Big Foot’s cottage stood slightly out of the way, higher up than the other houses. It was one of three inhabited all year round. Only he, Oddball and I lived here without fear of the winter; all the other inhabitants had sealed their houses shut in October, drained the water from the pipes and gone back to the city.
Now we turned off the partly cleared road that runs across our hamlet and splits into paths leading to each of the houses. A path trodden in deep snow led to Big Foot’s house, so narrow that you had to set one foot behind the other while trying to keep your balance.
‘It won’t be a pretty sight,’ warned Oddball, turning to face me, and briefly blinding me with his headlamp.
I wasn’t expecting anything else. For a while he was silent, and then, as if to explain himself, he said: ‘I was alarmed by the light in his kitchen and the dog barking so plaintively. Didn’t you hear it?’
No, I didn’t. I was asleep, numbed by hops and valerian.
‘Where is she now, the Dog?’
‘I took her away from here – she’s at my place, I fed her and she seemed to calm down.’
Another moment of silence.
‘He always put out the light and went to bed early to save money, but this time it continued to burn. A bright streak against the snow. Visible from my bedroom window. So I went over there, thinking he might have got drunk or was doing the dog harm, for it to be howling like that.’
We passed a tumbledown barn and moments later Oddball’s torch fetched out of the darkness two pairs of shining eyes, pale green and fluorescent.
‘Look, Deer,’ I said in a raised whisper, grabbing him by the coat sleeve. ‘They’ve come so close to the house. Aren’t they afraid?’
The Deer were standing in the snow almost up to their bellies. They gazed at us calmly, as if we had caught them in the middle of performing a ritual whose meaning we couldn’t fathom. It was dark, so I couldn’t tell if they were the same Young Ladies who had come here from the Czech Republic in the autumn, or some new ones. And in fact why only two? That time there had been at least four of them.
‘Go home,’ I said to the Deer, and started waving my arms. They twitched, but didn’t move. They calmly stared after us, all the way to the front door. A shiver ran through me.
Meanwhile Oddball was stamping his feet to shake the snow off his boots outside the neglected cottage. The small windows were sealed with plastic and cardboard, and the wooden door was covered with black tar paper.
(…)
On a normal evening in January, a year and a half ago, I lay beside my mother on her bed. Although the television was on across the room, probably tuned to the news, we were on YouTube watching music videos by a singer named Anbuley. Anbuley, a stunning, lithe-limbed Ghanaian singer, has hair long enough for her to look like an African rendering of Eve. But this was not the reason for our watching. Rather, I had brought her to my mother for translation. She sings each of her songs in vibrant, forceful Ga, the language of my parents. Even now, she is the only contemporary artist I know of who does this and, since I don’t understand a word, my mother began to interpret for me.
My inability to speak or comprehend Ga is both surprising and unremarkable. Surprising, because my parents share this ethnic group, and have spoken the language to each other all my life. Surprising, also, because while I don’t understand it at all, I know its signature intimately. I’ve overheard it spoken between strangers on the street and guessed – with their confirmation – that what they were speaking was Ga. What, then, could be unremarkable about this? Nothing other than the fact that it is a very common experience. Wade Davis, Canadian anthropologist and writer, uses a daunting comparison to make this clear. “No biologist,” he warns in his essay collection The Wayfinders (2009), “would suggest that 50 percent of all species are moribund. Yet this, the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity.” Davis goes on to summarise in more frank terms: “Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, unless something changes, they will disappear within our lifetimes.”
When I let these words sink in, I hear a forest full of birds. An orchestra of seven thousand songs that combine and sometimes clash to form a living, organic, polyrhythmic heartbeat of life. For whatever reason, some of the songs rise over the others. Forget, for this moment, about history; about colonialism or conquest. These louder songs carry the overall melody – perhaps they are the strings section. Other songs, in the meantime, are audible only rarely, and mostly not at all. They are the triangle that dings subtle-bright in the background, easily missed. As time goes by, these quieter songs disappear, or join the winning tune. The overall melody becomes homogenous and weighted, too heavy for itself to carry that sense of lightness that great music can invoke. It grows boring, first, then unbearable, then oppressive. It is without joy, or surprise, and is all that can be heard.
As I lay beside my mum in conversation that evening, a thought came to me. If, as had long been happening, I could approach my mother to translate Ga songs into English for me, why, then, couldn’t I ask her to translate my own work into Ga? If, as a poet who performs regularly, I knew my own work deeply, surely the access to Ga translations would enable me to become more familiar with the language as a step towards learning it. Then, another thought, or rather, a remembering: my situation is unremarkable. I don’t have enough fingers – and possibly not even enough toes – to count the individuals I know who do not speak the language of their parents. Knowing that a number of them are poets too, it occurred to me to think bigger about this small idea. Even where the language had survived the generational distance, was there not still something of value in the act of sharing and translation alone? That night, back in my own room, I scribbled everything down in a new notebook. I named each of my motivations and fears, then noted the names of the poets I had in mind. I wrote continuously for about five pages, and headed it all with the title MOTHER TONGUES.
A year and a half on, at the time of my writing this, MOTHER TONGUES is an intergenerational poetry, translation, and film project that sees four celebrated young, female poets in collaboration with their mother-figures. Each poet invites her mother to translate a poem into her native language. Later, the poet and mother visit a studio where the mother is filmed reciting her translation, followed by the poet reciting the original. A conversation is then captured between the two, prompted by questions (from myself) that aren’t heard in the final cut. Each ten-minute film features one poet-daughter and her mother, the poets being Belinda Zhawi, Theresa Lola, Tania Nwachukwu, and myself. The films debuted at Rivington Place Gallery in Shoreditch, London on Wednesday 26 July; tickets sold out within 48 hours.
(…)
Something Bright, Then Holes
I used to do this, the self I was
used to do this
the selves I no longer am
nor understand.
Something bright, then holes
is how a girl, newly-sighted, once
described a hand. I reread
your letters, and remember
correctly: you wanted to eat
through me. Then fall asleep
with your tongue against
an organ, quiet enough
to hear it kick. Learn everything
there is to know
about loving someone
then walk away, coolly
I’m not ashamed
Love is large and monstrous
Never again will I be so blind, so ungenerous
O bright snatches of flesh, blue
and pink, then four dark furrows, four
funnels, leading into an infinite ditch
The heart, too, is porous;
I lost the water you poured into it