Witnessing Magic
Leanne Ellul interviews Malika Booker
Malika, you’re the fruit of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. You identify as British-Caribbean. To what extent does your identity shape your poetry?
I identify as a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage and regard myself as a diasporic woman shaped by a transnational upbringing. I was born to parents who were part of the Windrush generation, a pioneering adventurous generation of Caribbean young women and men who migrated to England after the war in the fifties and sixties. They had been invited by the British to come to the UK as British subjects to help the post war country to rebuild. The racism my parents experienced in this country led them to return to Guyana when I was born in 1970 as they did not want their child subjected to the racial abuse they were subjected to. I returned to Britain when I was eleven years old to a Grenadian household – my mother’s family. By this time my nuclear family was split between Grenada, Guyana, Brooklyn (New York) and Brixton (London). These Caribbean diasporic experiences have shaped me and been the inspiration for my poetry. I write from a British Caribbean upbringing shaped by the food, music, dance, culture and rituals we adhere to. My poetics is shaped by the legacy of the middle passage, and my ancestor’s existence on a brutal plantocracy society, and how that shaped and impacted on them today. I am interested in the intergenerational legacy of this history on the Caribbean and it’s migrating ever expanding diaspora. I am also interested in writing about Caribbean women. Giving voice to their experiences and writing into a strong Caribbean female writing tradition that began to assert itself in the late sixties’ early seventies.
Caribbean writers like Louise Bennett, Jean Binta Breeze, Lorna Goodison, Merle Collins, Olive Senior, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, and Pamela Merdecai, influenced me and helped shape my identity. These writers radically challenged and wrote their stories into a literary silence where male voices like Derek Walcott and Kamal Brathwaite had been prominent. These female Caribbean writers began to challenge this patriarchal silence by centering female experiences. I aim to continue this literary intervention with my own poetics, so I am shaped by my upbringing and Caribbean women writers.
In your poems, what does “we” (as in “A Parable of Sorts”) and “we’re” (as in “Sue Speaks To Me In The Swan Room”) stand for? How much of the singular you and plural you do we find in your poems? Or is it the case that the personal pronouns represent a persona of sorts? Through your poetry, do you write yourself?
This is a very interesting question. The ‘we’ is used interchangeably in poems – sometimes to represent me being part of a community and implicating me in the subject matter being addressed in the poem. At other times the ‘we’ is a persona a character. It does not matter where the reader places ‘we’ during the act of reading, what matters most is the truth of the poem. In the poem ‘A Parable of Sorts’ I am writing as part of a community and throwing light on a communal healing that occurs in dance halls and parties. I am attempting to capture a sense of these healing spaces and the role it plays in soothing us Caribbean / Black diasporic communities living in racist western places.
I must also inform you that the poem ‘A Parable of Sorts’ is a golden shovel responding to African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks poem – ‘The Sermon on the Warpland.’ The Golden Shovel is a form invented by the African American poet Terrance Hayes, as homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. Hayes used the words from Brook’s poem ‘We Real Cool’ to create the first Golden Shovel. The idea is that one takes a line or lines from a poem we admire, and each word in the line becomes an end word in a line of the poem. I use the first two lines in Brooks poem “And several strengths from drowsiness campaigned / but spoke in Single Sermon on the warpland.” As the couplet is fourteen words, my poem is a fourteen-line sonnet. So, to answer your question – in this poem I wanted to give voice to the psychological effects of racism inflicted upon us as Caribbean / black bodies navigating various western spaces and how we deal with these through dance halls and parties in the night. I wanted to explore the healing effects of dancing. In this poem I am part of the community who commune in the dancehall as a church to erase the hurts and blues. This is enacted in the poem as a continuing ritual.
Whereas ‘we’ in “Sue Speaks To Me In The Swan Room” is a persona poem, a representation of Sue and a group of friends I met in The Swan Room. As poet in residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company I interviewed audiences for material to write poems. One day I noticed a group of elderly women in The Swan Room sitting around a table drinking cups of tea and there was a teacup with tea resting on the table in front of an empty chair, but no one seemed to be sitting there. Intrigued I approached them, introduced myself and asked them about the teacup. They told me the most amazing story about their friend Dolly who had organised all their yearly visits to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre since their school days. The teacup there is Dolly’s they explained, she would have been here, but she died two weeks ago, and this was their way of honouring her and bringing her with them on the trip. As they spoke, I could feel goose bumps rise on my skin and knew this was rich material for a poem. The poem is an attempt to capture these characters, to give voice to their profound storytelling. It is a persona monologue where Sue is the main speaker and the ‘we’ is her and her friends.
…references to food [have] the ability to enable a reader to access and be transformed by the emotional landscape food evokes.
Food is part and parcel of your poetry; they both feed each other as themes and as circumstances. For one, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen brings together “poets by emphasising craft, community and development”. How did this concept come about? Where is it leading you to?
I am interested in the role of the table, as a place where family and friends can gather to break bread together and the way it correlates to writers gathered around tables in a room, writing, developing their craft and sharing food. Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was hatched in the kitchen in my home one evening in conversation with the poet Roger Robinson. Roger and I had just completed a course called ‘Afro style School’ with the poet Kwame Dawes, and we had learnt so much, we wanted to pass on this knowledge to our peers. At that time Black and working-class writers were marginalised from the literary scene, workshops were not open to us or even safe spaces and we wanted to grow and develop our craft as writers, which is why, the organisation ‘Spread the Word’ organised ‘Afro Style School’ with the Ghanian / Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes (who had just won the Forward Prize for Poetry). Afro Style School had been a safe naturing space, yet rigorous and developmental. It enabled so much growth in our work and our poetics and I was sad that it could only occur when Kwame Dawes visited the UK from North Carolina (where he lived and lectured).
Sitting with Roger in in my kitchen I spoke about how instrumental it had been in creating a community of black writers, enabling us to develop our craft and what a shame it could not continue. And Roger Robinson said – we can start our own. What shall we call it? I asked – Malika’s Poetry Kitchen he responded. When should we start? I asked – Next week – he said. And so Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was born. We used June Jordan’s book ‘poetry for the People’ edited by Lauren Muller and the Blueprint Collective as our blueprint. And Malika’s Poetry Kitchen is now twenty-four years old and our members have had a significant impact on the British Literary scene, getting published and winning prizes. It is a space of growth where we write, we give feedback to each other, we encourage each other with prompts, we bring knowledge that we learn about poetics. And the aim is that we support each other outside of the space. That kind of growing – creates healthy competition. At the heart of all of this I think that community is very, very important. Especially when you are marginalised in a country where, you are trying to shape you own poetics through looking at Caribbean, African and African American writers for inspiration. Malika’s Poetry Kitchen enables us as poets to discuss poetics, to discuss thoughts, to share poetry and knowledge gained elsewhere, and to form your own distinctive voice, and fundamentally to get critique and support.
The poem “Libation” is seasoned with food but also of kinships, ancestry, memory and a sense of inheritance. In “Pepper Sauce” you write the violent image of ” … that grandmother, grinding her teeth, / one hand pushing in fresh hot peppers, seeds and all, turning / the handle of that old iron mill, squeezing the limes, knowing / they will burn and cut raw like acid” whom you pray for. What does food mean to you? Both in poetry and in real life?
Caribbean cuisine is so embedded in social, cultural and religious environments. It lies at the heart of ritual, so much so that I cannot write without reference to it in some shape or form. My first collection is called ‘Breadfruit’ and my second is called ‘Pepper Seed’ which is saying something.
There was a severe missing of Guyanese food when I arrived in England to British and Grenadian food. I missed the rich, colourful and spicy food, and I missed the abundance of fresh fruit ripe from the trees, and that missing enabled me to understand the connection of food to loss, to memory, to kinship, to country, to geography, to identity, and to inheritance. This understanding led me as a poet to understand that references to food would have the ability to enable a reader to access and be transformed by the emotional landscape food evokes. The act of cooking and eating engages most of the senses – visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory and these are also at the heart of creating simile, metaphor and symbolism in poetry. Food is important as metaphor, as symbolism, as ritual, and it permeates my work. Even as a lecturer with my creative writing students at Manchester Metropolitan University, I use food analogies. I compare the blank page to being given a pot with water and asked to cook food. I tell them keeping a notebook and making notes is like gathering ingredients (the onion and garlic prep) for a writer.
In a Caribbean household every celebration involves the big iron cooking pot, and the cutting of onions, and the seasoning of meat and fish and the overnight soaking of peas. There is soup on a Saturday, rice and peas with macaroni and fish or chicken on Sunday. And there is a ritual to these preparations that intrigue me and seep into my writing. Even the celebration and paying homage to our ancestors involves pouring rum as well as leaving food out in a plate for them. As a young woman I was often in the kitchen watching my aunts and cousins preparing food and I remember thinking that I was witnessing magic. Food was a way the female members of my family showed their love.
…it is the deeply autobiographical poems examining hurts and grief that I find difficult to read without giving in to my emotions.
By performing poetry we feed poetry to our audiences in a different way. How do you go about performing a poem? Does the performance part come after the actual writing? Do you write as if you are performing the work? Have you ever written works which were never performed? And do you think direct speech injects a stronger sense of liveliness to your poems?
The act of writing means sitting at a desk trying to find the right language to articulate an idea and it is quite separate from live performance. Once I have the first draft I begin to edit the poem for the page. I consider punctuation, line breaks, imagery, and maybe I begin to mutter the poem out aloud and pace with the words in order to finesse the musicality (through alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme and rhythm). I see if the musicality of the poem reflects the emotional tone I want the reader to experience. I am conscious here that the poem will be read by a reader whose only access to the work is through the page and there is a need to actively score the work to enable an engaging reading. However once the poem is written I then have to move the writer out of the way and look at the poem as a script in order to craft it for live readings/ performances. I have to realise that my voice and body is the stage and think about the text as a performative piece and score it accordingly. This involves using elements of drama – tone, pauses, eye contact, enunciate, emphasis, demonstrating changes in register, mood and cadence. Instead of using the term performance I use the term engaged reading. I see the performance as me communicating a story to a listening audience using a variety of strategies to appeal to their aural skills and knowledge and therefore engage them. These also include gesticulation, facial expressions and using the body to provide physical metaphors, which enhance the reading.
There are works that I have had difficulty performing because of the psychological effect it has on me as opposed to it being a ‘page poem.’ I think that every poem I have written can be communicated to an audience, because my work is vivid, emotive and engaging. Yet it is the deeply autobiographical poems examining hurts and grief that I find difficult to read without giving in to my emotions. Even so every so often I try to include these poems in my set as a challenge.
I do think that ‘direct speech’ enables the enacting of other voices in the recitation that enables a performative form of communication, that is at once conversational and on the other acting (enacting other voices). This is quite effective.
In his book, “The Ode Less Travelled”, Stephen Fry claims that “writing poetry is an act of faith in the power of language”. Coming from a Catholic island with a dwindling faith, this topic intrigues me a lot. So, let’s speak a bit about faith. Firstly, prayer, hymns, and Jesus find their way into your poetry. Your poetry is imbued with Biblical allegories. Poems like “Jesus in the Wilderness”, “Faith”, “The Little Miracles” and “Nine Nights” you write of family and faith. Is faith a way to write family? Or is family a way to write faith? Secondly, in “”A Parable of Sorts” you claim: “Each step our single / prayer, each jab our benediction.” Is poetry a sort of prayer in itself?
I think that having a catholic upbringing has had a tremendous impact on my poetics. For years I have been subjected to the language of prayer, to the incantation and power of litany, to the importance of symbolism – through objects like Jesus bearing the cross (representing sin), the nails in Jesus’s hand. I have seen stained glass windows of apostles and scenes from Jesus’s crucifixion, I have witnessed numerous statues of the Virgin Mary. At communion I have taken a wafer on my tongue symbolising the body of Christ and sipped wine symbolising the blood. I feel that this alongside the psalms, and the language of prayers have been a rich training ground for me as a poet. I am also influenced by the poet ‘William Blake’ I love his poetry and the way that the Bible was a source of inspiration for him. His paintings and poems attempted to capture a sense of the mystic. On another note I have always been intrigued and obsessed by the way the King James Bible is so intrinsic to Caribbean society as the poet Lauren K Alleyne says “The King James Bible is such a sacrosanct object in so many Caribbean households.” That my latest project starts with the question – what would happen if the geography. Characters, language of the King James Bible was resituated to the Caribbean region. So I explore what happens if Lazarus is resurrected into the a Caribbean funeral, a nine nights wake and he returns on the fourth day? Or Jesus is a black man in the wilderness? In the poem Jesus in the Wilderness – you will see references to the belly of the ships used to transport my enslaved African Ancestors. What if Jesus is a black man in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his betrayal and he wants to enact a wake and play dominos and drink rum and talk about life, but his disciples fall asleep. It is so interesting working with a book with such a complicated history in the Caribbean. It was the book used to sanction the slave trade, it was also a book slaves were not allowed to read or the consequences could be death. I am interested in how a book used to justify the middle passage is commonplace object. I also love the language of the book, it is so musical, and lyrical. Yet I can also continue my poetics of writing erased women into the centre of their own stories. Having Black women like Samson’s mother or Mrs Noah tell their own stories.
Endings in poems or life are always difficult to write… once you find the ending of the poem that is when it transfers to art, and is not just an anecdote or a didactic oration of the truth.
” … there is no language / in the landscape of our ancestors to contend / with all this loss.” (“Libation”) Is the language of poetry enough to get us through loss? Is language at a loss when faced by death? And more interestingly, how do you write endings?
It is no coincidence that people turn to poetry when language fails. The sale of poetry books rose during the pandemic as people scrambled to find language to help them cope with an unexplainable pandemic, that saw massive death tolls and a loss of public freedoms.
This is maybe due to the fact that the poem has been described by other poets like Roger Robison as an empathy machine, because of the compactness of the form and its ability to capture a moment, as well as use language to score emotion. It is one of the few artforms that can be used to get us through loss.
I used to write my poems every day at the poetry library situated in the Royal Festival Hall in London, and every day I witnessed the librarians being inundated with requests from members of the public to find poems for them as they had a bereavement and needed this particular poem to read at the funeral as it would better articulate what they wanted to say. It was through observing this need for poetry for funerals that I began to draw conclusions that the ability to eloquently capture loss was one of the roles and functions of poetry in our society.
Endings in poems or life are always difficult to write, yet as a poet we work with each draft trying to get at the emotional and thematic truth at the heart of the poem, once you find the ending of the poem that is when it transfers to art, and is not just an anecdote or a didactic oration of the truth. All of the poetic tools like imagery, music, form and voice aid in this realisation.
In “Jesus in the Wilderness” you vividly use the metaphor of the river to signify difficulties, the strenuous twists and the troublesome turns of life. In “Destined to Grow Apart” you speak of actual ‘oceans’, ‘lakes’ and ‘waterfalls’. In both cases, there is a sense of doom, an ending luring on the horizon. Do you think humanity is doomed? And can poetry act as some kind of salvation? I agree that both poems address catastrophe in some sense, yet they also address rebirth. In the case of “Destined to Grow Apart” the planet Mars died so Earth could bloom. I think poetry can chronicle, capture and bear witness. I also hope that poetry’s ability as an empathy machine enables transformation. I strongly believe that if a human being can have empathy, then they can be changed by that connection with the poem’s subject, theme or characters through this emotional response. It is disconnection that leads to lack of growth and development. In the case of ‘Jesus in the Wilderness’ – after his isolated time in the wilderness he is betrayed, crucified, and killed to be resurrected. I am not sure that poetry is powerful enough for salvation, but I think it is a vessel for hope.
First published on The Times of Malta, on 26 August 2024.
