"Poor" by Caleb Femi

 I heard the author of this book interviewed on Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 16th November 2020

Regular readers of this blog will know I don't read much poetry. I don't really understand modern poetry. But this book is an exception. 

Written by a black man from London it is full of the anger and the hurt of an underclass who have suffered at the hands of the police ("the boydem"), suffered at the hands of architects of concrete jungles, and suffered in the fire at the Gresham Tower Block. These are the voices of the boys in gangs who are shot and stabbed by other boys in gangs:

• “Boys who look to polar bears for lessons on how to grow white fur on black skin.” (Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time)
• “Boys whose names sound like the rip of duct tape” (Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time)
• “Boys who sleep in cupboards” (Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time)
• “Boys who can’t explain why they flinch at the knock of a door.” (Put Them in the Room of Spirit & Slow Time)

There are moments of anger and pain:

• “trees live as long as boys do here that’s why we have concrete” (A Designer Talks of a Home / A Resident Talks of Home (I))
• “on the 19th floor you can see everything but the future” (A Designer Talks of a Home / A Resident Talks of Home (I))
• “the East wing stairs were where Damilola was found: blue dawn, blue body, blue lights, blue tapes.” (Because Of The Times)
• “Isn’t this how you would call out to your friends if you too were in a dark place, standing on a ledge?” (Coping)
• “Shoutout to us boys who play out here. God knows how we do it. Maybe God doesn’t know” (Coping)
• “Preach of heaven, Pastor; we know enough of hell.” (While the Pastor Preached about Hell, His Son Was Texting Girls)
• “Just ask the mother who worked until her hands curled like boiled crabs to have a son on safer shores; fed him; bought him toothpaste for two decades, almost. Who would get a call that said she had birthed her son into a casket after all.” (Trauma Is a Warm Bath)
• “one in every clutch of us must take a bullet or a blade.” (The Six)_
• “We’ve tasted the sting of tasers.” ([redacted]phobia)
• “[In the future, every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell” (Excerpts from Journal Entries, 2017)
• “If those in the higher seats of the high places don’t note Grenfell as a mass murder, as gross incompetence, as a final warning, as a regression of Humanity then they should at the very least take note (since they all watched it from their windows) of the nature of a spreading fire: if the bottom burns then surely with time the top will, too. Surely it will succumb to the flames.” (Excerpts from Journal Entries, 2017)

But it isn't just anger and pain. There are moments of wisdom:

• “horny likkle bwoi playing horny likkle games, baking in laughter like he be the first to be horny in history, forgetting how he came to be born” (Honeytrap & Likkle Bwoi)
• “You don’t have to run faster than the police – you just have to run faster than the slowest person.” (Concrete (I)
• “the devil found good ground to plough his seeds.” (Because Of The Times)
• “Better to have and not need, I thought, than need and not have.” (Things I Have Stolen)
• “If retribution was what the youts wanted not one brick would remain on the city’s skyline. We are over such theatrics – for now. We browse through the catalogue of anarchy,” (Gentle Youth)
• “I crossed over & now the hood won’t take me back. I stink of uptown, high ceilings, grand windows – they know that I room in the belly of the bourgeois.” (On the Other Side of the Street)
• “it is strange to order your own death like takeaway.” (We Will Not All Fight like Dogs at Our Death)

There are moments of humour:

• “I am a superhero with the power of invisibility problem is I haven’t quite got the handle of it yet” (Barter)
• “We laughed to see Satan get swindled like a rich mark in a brothel because anyone who knew Mike & what he could do when the night air has too much iron in it, knew that that wretched boy didn’t have a soul to be marketing out in the first place.” (The Painting On The Concrete Wall)
• “You can’t say CRACK here you’ll fuck the house prices what you say is craquè” (Old New)

There are wonderful descriptions: 

• “a few youngers sprawled like a deck of trick cards on the back stairs” (Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms) 
• “two men bouncing along the pavement through another eye they look like young dolphins slicing coastal waves” (Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms)
• “a boy smiles at the mirror welcoming a new strip of muscle breaking through the sheen of boyishness” (Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms)
• “On the left wing of the church, you sit in rows with the other boys dressed tidy like a supermarket shelf of tuna” (While the Pastor Preached about Hell, His Son Was Texting Girls)
• “death drifted through the ward like a gardener checking on the ripeness of his plants inspecting each body attached to vines” (Repress)

And there are moments which are just poetry:

• “your life, your tinkering, your blooming, making-do.” (Because Of The Times)
• “maybe an estate, tall as it is, is the half-buried femur of a dead god, and the blue light of dawn – his son in mourning – looks on the things we do when there is one less boy among us.” (Coping)
• “What we really do is [make music, tweet, gram.] unwrinkle nightlight from skin.” (Gentle Youth)
• “A light crawls through the window and folds in on itself to kneel beside a boy at prayer in a South London police cell.” (Two Bodies Caught in One Cell)

OK. I shouldn't need to learn this lesson: these people are the same as me, they have the same souls, they too suffer, they too love, they too get excited by beauty, they too are tender, they too are kind, they too quest after the meaning of the universe. That is the lesson of this book. It isn't new. George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, written about the white underclass in the 1930s, has a moment when the author glimpses a slum girl from a train. Her face wears "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen ... she knew well enough what was happening to her." He uses this image to refute the concept that the lower orders are dumb brutes and don't mind poverty and squalor. If we, the privileged, cannot even feel the righteous pain of the dispossessed, then we do not deserve the great good fortune that we have.

This is a wonderful book. November 2020; 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God