"Rainbow Milk" by Paul Mendez

Shortlisted for the 2021 debut fiction prize at the British Book Awards.

At the age of nineteen, Jesse, a young black man from Dudley in the UK, is disfellowshipped from the Jehovah's Witnesses for being gay. He moves to London and becomes a drug-fuelled rent boy. This book chronicles his experiences. He is befriended by a supportive network of gay men and women, and people of colour, all struggling against a world they see as controlled by straight white males. 

I presume that this novel is largely autobiographical. This raises a problem for a critic. My comments are not meant to undervalue in any way the reality of the lived-in experiences described. The authenticity of the narrative was often overwhelming. But it seemed to be more of a memoir than a novel.

The main character is defined mostly by his opposition to his context. He is bitter and resentful about his birth mother and white stepfather; he is very angry about the Jehovah's Witnesses and their version of God. He works as a waiter at a posh London restaurant and sees almost all of the diners as spoilt and self-centred; he feels they look down on him or see him as a threat (There are several wonderful pages of hugely realistic dialogue presented as snippets overheard by an overworked waiter which are the best in the book). His customers as a rent boy divide into those who are kind and those who are exploitative. He is angry and bitter, particularly against  white men (the irony being that he is sexually attracted "to lick, suck and fuck white male ass" ). Almost the only positive side to his character is his deep love of and knowledge of music. Unfortunately, since one of my many failings is that I am more or less totally ignorant of any music post-1970, I was unable to appreciate the pages and pages of musical hagiography.

Other characters seemed stereotypical. The gay white poet, published by a gay white contemporary from Cambridge who was easily monied, descending from landed gentry, the pair of them part of the "horrible, toxic, racist, complacent, inbred, white supremacist homosexual world of high poetry" (Brixton, Ch 4) While the author's past is represented by the industrial proletariat, his present and future are worlds where there are few shop assistants or warehouse workers or lorry drivers, or even research scientists and engineers; everyone he knows now is creative or academic. 

The author is very good at capturing the speech patterns of different dialects but too many of the dialogues are dominated by speeches in which the characters represent points of view as if this novel is a sociological essay. These moments undermine the authentic feel of the rest of the novel. Perhaps in the author's world people really do speak so coherently but not in mine.

I felt too often I was being preached at, rather than being captivated by the story.

Selected quotes:

• "I don’t know this about England when I did back in Jamaica, but they have this whole spread, thick like lard pon bread, of people who can’t read, can’t talk good, scratch themselves up like dog with flea, don’t understand a thing about life outside their own head, but think they can call me nigger, darkie, coon, gorilla, tell me to go back to my own country where I belong and stop steal their sunlight – I don’t have enough back in the jungle?" (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• ‘I don’t want to get better at suffering, Norman. I want to be happy."  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "I don’t like this world. I can’t go to church when God make me humiliate so"  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "Two evangelists, both mic’ed up, competed with each other over dub basslines at the station’s mouth." (Great Bridge August 2, 2002, Ch 1)
• "Johnny was scrubbing his cup as if an alien’s tongue had rimmed it" (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He recognised that if he was a tall, blond white boy, everything would have been different." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He had thought of himself as a blond white boy all his life. He’d never thought of himself as a black boy, or compared himself to other black people." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life convincing people that he wasn’t too black." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "‘So you’m part o’ the furniture, then?’ ‘The squashy old sofa. Or the vintage slot machine, take your pick,’" (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 1)
• "Jesse realised he’d spent much of his life learning what it was to be a black man from white men. You’re like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 2)
• "The bright morning, even if it wasn’t sunny, pursued him like paparazzi." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "Graham wasn’t even really a football fan anyway, which put him in a minority of one among the Brothers of the congregation, who, even while they quoted scriptures warning against idolatry, were openly worshipful of the Baggies’ Number 9." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "His smile had the capacity to convey every intention and emotion, and had faded slightly, transmitting concern." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He had never prayed, anyway, not really. He said words in his head but could not believe he was speaking to a real being, who was actively listening. As far as he was concerned, a conversation had to be between at least two voices; otherwise he was talking to himself, and he was not mad." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He’d found someone who could love him, whom he’d be willingly led by if he was blind." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch4)

A fascinating, bitter, portrayal of a segment of contemporary London life. August 2021

At one stage Mendez references, as novels portraying black life in England in the middle to later part of the twentieth century, Small Island by Andrea Levy and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. Both these work better as novels. He also references the unutterably superb Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which is about a young man whose upbringing conflicts with his homosexual desires. 

Autobiographes of rent boys reviewed in this blog include:

• Making Beds in Brothels by Adam Brock
• Street Kid: A Rent Boy's Tale by Ned Williams

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

"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