It’s been many months since Karen and I blogged about our letters, but offline, our correspondence is alive and in the post. We’ve now been writing to each other for over a year, and these letters, with their free-flow of thoughts, pictures, poems, birds and colourful envelopes have become an essential part of my writing process and my life.
It’s been a year of new places and a whole assortment of post boxes…
I started the year in Geneva, with its famous yellow postboxes
Then back to London, where our letters become more local
... And finally to Singapore, where some colourful postboxes can be found, as well as plain silver ones.
On a trip to Melaka in Malaysia, I also discovered these beauties:
Letterbox at no. 89
Chinese letterbox
Living so far from home, I’ve been surprised to find that my best news from the UK comes by post. Skype, email and facebook would be hard to live without, but they rarely include as much of another person as an eight-page letter. When I’m writing my letters, I feel as if I’m spending some time with Karen, sharing a little piece of my life with her.
Karen and I have noticed that when we were blogging about our letter writing and how it fed into our writing process, our correspondence had a stronger visual element. We sent each other more pictures, collected photographs for the blog of things we were writing about and developed ideas for poems through images as well as words. We’ve decided to try bringing our correspondence back online, to see what happens.
I’ll sign off with some large Indian civets, who often accompany my letters…
Last Thursday was a big day for my poem Wing which began life here on Open Notebooks. Wing is featured on the Poetry Society’s homepage and is published in the Winter edition of Poetry Review which looks at The Poet’s Progress. I was asked to read at the launch and give a short talk on my process. Trying to uncover a ‘uniform’ process is tricky, each poem is inevitably different, so I decided to zoom in on Wing as an example, and see what unfolded.
As soon as I saw the wing I was mesmerised; it was twilight, January, everything was stripped back. The wing was pristine. I wondered about its owner. The loss.
I started to scribble in my notebook and took a lot of photographs.
Once I'd seen the wing, it seemed as if dead animals were popping up all over the place.
Birds were on my mind at the time: I had been reading Pablo Neruda’s The Art of Birds and they had been flitting in and out of poems. I was still reeling from a life-changing bereavement and loss, death, love and the bird as an emblem of hope and renewal were ongoing preoccupations. The wing really did feel like a gift.
The shift from the physical to the ethereal realm makes the body seem more physical somehow - when the corpse is all that's left.
Decay is an oddly active process.
At this time I was also engaged in a creative correspondence with the young poet Miriam Nash. We were writing letters to each other, sharing our thoughts, poem drafts, notebook entries and thematic concerns.
I send Miriam an early draft.
Looking back I can see that Wing really started to take shape when I introduce the formal construction of ‘Dear Wing’. It elicits the letter form which in turn brings its own diction and visual conventions to the table. This is also the key moment when I start to move from block paragraphs into lineation. The direct form of address also allows me access to a more intimate tone.
I won’t go through every editorial conundrum here, but at this point I’d also say that sound was a very important feature in the poem. The sound of the language, but also the sounds in my head. That afternoon on the farm we also visited some piglets (free range, organic, very very sweet). I’d made a video of them and was obsessed with watching it on my phone. They were cute, but there was also something in the snuffling they made — an intimacy, an innocence, a vitality that made me realise they needed to be there to balance the energy of the poem.
Now the poem is published in Poetry Review, so it has made its journey out there on to the printed page. There are however still a couple of tweaks lingering in the back of my mind…
This weekend I went to Liverpool and wandered in to Sachiko Abe’s performative work Cut Papers. Sat on a ledge above the old ‘office’ in a chilly warehouse, she had the air of a fairy tale princess.
A trail of icy white cascades down from her eyrie. The snow-like peak you see in the foreground is the product of seven years’ paper cutting. The room is silent apart from the slightly amplified sound of the blade on the paper. Abe has been in residence for the Liverpool Biennale since September and performs for a total of four and a half hours a day. One of the gallery attendants told us she got chilblains, so they’ve installed a heater behind her now.
Apparently she started cutting paper in a mental institution as a way to stay calm and to avoid cutting herself. In an interview with the Guardian she says: ‘It takes 40 minutes to cut one whole paper. The thinness is 0.5mm. During the depressed period, the thinness is about 0.3mm.’
In the room downstairs there is a small gallery of intensely intricate drawings in pen: produced in intense bursts over a relatively short period of time dark patches occur at intervals; giving the work a surprisingly affecting emotional import when viewed up close. See here for more on the work and its aesthetic and philosophical contexts.
What struck me is the obsessional quality of this work — its extremity only serves to create a purity, of focus, execution and impact. And although the artist says it is neither ‘meditative or beautiful’ as a viewer this is very much its effect. I was also heartened by the transformative nature of turning pain into art. I wish you could hear the sound of the scissors; it is utterly mesmerising and hypnotic.
The prompt this week is to write a poem where you do something in an obsessive way and through that action transform the original emotion into something new.
Another month with 30 days and I’ll be prompting for the 30/30 crew (a group of poets working to write 30 poems in 30 days) every Monday, posting some of the result here and also posting up the prompts I set for anyone that wants to join in.
As I write this it’s Halloween — or the Pagan ‘New Year’ festival Samhain (literally meaning ‘the end of summer’). Bonfires were lit all over the country, pumpkins and gourds were harvested, and it marked the passage from the season of ‘day’ (summer) to that of ‘night’ (winter).
Photo courtesy of Naomi Woddis
It was also seen as a time when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest. This festival is reiterated all over the world in different forms, from All Saints Day in Eastern Europe to the Day of the Dead in Latin America.
It is a time of divination, when we honour our ancestors, meditate on the past, think forward into the future and contemplate the cycle of birth, death and renewal. I’ve been thinking about the idea of poetry being an attempt to influence the future…as a ‘spell’ that is cast, momentarily, over the reader.
Write a poem that tells us of an event that will happen in the future…it could be an event that HAS happened in the past, but is written in the future tense, or a poem that intuits the future, as a prophecy…
I’m completing a short story collection set in Cuba.
I recently returned to the island after an absence of five years. Here is an extract from my notebook, where the stories start.
Part of what I wrote in my notebook that day
La Habana, Friday 2pm.
We walked through Vedado, down Calle 8 to 23 where the bank was. I sat down in a green office chair outside. There were a few people there clustering under the shade. L— asked who was last in line. It was a middle-aged woman with bleached hair not done very well – a bit orange and patchy. I can’t remember what she was wearing except that it was orangey-red – trousers, I think, and a top pulled down to cover her belly. She was nothing like the lithe stalk girls – younger ones, before children came, perhaps before they stopped caring.
But I know that she said a nice thing to me, and I wanted to touch her arm – I did touch her arm. I jumped because a man had dropped ash on my toes in my white sandals, which already left my feet raw and chewed.
Chewed feet from sandals and walking and walking last night, along the Malecon por el dia, then hours in Centro Habana after dark, where smelly pools of water encircled by cats made me jump, as if they might have been rats, not half-starved domestic beasts.
Street in Centro Habana
And we walked to Giolvis in Cohimar and I remembered how it was here – the feeling of being cut off – the voices voices, everywhere human voices sobre todo – people just there, in the street, on the sides, on walls, talking, wandering… Loud music pounding from open houses; rock n roll; an old woman in a pink housecoat rocks, staring fixedly at her past as she listens to the Righteous Brothers: Oh – my love – my darling – I’ve hungered for your touch – a long, lonely time … but the music’s not from her house, but it doesn’t matter, it just plays…
And we walked down roads full of puddles and smashed paving stones and shacks that ate the street, and no one knew what the numbers were. Every house was 26. People were tired and broken and unhealthy – misshapen, protruding bellies, little stick legs and shriveled skin – a lot of raggaton. Loud loud. Who are these people? What do they do?
I remembered how it was to be so far from home – and not know who to be – how to be. Speaking Spanish like a clipped dinner party guest as we sat at Giolvis’ table eating rice and frankfurters, all chopped up – it might have been pork but I ate it anyway – it was all there was in a big pot, and salty beans with a side dish of platano, and Eric, an angel, Giolvis’ new boyfriend whose eyes and mine spoke.
Eric at Giolvis' house in Cohimar
I wanted to be here – this far away and strange, where people kept water in drums because sometimes it just stopped coming – you never knew when, like the light. The street lights stopped two weeks ago and no one knew why – anyway, nobody would come to mend them until who knew when.
The Cuban economy was fucked, said Giolvis. No one wanted to work in el campo any more – the work was hard and boring, without protection of conditions. Everyone was educated – they all wanted to go to university – but there was no one to grow the coffee, or the sugar now. Cuba was fucked – even God did not know what was going to happen to Cuba now.
Vivan Fidel y Raúl — 'Long live Fidel and Raúl' (Pinar del Río street)
Outside the bank I jumped and the hot ash burnt me and I said in English, ‘Ow – that hurt, he dropped his cigarette on my foot!’ No one knew what I was saying but they all understood, and the orangey woman rolled her eyes, annoyed for me, and a few of the crowd moved at me sympathetically.
An old woman with one crutch came over. She loped from side to side, and had a boy with her of about four. He was eating something.
Her face was craggy and sweating. I let her sit down and the boy crouched into her, holding the top of the white plastic crutch. He had had enough of the crumbly thing
– cake or bread – that he was eating. He pushed it at her. ‘Finished?’ she asked.
‘Sí’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded.
She bit out a part, I think with jam in, and threw the rest into the flower bed, then screwed up the paper it was in and tossed it behind her.
The boy, in a white vest and checked cotton shorts, lolled in the seat next to me.
The woman’s face was bluish, or reddish, and she kept looking into the distance, not paying attention to the boy. I looked at him. He was a hard little boy and I did not feel especially sympathetic. He looked back at me in an expressionless way. I thought of L— as a boy – a hard little boy who got beaten with a belt, whose father beat his beautiful kind mother whom everyone loved, and who died at 40 from an aneurism.
But then the boy smiled just a tiny bit; I gazed and was kind. He was, after all, just a boy. He looked at his grandmother, then back at me, and she said: ‘There – you see!’ and her face filled up with light.
Venceremos! - We will overcome! (Cuban revolutionary slogan on The Malecon, walkway along the Havana coast)
I was in Cuba again to gather material for my stories, face to face with her contradictions, five years on.
The confrontation with memory forced a jarred leap across the gap of years and understanding. What was a memory? What was real? Could I see without memory shadowing every step? Time sped up as if none had intervened – every friendship here preserved in stone. They began again with me as if I’d left only days before.
In contrast to the flat planes of my London life, Cuba jumped at me upon my return. Writing became more vivid through a long absence; maturity; other lenses I have ground and now see through. For the last year I had worked with notebooks from my original trips to the island, which began almost a decade ago, and now I wrote with a better understanding of what raw material was useful – and with greater awareness of my methods. Distance had shown me why I was drawn to Cuba – the emotional resonance of this place. Now I could concentrate on developing work about that.
I wrote as much as I could from first impressions, visual and visceral, without thought. Emotional, uninhibited. This was the kind of work I most liked in the original notebooks, which I now knew would be the most valuable for making the stories.
The second part of this post will be a notebook extract, with which I hope to share how I gather material for stories in which I am emotionally present. As to the why of writing – it is for survival, and this trip, a difficult one, showed me that more than ever before. I write from what I know, have felt and lived – watching its meaning unfold as I put words down on the page.
Mostly, I don’t photograph. I find that photographing gets in the way of observation – the inner recording of an event, a kind of dialogue with things as they happen around you – how is this situation making me feel? What do I think? But sometimes if I’m tired or distracted and don’t have peace of mind enough to be present and observe, using a camera allows me to connect to my experience again.
Other times, especially with friends, when I want to participate in an experience rather than be at the writer’s one remove, I photograph as I go along – my personal connection and interaction recorded in these images, which allow me to return later to events I’ve participated in rather than witnessed, and to think of them again in terms of my writing.
This time in Cuba, I knew better how to be present in the work. I have gained confidence in my voice over the intervening years. Reading the original notebooks, I realised that it was the writing with a strong, uninhibited voice that made the stories interesting. As a younger writer, I had shied away from the ‘I’ – edited the ‘I’ out – but now I knew that viewpoint – mine – was interesting and essential in the creation of this, a collection of work about being outside.
Now I understood that I could never write about Cuba in any other way; I would always write across a culture gap – could see only from its far side. This was painful. Naïveté had led me to believe that what separated me from life in Cuba was superficial. I saw now that it was not. It was embedded and I could love only from the island of my difference.
Bernardine Evaristo’s first novel in verse Lara was originally published in 1997. Since then she has written two further verse novels: The Emperor’s Babe, a linguistically exuberant tale of a precocious Nubian teen growing up in Roman London which heralded her move from a small independent, Angela Royal Publishing (now defunct) to Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, and Soul Tourists, an ambitious and subversive take on black European history via the modern day road trip. Her first prose novel Blonde Roots met with considerable critical acclaim when it was published in 2008 and that year she also decided to update Lara – a semi-autobiographical verse novel based on her own childhood and family history over 150 years across Britain, Germany, Ireland, Nigeria and Brazil, which was published by Bloodaxe last October (2009). Here on Open Notebooks, I talk to her about what might make a writer return to a book more than a decade later and get a glimpse into her editing and creative process…
KMW: What prompted you to return to Lara after so long?
BE: I was giving a reading from Lara soon after it came out and an Irish Academic approached me and asked why I hadn’t written about the Irish side of my family. I had mentioned it but not explored it, and she said this was surprising because of Ireland’s history of immigration and colonialism, two of the most important themes in the book. I realised I really hadn’t thought of it and was shocked because it seemed such and obvious thing to explore.
When I embarked on Lara first time round I was much more interested in exploring my Nigerian and Brazilian ancestry – the black side of my family because this was the absence I felt in my life when I was growing up. When Bloodaxe agreed to republish Lara I decided it was a great opportunity to explore the Irish and German side of my family history too. The end result is that the book is more balanced in terms of both sides of my ancestry.
'With the German ancestry I had been looking at family photographs, and my mother knew there was a German on her father’s side, but she didn’t know who it was. I was looking at this photograph of my mother’s father’s mother – she was called Ada Wilkening - and I thought why don’t I go on ancestry.com and see if I can find anything out about her? I quickly discovered her father, Louis Wilkening - he came to Britain in the 1860s and settled in Woolwich where in fact I grew up. So that became a wonderful adventure for me and I tracked as much as I could about him down as I could.'
KMW: So how did you integrate these new characters into the existing text?
BE: It wasn’t too difficult because at the beginning of the book I have a character called Taiwo based on my father – a Nigerian man coming to Britain in the late 1940s who meets my white English mother called Ellen in the book. I explore her history of growing up in England in the 1930s and 40s and the book also explores her mother’s story of growing up in London as a woman of Irish parentage at the turn of the 20th Century. The new characters, who are Irish and German, are on my mother’s side of the family, so I was able to slot in the new sections at the beginning of the book without altering the existing text too much.
'A lot of Irish people came to the UK in the 19th Century because of the famine in Ireland – and a lot of Germans came to live in Britain at that time too – they were the largest immigrant group. The population Germany had grown too quickly and the land couldn't accommodate the people, so a lot of Germans, such as my great-great grandfather emigrated to England. The newly revised Lara became a book, which in its historical aspect is not just concerned with people from the former colonies coming to Britain or descendants of slaves, but about a much wider experience of migration.'
KMW: As a writer, more than a decade down the line, do you feel your approach to the text has altered? Did your relationship to the material feel different when you went back into it? Was there a temptation to rewrite the whole thing?
BE: I loved revisiting it knowing that I could tweak it here and there, especially the bits I’d known since publication didn’t quite work – nothing major just a word here or there. This book is very close to my heart and I didn’t feel the need to revamp it completely although I did break up the text into couplets so that the dense, textured poetry has more space to breathe. I had given numerous public readings from the book for over ten years so I didn’t need to re-acquaint myself with the story. The task for me was to get back into the spirit of the poetry I had written all those years ago. At first my language was too prosaic because I’ve been writing prose fiction recently and I had to make the shift back into my more intensely poetic self, which took a while to achieve.
KMW: So do you think the editorial work changing it into couplets perhaps loosened you into the text?
BE: It didn’t really serve in that way. It’s just that I have a fondness for couplets. The Emperor’s Babe was in couplets and I feel very comfortable with that form.
KMW: The way that the stories mesh together is via the dramatic poetic monologues of the characters – did you find your handling of voice was different in any way?
BE: Again, not really. I love writing in the first person, capturing voice, conveying character. In fact all my subsequent books have utilized the first person narrator, whether poetry or prose, so it was very familiar. That said, with each character there’s always the challenge to bring them to life. How to put flesh on an ancestor? How to make them living, breathing sentient beings? For example, how would Louis the German speak in the mid 1800s? How could I convey the cadences and syntax of his speech convincingly without going overboard? How far could I go in writing broken English phonetically? I experimented with it and then emailed a German friend who made helpful suggestions.
KMW: Does the first person narrative voice attract you because of your earlier work in theatre?
BE: I realise now that my writing has been very informed by my theatre training as an actress and a playwright. For many years I didn’t see the connection. The use of dramatic monologue is an obvious example. I like my characters to leap off the page, to be seen and heard, to exist as if they really are alive and not as wooden characters embedded in text, not quite real, never fully realized. I want my characters to live in the imagination long after the pages of my books have been closed.
KMW: in Lara the arc of the story is not told in the traditional narrative sense. I imagine that’s one of the things that facilitated the updates as well. It’s almost as if the structure of the novel is as family tree. That’s how it is visually. You can hang different branches from that tree and watch them grow.
BE: That’s a nice way of putting it. In Lara there are stories within stories, chapters or units, that loop backwards and forwards and inter-connect thematically and sequentially if not always chronologically. Each character goes on a journey within their own chapter, and some of them leak into other characters’ sections and stories. I might take a character from birth to death or just capture significant moments in their life – moments of high drama or conflict, their relationships and the journeys they undertake within themselves and/or abroad – traveling from one place to another, one country to another, one continent to another. And of course the book traverses two centuries. It’s not a traditional novel structure at all, and the verse novel genre gave me freedom to explore ways of telling the story outside of the parameters of the conventional novel format.
KMW: Having written Blonde Roots as a prose novel, was there a temptation to do the same with Lara?
BE: Now that would be a huge step to take and one I’d never do because I think Lara works as it is – as a verse novel. People used to say that if only I’d written it as a prose novel it would reach a wider audience but it is what it is – although it was originally a prose novel that I worked on for three years before spending another two years re-writing it as verse. Lara has quite some history – starting off as a conventional novel, ending up as a verse novel and then being given a third life, if you like, with a new form and additional material. I’d like to hear it on the radio and various producers have submitted it to BBC Radio over the years but it never gets accepted. They think it will be too complicated for the reader to follow. I beg to differ.
KMW: With the updates was there a temptation to bring the Lara character forward in time – obviously Lara is also you…
BE: Let’s say that she is based on me rather than actually being myself. The book is a mixture of fact and fiction, it’s semi-autobiographical, a fictionalized family history, so I can’t claim that everything Lara is and experiences tallies with my own life, although a lot of it does. It ends in 1995 and it’s now fifteen years later. But even so, I’ve missed out heaps of interesting stuff about my own life. Maybe that will feed into another book some day. For the purposes of the story I wanted to tell in Lara, the eponymous Lara’s job is done. It begins with her fragile sense of belonging and identity as a mixed race girl/woman, and ends up with her embracing all her selves, no longer divided but multiple. She’s travelled and searched into her family history and returns to England with the realisation that ‘this is home’. She’s come to a deep understanding of the two sides of her family: the black, white, English, Nigerian, Brazilian, European and she’s integrated that and found a sense of peace and completeness.
PHOTO RENGA. THIS IS A CALL AND RESPONSE POEM. IN EACH ITERATION NAOMI AND I SEND EACH OTHER A NEW HAIKU AND A PHOTOGRAPH. IN TRADITIONAL RENGA THE LINKING TEXT IS TWO SEVEN SYLLABLE LINES - HERE WE USE OUR PHOTOS INSTEAD. AS I INVITED NAOMI TO COLLABORATE WITH ME ON THIS, IT'S ALSO TRADITIONAL FOR ME TO START THE RENGA. THIS RENGA READS BACKWARDS ...SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL NARRATIVE START AT THE FOOT AND READ UP. OTHERWISE SCROLL DOWN...
While I was drawing this a tanned teenage girl wearing only a Rasta hat and a bikini came toward me on a bicycle, stopped, looked down at my drawing and said, ‘Did you like, go to college to learn how to do that?’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking up at her.
‘My Mom went to college to learn how to do that, too,’ she said, ‘but she can’t do it as good as you,’
‘That’s nice of you to say,’ I said to the girl, ‘but you probably shouldn’t say that to your mother,’
‘No,’ said the girl after short pause, ‘I guess I probably shouldn’t.’
After all the time spent thinking, sketching, planning and sketching again, the printing process is fast and furious. I spent a whole day in the print studio: in the morning I exposed the artwork into the screen and mixed my colours, and in the afternoon I made the print.
inks mixed ready to print the exposed screen
the first layer drying on the rack
layer two: a blend of purple and brown to add detail
layer 3 - green/blue highlights
I overprinted the image with words to bring the three parts of the tryptich together, and finally added the feathers – I used real feathers in the exposure unit with the hand drawn artwork, and then printed the ‘negative’ image by painting the ink straight onto the screen – the same method I used for the first layer.
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
Open Notebooks is an online experiment that asks: what do we do when we write poetry, does it make any difference if we do it in public and how is a paper notebook different to a virtual one?
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
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