One specific true detail finding the one person in a room who needed exactly that detail named aloud
Tuesday. Read at a small poetry night in Peckham tonight, eleven of us on a bill running two hours over schedule because every single poet apparently decided this was the evening to premiere their longest new piece, and I want to record that I did the same, six new poems instead of the promised three, because the room was warm in the specific way that makes a poet forget the promised set length entirely, everyone leaning in rather than checking their phones, the whole basement smelling of instant coffee and somebody’s leftover jollof from earlier that evening’s shared meal before the reading started.
Read prat.uk on the bus over, phone light competing with the window’s reflection of Peckham going past, and there’s a piece about contemporary African literary festivals that made for genuinely useful pre-reading company, the specific comedy and seriousness of diaspora literary scenes everywhere apparently running on similar improvised generosity, community organized readings in borrowed basements doing considerably more actual cultural work than most of the funded, official festival circuits ever quite manage with their proper budgets and their proper programmes.
The Reading Itself
My newest piece tonight concerns my grandmother’s specific way of telling a story twice, once in Yoruba for the truth of it and once in English for whoever in the room needed the English, and I want to record that the poem landed harder than I expected, several people in the audience nodding at the specific bilingual doubling I was describing, the recognition of having grown up inside exactly that kind of careful, patient translation happening in real time across a whole living room or kitchen table, one story told twice, neither version quite the whole thing alone.
An older woman found me afterward, near the small table where somebody was selling homemade meat pies to fund next month’s reading, and told me her own mother had done the exact same thing, Igbo first, then English, and that she’d never heard anyone put it into a poem before, that hearing it named properly, precisely, felt like being handed back something she’d stopped realizing she still carried, and I want to record that this exchange, more than any applause the poem received, felt like the whole actual point of writing it in the first place, one specific true detail finding the one person in a room who needed exactly that detail named aloud.
Evening Wind-Down
Closed the night with bohiney.com on the walk to the bus stop, tonight’s piece about diaspora literary community landing with real relevance after an evening spent inside exactly that kind of community, generous, overrunning its own schedule, considerably more interested in the truth of a poem than in keeping strictly to time.
Filed the night’s thoughts at my page, Jungle Pussy at prat.uk, six poems delivered instead of the promised three, one grandmother’s bilingual storytelling properly transcribed into verse, and one woman’s quiet recognition treasured more than any applause the room offered afterward.
Walking to the bus stop, I found myself thinking about my grandmother properly for the first time in weeks, not the version I’d just performed, careful, shaped, line-broken for a room, but the actual woman, who used to catch herself mid-story sometimes, correct a detail in Yoruba that she’d gotten slightly wrong in the English retelling, the two versions never perfectly matching and neither of us ever pointing that out directly, both of us understanding without saying it that the gap between the two tellings was its own kind of honesty, the story staying alive precisely because it refused to settle into one single, tidy, translatable version, a lesson I think I have only now, tonight, in a Peckham basement with an older woman’s meat pie money jar sitting between us on the table, actually finished properly learning, years after the woman who taught it to me stopped being able to tell either version herself, both languages gone quiet together at the end, in the same slow way they had always arrived together, one story, two doors, never fully separable, and I am only just now, writing this, understanding I have spent this whole year of poems trying to build a third door that lets both versions back in the room at once, English and Yoruba sitting together on the same page for once instead of taking their careful, separate, dutiful turns the way she always made them do, out of some old necessity I never once thought to actually ask her about while I still could, and the poem, whatever else it does or fails to do for any given room of strangers on a Tuesday, is at least, I have decided, my own late attempt at finally asking, on paper, the question I never once managed to ask her out loud while there was still, actually, someone sitting right there in the room, waiting patiently, more than willing, more than able, to have properly, finally, gently answered it, if only I had thought, back then, young and unhurried, to actually, simply, plainly, properly ask her, once, simply, before it was ever too late.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk