Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
The Colour of James Brown’s Scream
Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee
Fisherman’s Song
Broomhall
Winter Song
Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly
The Room
Some Bright Elegance
calling a spade a spade
The N Word
Alterity
The Cricket Test
The Conservatoire System
On Reading ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’
Varsity Blues
Casting
Callbacks
Normative Ethics
Curfew
25 October, 1964
Legerdemain
How to Build Cathedrals
Waves
Malumbo
Orientation
How to Cry
Loch Long by Ardgartan, Argyll
Kumukanda
H-O-R-S-E
Alternate Take
A Proud Blemish
Orphan Song
Grief
The Nod
In Defence of Darkness
Andrews Corner
Martins Corner
Kung’anda
’Round Midnight
Baltic Mill
This poem contains gull song
For those orphaned late in life
Author’s Note
Notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Translating as ‘initiation’, kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. Kayo Chingonyi’s remarkable debut explores this passage: between two worlds, ancestral and contemporary; between the living and the dead; between the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived.
Underpinned by a love of music, language and literature, here is a powerful exploration of race, identity and masculinity, celebrating what it means to be British and not British, all at once.
About the Author
Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of two pamphlets, and a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015.
I.M. Thomas Kareem Crosbie, aka PACE, 1988–2016
KUMUKANDA
Kayo Chingonyi
The Colour of James Brown’s Scream
for Steve McCarthy and Todd Bracey
I have known you by many names
but today you are Larry Levan,
your hand on the platter in the smoky
room of a Garage regular’s memory.
You are keeping ‘When Doves Cry’
in time, as you swing your hips,
and sweat drips from your hair
the colour of James Brown’s scream.
King of King Street, we are still moving
to the same sound, though some
of us don’t know it is your grave
we dance on, cutting shapes
machismo lost to the beat –
every road man is a sweetboy
if the DJ plays ‘Heartbroken’
at just the right time for these jaded feet.
Teach us to shape-shift, Legba,
you must know I’d know your customary
shuffle, that phantom limp, anywhere;
that I see your hand in the abandon
of a couple, middle of the floor,
sliding quick and slick as a skin-fade
by the hand of a Puerto Rican clipper-man
who wields a cutthroat like a paintbrush.
Let us become like them, an ode
to night, ordering beer in a corporeal
language from a barman who replies
by sweeping his arms in an arc,
Willi Ninja style, to fix a drink our lips
will yearn for, a taste we’ve been
trying to recreate ever since.
Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee
I.
117 Retford Road, Harold Hill, Essex.
I can’t sleep because there are no sirens,
no neighbour’s screams lulling me
to lurid dreams of Natasha Laurent.
There is no panoramic view for solace
but in the right light this window
shows, not this white-flight-satellite-town,
but south London from seventeen floors up:
the River Wandle a coiled snake
swallowed by the Thames,
friends crossing the road
to the park in my absence,
the alley between flats where Sacha blasts
a tattered ball into the goal-net simulacrum,
a wall against which his brother Stacey stands,
hands shrouded in Goalie Gloves.
It is our first night in this grieving house.
I miss listening to Delight 103.0
and with no tapes to remind me
the best bet is Kiss 100 but they don’t play the songs
for which my cheap headphones exist.
When we pitched up the neighbours spoke of how
the old girl, God rest her soul, wasn’t found for days
and, though the family tidied up for a quick sale,
there was a staleness when we prised the door open,
its hinges stiff, wood swollen in the late summer heat.
If you were to walk the four and a half miles to Crow Lane
you’d see her name in their one stone, she fell asleep
three years after him and they’re dearly loved, sorely missed
but no less gone for that. When all is quiet I can still hear
the sirens through gaps in the barred windows,
still see the power station dusky and unused in a distance
that seems to stretch to the edge of everything. The smog
in which garage music lives and everybody’s got lyrics.
I can still hear Peter Biggs saying:
Enter with the Eastender
Peggy with the breast cancer
Tiffany try make baby
Mark with the HIV
In Harold Hill the girls ask if I’m from up London,
smile when I nod like we’ve come to some understanding.
Sensing I have a voice Mr Cox tries to make me join
the swing band, I say no. I end up singing ‘Living La Vida Loca’,
in midnight blue shades, anyway. For months the hours
before mum comes home pass in the wake of drive-time pop.
Until flicking through stations, one dark afternoon,
I hear those click-and-clack-hi-hats and stop on Majik FM.
II.
‘It was all about tapes, back then’ – Darryl McDaniels
If I could navigate the fuzz of traffic
reports, dinner table jazz and topical chat
Majik FM! is where, in the stillness between
last bell and the latch announcing mum’s
return to dishes littering the kitchen sink,
I’d rest the red dial of the Sanyo cassette player
bought, part-exchange, from a now-defunct branch
of Tandy on Wandsworth High Street. Hours lost
to the underwear section of Littlewoods catalogue
gave way to R&B on E numbers, hi-hats the hiss
of hydraulic pistons, snares like tins dropped
on tiled floors. All of it piped in from back room studios,
s
heds, distant kitchens haunted by teenage DJs hunched
over decks set up next to microwaves or, in pride of place,
on a good table usually reserved for special occasions.
We loved the casual bravado of emcees
with forty-a-day voices and too many ladies
to big up from last week’s rave; years out of reach
but ours to keep on a TDK cassette, four in a pack,
for a pound. Most days I couldn’t stretch,
pocket money spent on pick ’n’ mix,
I’d plunder my mum’s cache of cassettes
for something she wouldn’t miss
or couldn’t bring herself to admit
she once loved. Lucky Dube and Prince
slick lyrics I could earn stripes by reciting
tomorrow lunch in front of anyone who’d listen,
if I could cut just the right amount of Sellotape,
make small enough balls of tissue to cover
the notches along the apex of each cassette.
Remember the days before your Walkman
was banished to a life in the attic?
How you cherished it, cutting a hole
in the lining of your blazer so you could
slip the silver box into the gap between the fabric,
pass an earpiece up one sleeve, rest your head
on one hand during maths class and ignore the talk
of vertices, indices, factorials, Napier Bones,
as you mouthed the lyrics,
brow crimped in concentration?
Soon, I’d used up all the dregs in mum’s collection
and nothing was left save a black TDK, unmarked,
without a case. Thinking that it must be something
so laughable she couldn’t bring herself to label,
I lifted it, weighed it in my hand, slid it cleanly
into place, pressed the play button and waited.
III.
My name rendered in a kettle-drum pitch
I knew to be my father’s voice from the slight
twang of a lost tongue. How old are you?
I knew the boy’s answer though I heard
only the hiss of static. No, you’re lying,
you are four years old. If I was still a man
of faith I’d say he sat next to me that day
as I rewound the tape and asked me again
and again till streetlights bloomed through the still-
open curtains and settled in the lacquer of the table.
I started saving the odd pound coin here and there,
buying cassettes in bulk so I could record emcees,
study their lyrics, and pass off their bars as mine
moving from yes, miss to Boom like TNT/the explosive
commentary/there is no similarity/to my originality
in the time it took the teacher on duty to round the corner
and the regulars to form a rag-tag circle. I had a following;
girls two years older asking my name and could you do
the one about the cartoon characters again? Assemblies,
talent shows, tours of local junior schools, and lunchtimes
in the music room making haphazard recordings onto TDK
cassettes, broken tabs Sellotaped, a surfeit of fame secure.
Centre-stage, the keys dangling on a lanyard round my neck
were the jangling links of a gold chain; my budget shoes
doeskin loafers. Since I could spit lyrics every stone
thrown by those two boys, whose cries of nig nog
still follow me, bounced off my back; fell reverent at my feet.
At night, after mum snuffed the light, I’d practise,
under my breath, in bed; ape the latest tape
down to the last big up ya chest sliding from
sum ah dem ah ay sum ah dem ah love dis to
in the venue we send you our menu that’s the combo
emcee/dynamical lyrical tech emcee/I like it like the K-I-E.
Soon I had my own chats. I was:
k to the a to the y to the o,
lyrical G with a badboy flow
if you don’t know better get to know
I’m k to the a to the y to the –
Eminem ruined everything. I had to learn the words to ‘Stan’,
borrow the nasal whine, slide into a drawl midway between
London and New York and nowhere near Detroit.
In time, I could rattle off The Slim Shady LP line for line,
though no amount of practise could conjure the pale skin
and blue eyes that made Marshall a poet and me
just another brother who could rhyme.
Fisherman’s Song
What sadness for a fisherman
to navigate the blue
and find among receding nets
strange, underwater blooms
that look, at first, like bladderwrack
but from a closer view
are clumps of matted human hair
atop an acrid soup.
And what song shall this fisherman
who loves a jaunty tune
sing to lullaby his children
when dark shapes in their room
make the night a snarling monster
only father’s voice can soothe
and who will soothe the fisherman
who navigates the blue?
In light of what my aunt calls
the Arabic texture of my hair,
I’m Abdi outside the only shop
selling tamarind balls, Irish Moss,
Supermalt in decent quantities.
It is not enough to say I miss
the smell of cassava roasted
over open coals, expeditions
in want of tilapia, kapenta,
assorted meats of questionable
provenance. How much, auntie?
Barter and bluff and rough hands
of stallholders glazed to a deep
blue shameless blackness that is
consigned now to another life
before this one of middle-class
white boys in reggae bands, who
love roots and culture as if their
love is enough to know the code
that some of us live and die by.
At least these boys who call me
Abdi seem to be fond of Abdi.
They ask why I don’t come
round no more, what it’s like
in Leeds and maybe, today,
I can be Abdi and this shop
can be all the home I need.
Winter Song
2002. Rapsz, Haystee, Kaystar,
JD, Sickness, Ashley and me
standing in the cold outside
Smokesta’s house – Smokesta
is the only one we know who
owns a copy of Snowman,
Wiley Kat’s latest white label.
I remember this as my bus
goes past what was once The Matapan,
now dubbed The Beacon Tree to rid
itself of infamy; this being the same spot
where Charles Butler was chased
round his car by a gunman, shot,
and collapsed in the road.
The songs we wanted to hear
lived on tapes of pirate radio sets
or in the first-hand crackle of vinyl
from Boogie Times or Rhythm Division.
When Snowman starts up, I’m back there,
in the arctic north of boyhood, lost
in the moment just before the bass drops.
Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly
The silence between songs can’t be modulated by anything other than held breath. You have to sit and wait, time the release of the pause button to the last tenth of a second so that the gap between each track is a smooth purr, a TDK or Memorex y
our masterwork. Don’t talk to me about your MP3 player, how, given the limitless choice, you hardly ever listen to one song for more than two minutes at a time. Do you know about stealing double As from the TV remote so you can listen to last night’s clandestine effort on the walk to school? You say you love music. Have you suffered the loss of a cassette so gnarled by a tape deck’s teeth it refuses to play the beat you’ve come to recognise by sound and not name? Have you carried that theme in your head these years in the faint hope you might know it when it finds you, in a far-flung café, as you stand to pay, frozen, and the barista has to ask if you’re okay?
The Room
‘When you sample you’re not only picking up that sound, you’re picking up the room it was recorded in’ – ODDISEE
For the purist, hung up on tracing a drum break
to its source, acquired in the few moments’ grace
before the store clerk, thin voiced, announces closing time,
it’s not just the drummer’s slack grip, how the hook line
swings in the session singer’s interpretation,
or the engineer’s too-loud approximation
of the MacGyver theme tune, it’s that hiss, the room
fetching itself from itself in hiccups and spools.
Though there’s a knack in telling A-side from remix
from test press that never saw the light of day,
mere completists never learn a good song’s secret;
air displaced in that room – the breath of acetate.
Some Bright Elegance
For the screwfaced in good shoes that paper
the walls of dance halls, I have little patience.
I say dance, not to be seen but free, your feet
are made for better things. Feel the bitterness
in you lift as it did for a six-year-old Bojangles,
tapping a living out of Richmond beer gardens
to the delight of a crowd that wasn’t lynching
today but laughing at the quickness of the kid.
Throw yourself into the thick, emerging pure
reduced to flesh and bone, nerve and sinew.
Your folded arms understand music. Imagine
a packed Savoy Ballroom and slide across
the dusty floor as your zoot-suited Twenties
self, the feather in your hat from an ostrich,
the swagger in your step from the ochre dust