About the book…
Jay Bernard’s extraordinary debut is a fearlessly original exploration of the black British archive: an enquiry into the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in south London in which thirteen young black people were killed.
Dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.
Tracing a line from New Cross to the ‘towers of blood’ of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.
A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism – both political and personal, witness and documentary – Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment
The Dylan Thomas Longlisted poetry of Jay Bernard, ‘Surge’, is out now from Chatto and Windus and I am thrilled and a little overwhelmed d to be talking about their works today on the blog.
Let me make this clear, I am no literature critic, no decipherer of words, all I can recount is the way these words impacted on me, how they made me feel in bearing witness to the stories told and hopefully, encourage you to pick up a copy and make that journey for yourself.
The New Cross Massacre and the Grenfell tragedy are the bookend influences for a poetry collection which uses multiple techniques and language to give voices back to those who were so cruelly robbed of them. I had no idea about the New Cross Massacre or it’s subsequent link to the Brixton uprising, and that is where I, as a reader, start, the same as so many of us, with another minority voice shouted down, relabelled as ‘riots’ , and no idea about it’s link with black activism.
Deeply devastating and wildly effective, these poems are incredibly moving.
Each word is chosen with pinpoint precision by the authors to flow and surge from the page to the reader. More than just a verb, it is a statement of intent, to rise up and be visible. The gap in years between the 2 events about which Jay Bernard has written is both closed by their poems and simultaneously ripped open.
In pieces like ‘+’ and ‘-‘, they use the perspective of a father’s voice trying to see the body of their son, and that of a son, waiting on a slab to be claimed by their father.
From ‘+’-
‘-they led us down to a room-and on the table there you was-no face,nothing to speak of-I said-I said-this is the body where you found the clothes?-nod,nod-So I said,it must be you-this must be my son’
From ‘-‘-
‘And then you came and I was calling out to you,dad-and I know you heard me because here we are,dad-come back-don’t bury me-I can’t stand it-I can barely stand it when the lights go off-and I’m here’
How can you not read this and want to wail for the families who lost their loved ones, their homes, their hard fought for corner of a world which regarded them as less than human?
As someone who is white and Welsh, I am trying to choose these words carefully and succinctly as this is a tale threaded through with anger, hurt, love and loss which is not mine to tell. It is the poet’s, it is their tale, the voices they give to those who were not listened to, whose lives were seen as less than worthy of being taught outside of their community.
Why was either of these events allowed to happen and then attempted to be brushed under the carpet? How courageous must you have been to bear witness and stand, saying ‘this happened, listen to our stories, make our lives matter’?
I hope most sincerely that this is a collection which stirs collective consciousnesses into reading about the New Cross fire, the Grenfell tragedy and that these are the flashpoint for education, representation and respect. It is part of a body of work which is vital, indeed, necessary.
From ‘Hiss’-
‘It will enter you if you stand there,
and spend the rest of its time inside you
asking whatitwas whatitwas whatitwas
in a vivid hiss heard only by your bones’
The answer is in the pages of ‘Surge’, made by recreating interviews and transcsipts into poems using vernacular, street speech, free form poetry which as a whole speaks , as evidenced above, to events which left bone deep scars.
‘Surge’ is an exhortation to action, to education, to listening and representation of minority voices which have been silenced for too long. This is a stunning, emotive and beautiful collection which urges movement like brain waves, the movement of water, consciousness and desire to surge and move forward, carrying the voices of the past to learn vital lessons for the future.
Absolutely incredible and visionary, thank you to Jay Bernard for sharing their words with the rest of us.
About the author…
Jay Bernard is from London and works as a writer and film programmer at BFI Flare (London’s LGBT film festival). They are the author of three pamphlets, The Red and Yellow Nothing (2016), English Breakfast (2013), and Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2008), and have been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines, including TEN: The New Wave and Out of Bounds: Black British Writers and Place. They were part of the original line-up for two ‘Speaking Volumes Breaking Ground’ tours to the USA, showcasing the best Black British writers from the UK. Jay was Poet-in-Residence at the George Padmore Institute in 2016, out of which came the poems for their upcoming collection, Surge (2019), based on the New Cross Fire of 1981 where 14 young black people lost their lives. Surge: Side A was produced by Speaking Volumes and performed at the Roundhouse as part of The Last Word Festival 2017.
Links-https://jaybernard.co.uk/home.html
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/dylan-thomas-prize/
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com