Interview with Kayo Chingonyi, Poet and Creative Facilitator

In his 2011 profile for Poetry International Web, Alan Ward calls Chingonyi a “creative facilitator”. A title well earned, as a look into his biography and my conversation with him reveal. Born in Zambia in 1987, Kayo Chingonyi moved to the UK in 1993. In addition to writing and performing poetry, he raps and teaches creative writing workshops at universities, schools and youth centres. He has collaborated with the dancer Sean Graham, and with the composer Fred Thomas, and curated events for the Institute of Contemporary Arts as well as London’s Africa Centre, to mention but a few of his projects. The London-based poet holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Sheffield and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Kayo Chingonyi has completed residencies with Kingston University, Cove Park and others. He won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2013. His first pamphlet, Some Bright Elegance (Salt, 2012) is subject of this interview. Following Kayo’s suggestion, we discussed the elegies “Kenta”, “Alternate Take” and “A Proud Blemish”. He has published a second pamphlet, The Colour of James Brown’s Scream (Akashic, 2016), and his first full-length collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017). Kayo Chingonyi attended the workshop “Voices from the Margins,” held at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, 23 and 24 September 2016, where this interview was conducted. The interview was edited and expanded in consultation with Kayo Chingonyi between January and March 2017

Forging connections: anthologies, arts collectives, and the politics of inclusion

The changing social and political landscape of twentieth-century Britain catalysed a remarkable rise in collaborative activity by artists and activists of black and Asian heritage. Creative communities began to gather in both local and regional contexts, with the aim of sharing resources and securing an audience. This chapter records some of these many activities, tracing the groups’ genesis, manifest objectives, and key contributions. It argues that anthologising should be understood as a specifically motivated activity. Literary anthologies of poetry and fiction served to showcase the diversity of contemporary writing, while also suggesting its coherence. Drawing on the concept of “strategic essentialism” elucidated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I show that the anthology acts to ensure the visibility of a group, bannered as a unified and singly-titled selection of texts, while also insisting on the differences within: the heterogeneous multiplicity of black and Asian British experiences and creative practices

'Vernacular Voices: Black British Poetry'

ABSTRACT Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. Not only in performance poetry and through the spoken word, but also on the page, black British poetry constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. In Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey (1988), David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole in order to linguistically render and thus commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, respectively, with the earlier collection providing annotated translations into Standard English. James Berry, Louise Bennett, and Valerie Bloom adapt Jamaican Patois to celebrate Jamaican folk culture and at times to represent and record experiences and linguistic interactions in the postcolonial metropolis. Grace Nichols and John Agard use modified forms of Guyanese Creole, with Nichols frequently constructing gendered voices whilst Agard often celebrates linguistic playfulness. The borders between linguistic varieties are by no means absolute or static, as the emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ (Mark Sebba) indicates. Asian British writer Daljit Nagra takes liberties with English for different reasons. Rather than having recourse to established Creole languages, and blending them with Standard English, his heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglish’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Whilst it is the language prestige of London Jamaican that has been significantly enhanced since the 1990s, a fact not only confirmed by linguistic research but also by its transethnic uses both in the streets and on the page, Nagra’s substantial success and the mainstream attention he receives also indicate the clout of vernacular voices in poetry. They have the potential to connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, to record linguistic varieties, and to endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. In this chapter, these double-voiced poetic languages are also read as signs of resistance against residual monologic ideologies of Englishness. © Book proposal (02/2016): The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing p. 27 of 4

‘Whitely’: Race and Lyric Subjectivity in Clare Pollard’s Poetry

This essay analyses three poems from the oeuvre of contemporary English poet Clare Pollard: ‘The Heavy-Petting Zoo’, ‘The Skulls of Dalston’ and ‘Thinking of England’. It argues that while Pollard's poetry presents jarring, discomfiting depictions of race and racial encounter, their direct exposure of racist ideas and discourses, and their methods of intertwining these with ideas of structured, gendered and nationalistic oppression, create space for critique of prevailing discourses that disempower both white female subjects and those racialised as non-white. Applying the writing of Major Jackson, Richard Dyer and Yusef Komunyakaa, the essay aims to show that the poet's refusal to soft-pedal the prejudice of her speakers shows the insecurities at the heart of structural whiteness; the insecurities that have been used historically to justify racial separatism as a matter arising from biological fact, related to the natural order of things