- 1 Such sentiments are reiterated in the 2016 anthology of experiences of successful immigrant-origin (...)
1In ‘My City’ from the poetry-play Ode to Leeds by Zodwa Nyoni, former member of the youth poetry group, Leeds Young Authors, whose stories and poems she loosely dramatises, the character Theo delivers the following lines: ‘My city shed its skin/It reinvents itself again and again/It is always becoming’ (Nyoni 44). For people of immigrant descent, what can, should be, or is said about what and who makes up British culture and its now-multicultural society and cities, is controlled by taboo: in ‘Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness’, Sara Ahmed discusses how in multicultural societies ‘unhappiness [is read as being] the failure of people who are different to interact’ (Ahmed 123), analysing how the burden is on the migrant (or person perceived as of immigrant origin, as different) to perform happiness in a society where they are the ones ‘who [are] not only stubbornly attached to difference, but who insist on speaking about racism, where such speech is heard as labouring over sore points.’ (Ahmed 133).1 The poetry of LYA is a poetry of this unsaid Leeds, this unsaid Britain, as is the work of poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, who has been disrupting public discourse about who constitutes, writes, speaks, renames, and reclaims British cities, as both a poet and activist. In a context where the racialised or marginal body and voice are often viewed as disrupting both (‘white’ or Anglo-Saxon) British tradition or the promise of multicultural harmony, these poets speak against such a positioning and present themselves as voices of cultural, literary and social change, part of ongoing disruption that they undergo and feel on a daily basis, positing such disruption as both positive and negative—or perhaps neither—and a necessary constant that can and must be spoken from all sides of discursive divides. In order to highlight the specificities of their work and the developments that they are a part of, I will examine the postcolonial and post-immigration social and literary context of British cities, focusing on London as a model and Leeds as a counter-example, before considering the appeal of lyric poetry, the importance of the internet for minority poets, and then going on to analyse Leeds Young Authors’ and Manzoor-Khan’s poetics of enacted disruption.
2Whilst the last few decades have been marked by the increasing proliferation of visible markers of Britain’s postcolonial past and multicultural present across its cities; a nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of British cities, coded as white and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, still persists, without reference to the imperial underpinnings of this so-called golden age nor to the contributions of those marginalised groups, as recent furore over removal of statues of slavers and imperialists has revealed,2 in cities where many streets and spaces bear their names. Recent YouGov surveys still show that a considerably larger proportion of the British population considers the British Empire something to be proud of than the proportion who see it as a source of shame.3 Manzoor-Khan takes issue with the nostalgic coding of cultural spaces, cities and British history as white and imperial (and more generally, elitist) in poems such as ‘Theatres’ and ‘Where is my history?’, which I examine below.
- 4 Notably: Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
- 5 Notably: There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.
- 6 For example, Resistance Through Rituals, The Question of Cultural Identity.
- 7 Both writers discuss the colonial heritage of British cities and their impact on the physical and p (...)
- 8 In Social Invisibility and Diasporas in Anglophone Literature and Culture: The Fractal Gaze.
3Historically, the city has been a site of alienation or even chaos in both the British Romantic and Modernist traditions, from Blake to T.S. Eliot, whilst the fragmented, multiple nature of major cities and most especially London came to be increasingly celebrated in the postmodern era. Immigration and the emergence of new cultural and subcultural forms has of course disrupted and changed the fabric of British cities, as has been extensively discussed, for example by Dick Hebdige,4 Paul Gilroy5 or Stuart Hall.6 Recently, important work has been undertaken to expose and recentre the side-lined importance of non-white people and peoples to the construction and success of today’s Britain by writers such as Afua Hirsch and Reni Eddo-Lodge.7 In terms of literature more specifically, it is important to consider how the imaginary of a place (here the twenty-first century regional British city, and more specifically Leeds) is constituted in part through its literary depiction and the tapestry of references and interlinks that this implies; as Bertrand Levy describes it, ‘la littérature, grâce au continuum littéraire, restitue une perception diachronique de la réalité’ (Lévy 40), and is in this diachronic perception and conception of the city that Manzoor-Khan and LYA’s expressions of the lived experience of Leeds shape, contributing to a Leeds literary landscape and a constantly evolving imaginary of British cities. The integration of multiple, minority or minoritarian perspectives against totalising discourses is of course a central project of postcolonial criticism and theory, building on Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of dissemination, it should therefore come as no surprise that thinkers such as Françoise Král have argued for the rendering visible (or ‘re-segmenting’)8 of the contemporary multicultural city in order to expose not only the different visions and perceptions of the city but also the fractions and tensions between different subjects and communities, expressed through the literature of such minority subjects; an examination of Manzoor-Khan and LYA could also be seen in this light.
4Leeds’ liminal position as a post-industrial Northern city that is also a centre of higher education and has managed to economically diversify and prosper—unlike many of the other West Riding towns and cities—places it both in the ‘Northern’ cultural imaginary and within discourses of the globalised, successful, multicultural cities, that The Economist terms ‘Londonia’ (which inhabitants of Leeds, or indeed Manchester, cited,9 would almost certainly resist). It has known race riots whilst developing as a centre of poetry, with local (Marsden-born, Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds) poet laureate Simon Armitage suggesting the establishment of a poetry headquarters in the city,10 and the British Library is due to open a Northern branch there. Depictions of the coexistence of immigrant- and non-immigrant-origin groups in the city have changed in poetry as they have in journalistic and governmental studies’ reports and the cultural imaginary, in line with its relative economic success.11 Elements and traces of the racially divided, deindustrialising city of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s that Martin Bell described as ‘the City of Dreadful Something’ (in ‘The City of Dreadful Something’, Bell 137) and whose unseemly, working class life and social issues were famously both decried and celebrated in Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ still ring out of Manzoor-Khan’s references to her grandfather’s work in the ‘mills’ (in ‘Paki’, Manzoor-Khan 20), recalling the human geography of the landscapes of some of Armitage’s work on the wider region; as the city’s seedier sides—alongside the pride and belonging—recall Bell and Harrison’s city in the work of LYA, but this is not the same city, the same imaginary, it has evolved, is being built upon, relived, and respoken. Harrison, perhaps regarded as the city’s most significant poet, dealt with the problems faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities (as well as the working class) in the post-industrial, post-colonial city, using traditional form and metre to incorporate subjects often excluded from the literary establishment and imaginary of British poetry; whilst the use of form and metre for Manzoor-Khan and LYA is often less rigid, his lyrical evocation of the everyday in everyday language in some ways presages their work.
5Work rewriting—and respeaking—and thus reclaiming regional British cities by minority poets has come to the fore in recent years: Daljit Nagra writing both London, Sheffield and more broadly Northern experience12 in his ‘Punglish’ (Punjabi English) or Zaffar Kunial, or even some of Imtiaz Dharker’s work; if we extend this to London and its specific neighbourhoods (in recent years, Inua Ellams or Caleb Femi in South London, Raymond Antrobus and Chimene Suleyman in the East), the list becomes far longer. It is also worth noting that perhaps the UK’s most prominent or well-established minority ethnic publisher, Peepal Tree Press, is based in Leeds and has published the work of numerous prominent 20th– and 21st–century British voices, from Patience Agbabi to Bernardine Evaristo and Linton Kwesi Johnson, making the city an increasing hub not only for ‘traditional’, mainstream and ‘working class’ poetry (thanks in part to Armitage and the University, and the heritage of Harrison) but also for ethnic minority literature. More broadly, even before the rise of internet broadcasting (which I will come to a little later), the British literary and poetry scenes have been undergoing a process of decentralisation and diversification over recent decades, as Bastien Goursaud has examined, in part due to economic and political processes (Goursaud 23). As such the poets I address are not revolutionary, but provide a useful example of how to examine the role and political and affective power of minority poetry as a creative force in the (re)imagining of the regional city today: I hope to contribute to giving them the critical attention that they deserve.
6Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer in the broadest sense, journalist and activist, and above all a poet. Gaining recognition both for her slam poetry and her blog, ‘The Brown Hijabi’, that plays with the categorisation that dominates the ways in which South Asian-descent Muslim women are positioned within British urban spaces. However, she really came to prominence when her clever and compelling poem on Muslim British experience, ‘This is Not a Humanising Poem’, earned her the runner-up spot in the Last Word national poetry slam final at the Roundhouse, in 2017, and subsequently ‘went viral’, rapidly amassing over 100,000 views on YouTube13 and 1.3 million on Facebook Manzoor-Khan interrupts and reconfigures discourses and conceptions of the city and of British identity, discourses that have placed them simultaneously within and without the city and is establishments, ‘British-born’: a term that she knowingly uses to demonstrate how British terrorists from ethnic minorities are separated from national discourse, their ‘birthplace is somehow random’, in the poem itself entitled ‘British-born’ (Manzoor-Khan 26).
7Leeds Young Authors, though not as prominent as a few years ago, are one of the most successful youth poetry groups in the world, having regularly competed as finalists in major international slam championships in the US; their progress through the Brave New Voices competition was documented in the 2012 film We Are Poets. The group is led by second generation Jamaican-origin Leeds poet Khadijah Ibrahiim in Chapeltown, a largely ‘West Indian’, low-income neighbourhood of inner-city Leeds; the surrounding areas are home to a wide variety of ethnicities, reflected in the changing make-up of the group. Former member Zodwa Nyoni, now an established poet and playwright in her own right, went on to fictionalise a part of her time with the group in the play, Ode to Leeds, structured around performances of poems that stage the key themes of the group (and thus of the play). Here I take LYA in its broadest sense, as both Ode to Leeds and much of the poetry of Ibrahiim come out of the same context and focus on similar ideas, questioning the city of Leeds and its ethno-cultural identity from the inside.
8Ibrahiim (herself published by Peepal Tree) being of a slightly older generation, it is worth noting at this juncture that performance poetry has played an important role in the disruption of British cultural and literary discourses for people of immigrant origin—and other marginalised groups—for several decades. From Linton Kwesi-Johnson to Benjamin Zephaniah, whose irruption into national consciousness was more radically and evidently disruptive forty-five or so years ago than the work of the Leeds-based poets I am looking at, to prominent contemporary queer spoken word artist Kae Tempest (amongst others), ethnic and other minority contributions to British culture are increasingly negotiated through poetry.
9It is important to draw attention to the relationship of poetry—and particularly of lyric poetry—to the real world, to lived experience. My exploration of contemporary writing by minorities (both in the UK and France) has led me to consider the angle of the lyric and of new lyric forms as a useful way to consider the variety of literature and oral expressions that are being produced by a plurality of writers and speakers today. In The Logic of Literature, Kate Hamburger defined the lyric enunciation as real, nonmimetic, a definition which Jonathan Culler has built upon to defend the importance of the form as intersubjective rather than a contemporary misconception of lyric as ‘solipsistic meditation of an individual’ whereas throughout its transnational history it had a role in ‘integrated community’ (Culler 891). Whether or not we choose to see in these poems the continuity of a lyric tradition, the intersubjective nature of lyric poetry lends itself to ongoing diachronic negotiation, contributing to how a community (here a city and its inhabitants) sees and expresses itself; it is radically open to other impressions, subjectivities as part of a partial patchwork or overlay of literary images and imaginaries of space and place, society and culture.
- 14 Her online performance to the camera allows a glimpse of Manzoor-Khan’s calm-yet-angry performance (...)
10Thus when Manzoor-Khan asks ‘Where is my history?’ she is indeed speaking from a place of personal experience, but this history is not solely hers; it is history, not story; and when she states that ‘it is adorning your proudest buildings/the ones I’m searched before entering’ (Manzoor-Khan 15), she confronts the white British person positioned as the ‘you’ and forces them to reassess their architecture, their cities, their attitudes; attitudes that would impose limits whereby ‘my archives/are the chicken shops/the taxi stops’, making economic, class and value distinctions between the different elements of the British city and its historic construction. Her ‘I’ asserts a singular, personal experience, but refers to the history of all British citizens of postcolonial descent, for whom she does not presume to speak but to whom she gestures in the penultimate stanza as ‘those of us who are still seen as “backwards”’ (Manzoor-Khan 17).14 This is a real-world conversation, a relation to life, placed into a process of transformation through poetry.
11Similarly, in a poem (‘A million miles away. . .’) performed at the regional slam finals in 2012, LYA describe with lyrical beauty the violence and fear of the riots that followed the murder of Mark Duggan (‘the crimson flames ripping away at the cardboard city’), questioning how minorities, supposedly equal citizens, have been reduced to being treated as and behaving as ‘wild animals’, stating that now they are ‘watching/waiting/for history to repeat’—implicitly posing the questions ‘why?’ and ‘how can this be changed?’ to their audience and wider community.15
- 16 ‘At the heart of the dispute was this notion of “accessibility” . . . Whatever your view, there’s n (...)
12The power of the words of these young poets does not only come from a reworking of the lyric tradition. The postmodern, postcolonial age is one of international exchange and influence, and it was first and foremost in the United States where minority culture—particularly Afro-American culture—began to become a dominant, influential force. The influence of hip-hop on spoken word movements and political-poetic expression for minorities beyond the United States is undeniable. Slam itself, with parallel origins, originated in Chicago and it gained increasing popularity and prominence in the United States before exploding in Europe around the turn of the Millennium. The importance of its immediacy and accessibility cannot be overstated, as opposed to how many young people and minorities unfortunately still perceive or are exposed to English poetry, as a form associated with seemingly esoteric or outdated modes of expression, as Sarah Crown examines in the article ‘Generation next: the rise—and rise—of the new poets’ which highlights the role of the internet in making poetry accessible to a wider audience16—and the ‘pedagogically unchanged reading lists’ cited by Manzoor-Khan in ‘Decentering Diversity’ (81). Performing directly to an audience and thus expressing one’s true, immediate feelings, seeing a reaction: all this is at the fore with slam. While LYA and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan may not be pioneers in this regard, their success speaks both to the quality of their work and to its reach, reshaping, renaming, reclaiming their cities and cultures in the way that slammers and hip-hop artists across the world have done.
- 17 See Crown’s article, cited above.
13It is also important to underline the impact of the internet in the broadcasting, sharing, and popularising of the work of these poets. The internet has made poetry accessible to a far wider range of potential poets and audiences than would have been imaginable a generation or so ago, circumventing the gatekeepers of publishing and the need to be in the know about local poetry performances and have the confidence to get up on stage.17 Nonetheless, it maintains, as Philip Auslander has theorised, the element or impression of live performance that is immediate and engaging for the audience (Auslander 3). As such, the internet allows for the original oral appeal of poetry to be brought to the fore, and it simultaneously disrupts who has power over poetry and literature, and accelerates this disruption, through real-time sharing and the phenomena of ‘going viral’, as Manzoor-Khan’s ‘This is not a Humanising Poem’ did. Whilst it should nonetheless be mentioned that this route to poetic success has often served (intentionally or not) as a platform to gain recognition before moving into standard publishing—as has famously been the case for Rupi Kaur, Hollie McNish, Yrsa Daley-Ward and more—rather than disrupting the entire publishing business model, such authors generally maintain an internet presence as a way of directly communicating with their audience, although the quantity and frequency of poems shared may be subject to the limitations of publishing contracts.
14I would now like to turn to some of the major characteristics that differ between, and bring together, the work of LYA and Manzoor-Khan. Firstly, there are important lexical similarities in how the poets express being discursively and physically—within the geography of the city—assigned to roles, categories, places, and spaces. This insistence on the categories, associated with the violence of ‘caging’ (describing the working-class youth ‘caged by the troops of law’ into certain areas of the city, certain roles, in ‘A million miles away. . .’), the ‘boxes’ or ‘prisons’ that ethnic minorities—but also women and gay people—are put in figuratively and within the cityscape recalling the boxes slaves were literally placed into (LYA, ‘Box’).18 In their performances of ‘A million miles away. . .’, the members of LYA enact the violence of the words, imitating baseball bats, darts and bullets thrown, whereas in ‘Box’ the performance becomes almost mime or dance: bodies moving to the rhythms to reinforce the affects (in a controlled tone that projects, seething with rage, just below shouting) and messages of the poem through gesture: holding each other in mock restraint, holding in their brains like walls made from hands. LYA’s slam performances are for the most part more choreographed and dramatic than Manzoor-Khan’s composed, reserved—and ultimately quite stereotypically British—style. Shouted words—often imperatives—and bodily gestures such as suddenly outstretched hands or the mimicking of bodies writhing in death and torture—serve as an aid to reinforce the violence of the messages of some of their poems (such as ‘Hand’19 or ‘Seven Seven’20); gestures choreographed to fit rhythms and further highlight key words, which are often imperatives (such as the half-shouted ‘give’, ‘write’, ‘speak’ in ‘Hand’) that open lines.
- 21 For example, in Manzoor-Khan’s ‘Where is my history?’
- 22 For example, in Manzoor-Khan’s ‘Theatres’, examined below.
15This recurrent use of terms of cages, boxes, physical and geographical control strongly suggests continuity between slavery and Empire and contemporary British urban experience. More generally, refrain, anaphora and repetition are commonly employed devices in the work of both Manzoor-Khan and LYA, insisting upon the regularity and dominance of such words, injunctions, and categorisations; they structure the poems into expressions of fragments of life structured by the experiences these words invoke. This is reinforced by the events and encounters described in which media, the police, government, and gatekeepers of culture ascribe minorities to poor neighbourhoods, to mills,21 to violence, to radicalism, and outside of museums, theatres,22 self-representation. The violence of the language used: the aforementioned caging, boxing, segregating, found once again in ‘Box’, comparing offices and classrooms to tanks and (prison) ‘squares of iron and concrete’; Manzoor-Khan’s supposedly ‘shattered’ identity as both Muslim and British woman, her questions of ‘blood’, ‘bombs’ and of who (her, or British history?) is ‘barbaric’ (‘British Values’, Manzoor-Khan 132-134), disturbs the sheen of joyous, harmonious multicultural spaces. It reveals the processes of othering and threatening that still occur, limiting minority subjects to poorer neighbourhoods, where such violence is perpetuated through cycles of poverty underpinned by prejudice and discrimination from politics down to the workplace. Manzoor-Khan examines the reasons for this in poems such as the previously-mentioned ‘Where is my history?’ explaining how ‘it’s not surprise my past is passed over/ . . . ’cos to find it would be to remember/that is Britain is Tudors and Victorians/it’s also Slavers and Plantations/the Colonies and the Colonsied’ (Manzoor-Khan 16), that the country does not want to see this past, and brings discriminatory and prejudiced discursive practices and unquestioned social attitudes to the surface in ‘This is not a humanising poem’ (‘. . . if you need me to prove my humanity/I’m not the one that’s not human’, Manzoor-Khan 141).
16More specifically, Manzoor-Khan examines the spaces from which certain subjects are implicitly excluded in her poem ‘Theatres’, the spaces of high culture, the heart of the city, the modern city built upon the wealth of Empire. Here she sets the scene: ‘small brown girl stands in a red jaw full of white teeth’, and asks ‘if a theatre is not a nation/why does the threshold feel like a border?/where are there border police?’ (Manzoor-Khan 77) in reaction to ‘big white man asks small brown girl/are you in the right place? . . . you are an imposter’ (Manzoor-Khan 78) positioning her as outsider to a world that is both white and middle- or upper-class, an act that makes the encounter one of double disruption. On the one hand, this is an emblematic experience of the disruption to and in the daily lives of minority and marginalised subjects who are constantly pushed outside of physical and figurative spaces, places into others, into categories and made to feel as outsides, threats, misfits. On the other hand, the ‘brown girl’’s presence disrupts the discourse of assigned spaces, places and categories within nominally multicultural cities and pushes against unspoken segregation. On a literary and cultural level, the performance of the poem furthers this disruption, disrupting both the image of the traditional, white-coded British city and the illusion of multicultural happiness; the well-spoken ‘brown girl’ speaking (in eloquent, precise English) her truth to power in unhurried, firm tones that cannot be side-lined as irrational rage and conform to the performance of the stiff upper lip. Nonetheless the ‘brown girl’—a version of Manzoor-Khan who as a prominent voice has been asked to represent minority women, Muslim women, working-class youth in various situations—is asked to ‘perform’ though she asks ‘for who?/her friends are all at home’; pointedly she does not say ‘for whom’, as Cambridge-educated Manzoor-Khan asserts legitimacy as a human, a member of British society without speaking ‘right sounding English’ as a prerequisite (in ‘This is not a humanising poem’, Manzoor-Khan 140). However, her relative lack of accent (despite a few Yorkshire inflections and the missing end-consonants typical of many of her generation) and extensive vocabulary paradoxically accord a certain cultural and political legitimacy to her poems.
17Manzoor-Khan also reclaims and renames the city in ‘British Values’ where the image of the traditional British city into which a young Muslim or other minority subject should integrate, rather than change, is transformed: ‘Britain is bismillah / Britain is basmati rice / Britain is box braids and black barbers’ shops, Bollywood and bhangra,’ (Manzoor Khan 132) she declares, the anaphora and alliteration of the hard ‘b’ sound firing discursive interruptions through confrontational consonants. She refuses assimilation and points out that the transformation is already here, reminding the white British listener that tea comes from Asia and sugar was grown by slaves, that ‘Britain is stolen artefacts in museums named after itself’ (Manzoor-Khan 134): Britain is responsible for disruption, hybridisation, pluralisation—and even what appears to be tradition was its precursor, built on the (forced) work of the ancestors of immigrants. This disruption as such has been posited as negative by nostalgic discourses that seek to maintain a certain image of the British city; Manzoor-Khan shows that it is a positive and productive force for society and culture when not weaponised against minority subjects in such a way as to disrupt their daily lives and sense of legitimacy.
18Sonority is of course a key element here, for if the poets are not the sources of urban disruption, they enact it through performance: this is poetry written to be performed and heard, to interact and dialogue with, to feel. Manzoor-Khan’s soft yet firm, controlled tones allow her to (to quote the title of another of her poems) ‘straddle the line’ (‘Straddling the / line’, Manzoor-Khan 118-9), not simply an angry coloured body to be dismissed (as a disruptive force), but a reasonable voice that nonetheless expresses articulate anger through deftly chosen poetic and sonic choices. Rhetorical questions are asked as logical conclusions to her arguments, questions and injunctions that she receives are turned back on the audience (for example when she is asked by a white woman to ‘Pick one’ identity, ‘Muslim, Feminist or Human’, Manzoor-Khan 90); whilst firmly and flatly delivered injunctions to ‘Love us’ in ‘This is not a humanising poem’ (Manzoor-Khan 140) transform the softness of both the sound and meaning of the word ‘love’.
- 23 In the same chapter, Goursaud also draws parallels with Jean-Luc Nancy’s examination of the constit (...)
19Alongside the anger of the disruption felt and enacted by the poets, it would be remiss to not speak of LYA’ poems that celebrate their city, local identity and call implicitly or explicitly for unity through a rewriting and inclusion of diversity of experiences; a unity that Manzoor-Khan never explicitly requests or demands. ‘True Grit’, for example, celebrates Yorkshire identity, voiced by a rainbow coalition of young poets using second person and first-person plural imperatives to ask all Yorkshiremen and women to fulfil their roles as part of the county’s community and culture. The role of spoken word poetry in the constitution of a community or collective identity or imaginary is examined by Goursaud, who underlines through the example of Kae Tempest’s South London poetic world many similar elements to those found in LYA’s and to some extent Manzoor-Khan’s work: ‘combinaison d’éléments poétiques et ordinaires, rencontre du « you » incertain avec l’anonyme, collision, en apparence désordonnée, du rap et du poème, du texte et de la performance spoken word, mise en parallèle des anonymes lecteurs/auditeurs avec leurs doubles dans l’univers familier et universel de la mégapole du poème’ (Goursaud 325).23
20In Nyoni’s ‘Stories’ (from Ode to Leeds) the different people and elements of urban life are brought together, linking the traditional ‘bartering at Kirkgate’ [market] to ‘sleeping rough under railway arches’, the idyllic ‘chasing dandelions in Roundhay Park’ to activities linked to or coded as referring to minority cultures, ‘styling fades in barber shops’, ‘skanking’, eating international food or, inversely, ‘blaming immigrants’ (Nyoni 95-96). Here the poem confounds the conflicting discursive images of Leeds that would pigeonhole it as either a successful multicultural melting pot or a post-industrial working-class Northern city: it is simultaneously both and neither. Nyoni’s play both starts and finishes with the proclamation ‘I am going to start the poem now,’ (Nyoni 6, 96) suggesting that the writing of the city is ongoing, perpetually unfinished work to be passed on from one generation of poets, speakers, bards, griots, to the next, whatever their positioning or origin, and indeed serves as a ‘next chapter’ to the story of the city that Khadijah Ibrahiim was already writing.
21A particularly striking poem in how it shapes questions of identity for (one of) LYA through the city is the lyrical ‘I Come From’, written and performed by Joseph Buckley. The poem starts with an implied disruption of the poet’s life, the assumption of foreignness in the question ‘Where are you really from?’ As such, the entire poem is an inscription into cultural discourse and a personal declaration of identity and belonging, of who and what the contemporary British city is. Mirroring the repeated injunctions and questions, Buckley too makes use of anaphora to structure his own belonging and the landscape of the hidden side and hidden lives of British cities. Thus, each line commences with the words ‘I come from’, mixing the exotic (‘blood fruit mango’) with the stereotypically British (‘frozen fish fingers’), social positioning ‘a world of miniature/of powerlessness’ and the transcendent universal (‘the dense nuclei flung from the wombs of stars’), all of which are contained in life in the poor neighbourhoods of Leeds. His childhood is firmly British, its games rewritten beyond the nostalgic image in whose light they are cast: ‘Hop, skip, hope to miss the syringes,’ its broken rhythm reflecting the game itself, acting out its violent conclusion.
- 24 For example, Nancy’s conceptions of being with others or constituting and negotiating community and (...)
22‘I Come From’ demonstrates some of the ways in which the poems of LYA, like those of Manzoor-Khan, enact lived disruptions in order to disrupt discourses and pre-conceived ideas in favour of a more open, empathetic and inclusive way of speaking the city, an ongoing negotiation. This process marks an evolution from earlier and particularly first-generation immigrant poetry and writing in the UK through its poetics of reappropriation, of place-taking, place-naming, moving against any notion of fixity: these poets are not simply trying to stake a place in the 21st century British city, they are affirming that they are the 21st century British city and that these cities would not exist in their current form without their ancestors and predecessors. Through their poetry, LYA and Manzoor-Khan foreground dissensus through acts of provocative confrontation and calls for an as-yet-to-be-achieved unity in its plurality, dissensus that allow subjects to self-represent in relation to one another, akin to notions of living together that can be founded in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.24
23This work starts through personal, intersubjective dialogue that can be local and immediate or take place through multiple communication technologies online, thus linking the particular of Leeds and other British cities to parallels in the US, third world countries linked to the West by colonial history and neo-colonial endeavours, and with which parallels can be drawn in France and other multi-ethnic postcolonial nations around the world. This poetry is a literature, a lyric of everyday disruption, dialogue, and renegotiation, in a process of decolonial renegotiation of both the British city and its literature, accelerated and been brought to the fore with the internet age, moving beyond the immediate physical community of the city to be shaped in online spaces that are intimately connected to the everyday lives of people and places.