nm0001: after this er little performance something very historic happened today 
i went down to Oxford University to examine as the external examiner er a D-
Phil on Black British writing from Equiano to er Linton Kwesi Johnson and this 
was ver-, i felt very historic because er it was a student of mine an ex-
student of mine who was in your class the M-A class namex and er there we were 
at Oxford University the centre of of er scholarship er a man of colour or as i 
prefer to call myself a Paki er [laughter] examining another man of colour whom 
we jocularly call a Paki on a Paki subject and i really felt terribly historic 
yes and it was such a brilliant dissertation that er it wa-, it was er passed 
without qualification so namex was my friend i dragged him right away he's got 
a gown on and you know in Oxford to be examined the external examiner can dress 
up er turn up like a slob which 
was what i did er but the internal examiner has to wear a gown a bow tie the er 
the er you know the fly swatter 
sm0002: a mortar board 
nm0001: mortar board so as soon as his examination was finished we had a quick 
glass of wine and er another one and got on a train he's in my office now and 
some other friends of mine are going to come and meet him and we're going to 
take him out for a good drink tonight and the legendary curry so you're more 
than welcome to come along now what i will do now is er just say a few things 
about why i write about slavery by saying something about Guyana Guyana is a in 
many ways a marginal country marginal in the sense or peripheral peripheral in 
that it's one of the most southernly of British colonies it's seven-and-a-half-
thousand miles away er it's it's and if and London was the centre of the empire 
or of the universe 
which it was Guyana was seriously at the periphery of it being seven-and-a-half-
thousand miles away maybe a thousand-and-a-half miles south of Jamaica [cough] 
it's marginal in another sense in that we do actually physically live most of 
us in the margins of the sea and the land most of us live in a very narrow 
strip of coastal land sometimes a mile deep sometimes seven or eight miles deep 
and we ha-, we we we we live in this very thin strip of land er behind us is 
the the great Amazonian jungle and in front of us is the stormy Atlantic and 
it's a very precarious existence because the er because the the Atlantic is not 
the blue Caribbean sea it is a dirty brown muddy brown tea brown horrible er 
coastal water er threatening to look at er largely because of the the mud 
washed down by the by the in the Amazon and the the er the great Amazonian flow 
towards the sea that takes all the mud with it so for twenty thirty miles 
outside of Guyana's Guyana's coastline is is muddy water yeah 
shark infested very dangerous dangerous currents and a-, and behind is as i 
said is the Amazonian jungle still pristine in Guyana which is not a place er 
it's not like an English garden obviously it's er it's a place of dread and 
darkness it's a place you we don't venture into it's a kind of space of er it's 
a kind of epistemological space almost it's it's the area of darkness you don't 
go walking in a jungle you know [laughter] er and of course the waters from the 
from the Amazonian jungle wash down into the sea and then you have the the 
waters of the Amazon washing up we're we're we're er we live a perilous 
existence in in the sense that er Guyana is er below sea level and therefore 
subject to constant flooding and i can't swim so it becomes even more perilous 
you know er it's a marginal place also in the sense that you can't really be 
authoritarian in Guyana [sigh] you see in the rainy season when it rains and it 
rains we have a rainforest and you know what a rainforest is 
when it rains and it rains the valleys get flooded the valleys get flooded the 
v-, the valleys get flooded up to fifty sixty feet of water the trees get 
flooded up to their necks up to the leaves the animals in certain parts of 
Guyana in the rainy season the animals cougars and the monkeys migrate to dry 
land what was dry land becomes almost a seascape and the animals migrate and 
fish all kinds of sea creatures great otters come in where the animals used to 
walk so what used to be land suddenly becomes seascape and of course when the 
rain ends er the fish bugger off to wherever fish go to and the animals come 
back so basically the land is inherently unstable you can't have authority you 
can't have authoritarian fascist structures in Guyana 'cause the land is 
inherently unstable it becomes a seascape in the rainy season and all these 
things filter into our imaginations i don't mean myself but all of us as 
Guyanese and if it 
is that we are probably the least nationalistic people in the West Indies it's 
because of the nature of the landscape now being peripheral being marginal is 
for us a source of strength because you see not a not a source of grievance 
it's only until you're at the periphery that you can tilt the plane of the 
centre you know when you're in the periphery yeah that's the centre when you're 
in the centre you're settled you're fat you're s-, you're you're you're you're 
stuck right you're canonical [laughter] you're imprisoned you're anchored when 
you're at the periphery you can tilt the plane of the centre you know as i said 
to you before right you could you could you could affect all kinds of movements 
through language through carnival through rioting through whatever you know you 
could actually you know with a bit more you 
could actually and the cannon has gone you know so being peripheral should be a 
source of strength to us and is a source of strength in terms of our writing 
now John Gilmore was there and i'm going to read a passage about the classics 
and i just wanted to say something about the classics the way that we as 
peripheral people came to the core of Western civilization now we came to it 
through very debased ways we u-, we used you know in the eighteenth century as 
you know we used to be called Nero and Caesar and [sigh] you know Plato 
Aristotle i wrote er in my first novel i wrote er er i went to school with a 
boy called Caesar when i was when i was a child i went to school with a boy 
called Caesar er he used to sell mangoes on a Saturday he was very poor er so i 
wrote about it in in this first novel about Caesar selling mangoes on a 
Caribbean pavement er yeah we came to the classics in very debased ways but 
then er 
as Gilmore's er research shows eventually we re-, we end up er revisualizing or 
er you know re-, reconceptualizing the classics in the works of say Omeros in 
Walcott the the triumph of Walcott winning the Nobel prize in ninety-two was 
exactly this creolization of the classics this revisualization of it so that er 
on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus we were able to we were able to 
enrich the classics by going beyond the pillars of Hercules in poetry er but er 
we came to language in peculiar ways now i'm going to read a passage about 
coming to language oh one last thing why do i write about slavery well you 
can't come from Guyana which has this admixture of different peoples where your 
own culture where your own language the language we speak at home is er is 
impregnated with aspects of the African experience slavery i always think of as 
the defining and the shaping and parent experience of the Caribbean er first 
the Amerindians the idea of eradication then 
the Africans and then the Indians so you can't live in guy-, you can't be a 
Guyanese without er without consideration of the theme of slavery in whatever 
form i remember er being braced up in some conference in London by a very 
ignorant Jamaican who said to me well why don't you just write about your 
Indian people being Jamaican you know kind of question you field and er 
[laughter] er by the way i do apologize er i sh-, i should say a pseudo-
Jamaican a Rastafarian Black British who wanted to be a Jamaican fine so i went 
away and i did exactly what she wanted me to do i wrote a whole book called 
Coolie Odyssey [laugh] right but of course er you see i've always thought and 
there are kind of urien underpinnings to this that ancestry is not a matter of 
blood merely if ancestry was just a matter of blood then half of you are 
Eskimos yes or Aborigines er ancestry can't just be defined by by by blood 
heritage ancestry is also a matter of culture and in a Guyanese context the 
African Guyanese if ever there's an African Guyanese is er as much Indian as i 
am African in terms of culture terms of cultural ancestry i have no debt to pay 
and i'm no longer defensive about these things yeah er anyway i want to read 
this passage about er here is th-, this is set in the nineteenth century a 
novel called The Counting House er and by the way i use the word nigger and 
coolie liberally er it's about ten minutes so after five minutes you can go off 
if you want er here is a woman called er Miriam an African this is just after 
slavery er an African African Guyanese er servant woman who was a senior 
servant in the er in the er great house and then a younger servant a younger 
girl called er Rohini Indian who's come who's come later and er the two of them 
and there's a kind of power relationship going on between them as to who is who 
is the who is the more ancient servant the g-, and the g-, family are called 
the Gladstone family yeah 
the Gladstone family cemetery a plot laid with lawn and adorned with urns of 
hibiscus and frangipani was Miriam's favourite retreat it was within the 
compound of the great house surrounded by a high wall of Suffolk brick 
especially shipped over from England neither nigger nor goat could idle in to 
graze for the entrance was barred by an i-, iron gate of all the workers in the 
plantation including the gardeners who tended the plot only she had the key a 
special favour from Gladstone to wander among the white dead to unwrap her 
bundle of fruit and picnic in their presence and when the sun was sluggishly 
hot to lean up against them this was her special privilege the white 
gravestones glared at her she closed her eyes and held her breath pretending to 
be the last corpse the effort of suppressing her breath made sweat rush to the 
surface of her skin she let out the air in a loud wheeze and cackled to herself 
at the thought of her livingness fuck-arse dead 
white babies no black hands to wipe their backsides down no black lips to tune 
up a lullaby she grabbed a broad leaf from off a sadu tree and fanned her body 
indelicately God was watching her through the vast cloudless sky God God's iris 
was the sky blue like white man's but she didn't care what he saw fifty-
thousand-million white angel stars stopped twinkling shocked at what she and 
Kampta did but blood blood-cloth to the lot of them when she died they could 
blow up on her and disperse her in particles of dust throughout the universe so 
that she could never be gathered up again well let that time come amen for the 
moment she was here and fat and Kampta was sprightly upon her so that when they 
rose no imprint was left in the earth no definite shape which was hers no 
matter how he grunted and pressed he was still too slight a coolie to leave a 
trace of her in the earth i ain't going to bury in some nigger mound in backdam 
she told 
Rohini giving her a tour of the cemetery as a way of impressing her status upon 
the lesser servant you see that one over there my one will be big and shiny so 
she led Rohini to what was the most ornamental grave in the plot the headstone 
was carved with cherubims holding up laurels or blowing trumpets at the corners 
of the tomb were urns bearing a profusion of bright tropical flowers which 
reflected colours onto the stone giving it a gaiety absent from the rest of the 
graves an ornamental pond patterned with lilies lay before it softening the 
appearance of the stone they stood at the foot of the pond looking at the 
tomb's reflection fish seeped through it as if through stone scaling the 
interior with tropical colour the gloomy dead English body of old Mrs Gladstone 
lay there but swimming within it were bright cubla and maju fish the bitch 
didn't deserve more than dry white dust but all good things come to white 
people even in death [laughter] 
jellyfish and piranha would have filled the pond if Miriam had her way who bury 
here roni-, Rohini asked in a whisper awed by the beauty of the setting old Mrs 
Gladstone it say on the headset you can't read Latin little bit Rohini stared 
at the lettering the top is the Latin and the bottom write in English acha 
Rohini nodded in agreement sunt lachrimae rerum you understand that i only 
learning the English more easy than what write on top sunt lachrimae rerum to 
tell the truth girl i ignorant myself what it betoken but how you know to talk 
the words Rohini asked overwhelmed by Miriam's learning my grandpa tell me how 
no nigger in this plantation blacker then he but Latin he know what old white 
people used to write in 
book he was stonemason and every time white man die is my papa who they 
instruct to carve plaque and letter it with Latin they write down for him on 
piece paper all over this place grap-, Gladstone graveyard Anglican church 
plantation house my grandpa work so hard that he learn Latin he use he speak 
nigger talk and he speak Latin and he use to say the two of them cousin close 
like bastards from one belly sunt is like scunt lachrimae sound like old Mrs 
Gladstone name and rerum is rear up what preacher man does call resurrection so 
the old scunt lucri-, [laugh] lachrimae will break wind and break stone and 
walk the land when kingdom come and nigger once more will scatter at her 
footstep how she dead Rohini asked seeking a direct response from Miriam 
something simpler than the story of her grandpa's doing childbirth she was 
bearing but like the v-, child violent and kick up her stomach and kill her 
Miriam looked hard at 
Rohini sensing the girl's withdrawal from her she felt a sudden compassion for 
Rohini for someone who still believed in giving birth as she once did someone 
to love was what she wanted but she got Gladstone and Kampta instead all of 
them the whole plantation of niggers and coolies saw only her fat and her 
rudeness she Miriam was good to get drunk with to grope to curse they wanted to 
slap they wanted her to slap them away in mock anger they admired her strength 
when they push when she pushed them off and they fell on the rum shop floor a 
humiliation more acceptable than that suffered at Gladstone's hand she knew her 
status among them as someone who could roam among the master's possessions and 
throughout his estate with the freedom they lacked they provoked her to 
outrageous deeds for every show of rudeness was a sign of their own desire to 
begin with she accepted her status dutifully for the sake of restoring their 
pride she was looking after her three 
abandoned brothers and she would take in the rest of the tribe she would 
nurture them all until they grew strong enough to survive on their own she 
remembered her grandpa coming home with a bruised mouth because a big word he 
had acquired from some gravestone had slipped out in the presence of a white 
man who took his learning as a sign of arrogance for weeks after her grandpa 
would talk like a nigger using a dozen small words at the most and 
mispronouncing them ignorantly only when his mouth was healed and the pain 
diminished would he try out the odd phrase and even so muttering to himself 
each morning she went into the adjoining yard where he lived with a bowl of 
boiled plantains for his breakfast he was once inside his hut sharpening his 
chisel for the day's work when the file slipped and injured his thumb he 
screamed some Latin involuntarily when she rushed in he raised his mouth 
protectively to his mouth and babbled apologies as if expecting a 
white man the shame on his face afterwards was a nigger shame it was inscribed 
on all their faces she had always seen it even when they twisted their looks to 
feign anger or revengefulness the louder they slapped their hands down on the 
rum shop table the more clearly the scars of their humiliation showed but the 
burden of sustaining their pride was outweighed by shame for their cowardice 
only Kampta was deserving of her for all the beatings from Gladstone he came 
and went as he pleased he would as-, he would abscond from the plantation on a 
whim and disappear into the bush they were all terrified of the bush the white 
man had made them clear the land creating paths digging canals he gave them a 
space within the estate which they became habituated to each morning they left 
their logies and walked down certain dams to their assigned portions of 
canefields each evening they returned home along familiar paths new generations 
arose but they too moved in the same direction for the same purpose they felt 
secure within the design of Gladstone's estate the 
boldest dared to trespass in the forbidden spaces within the estate received 
their lashes when caught and retreated back to their logies not even the 
boldest dared to test its boundaries though by entering through by entering the 
bush at the back of the estate er except Kampta he cast off his clothes and 
joined up with the Amerindian tribes living savagely on their diet of raw meats 
he took up bow and poisoned arrow with them hunting labba and bush hog when 
game was scarce he scavenged with them for skels worms rats whatever lurked in 
holes in the ground and when he tired of the degradation of their lives he 
abandoned the bush people and returned to the haven of the estate where there 
was rum and where the flesh of woman was to his mind less rank in smell less 
coarse in texture he took his punishment from Gladstone and then settled down 
to a period of work he entered Miriam's hut and assumed his previous space 
without permission he organized her brothers into a 
gang making Thomas shave his head and scarify his face to show his African 
roots he taught them coolie words all obscene since they had lost their 
original language under his strict supervision they practised throwing knives 
at young coconuts until the blade struck first time they exercised by climbing 
and reclimbing trees to pick more coconuts when he felt they were prepared 
devoted to him in mind and body he let them loose at night to steal wood from 
the fence surrounding the great house or tools from the warehouse with the 
money from the sale less a percentage for the boys he disappeared to nigger 
villages along the coast to make sport Miriam was glad to see him go for she 
felt that she was secretly afraid of him he loved her only because she belonged 
to Gladstone she could tell from the way he insisted on taking her at night to 
the cemetery always beside her on top of old Mr Gladstone's grave he would turn 
her around and press her against the cold surface 
deliberately so that she would cry out he took pleasure in bruising her skin 
against the stone she could so easily shove him off for she was stronger than 
him but she permitted it one night in i-, er in unfulfilled rage he would go 
too far and close his hands around her neck she knew it would happen for he 
tested her tolerance by gradual degrees and when it happened she would knock 
him off t-, she would knock him to the ground coarsely as she had once turned 
on Gladstone leaving him sprawling at the foot of his couch utterly terrified 
by what else she might do she had stood above Gladstone both hands behind her 
back as if concealing a weapon he had looked up at her not knowing whether to 
command her or to negotiate for his safety she had reached down plucked him up 
laid him on the couch again and left him there to regain his authority whilst 
considering the nature of her services so that was a chapter from er this 
Counting House book right by the way i 
should say as a writer it gives you great pleasure late at night when everybody 
is sleeping to er to just er to really write your neuroses 'cause when you 
write slavery or when do you when you write anything what you're really doing 
is writing your own neuroses yes and then er you get paid for it [laughter] you 
know sometimes pe-, i was saying to a friend of mine today we were talking 
about writing er you need a motive to write and you have to choose the basest 
motive 'cause the romantics have taken up the noblest motives yes and the 
basest of motive is when i'm short of money and i think if i write a novel of 
say hundred-and-fifty pages i get a hundred pounds a page yeah fifteen-thousand 
pounds royalty so i'm going to go to the library and make a hundred pounds 
today and in a in a peculiar way especially when you're writing about slavery 
[laughter] i [laughter] the commerce drives you to finish the page and then you 
get up and then you 
think well that's my hundred pounds tax free yes and if you do two pages you 
think yeah that's two-hundred pounds dead easy money you know it's like Equiano 
er capitalizing upon himself yeah by writing himself right er you don't have to 
write about slavery directly obviously but everything we we write about has to 
do with that kind of history er this is a passage from the first novel it's 
about two boys one is very aggressive er one's very aggressive sexually 
aggressive he's about eighteen and er sexually in adv-, well not in advance of 
his age but er sexually er vulgar yes vulgar you know and a younger boy who was 
er about seventeen who's doing his A-levels and is obsessed with the idea of 
romance he's doing his A-levels on Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer's er Troilus 
and Criseyde the great C-S Lewis says the great y-, a great poem in praise of 
love i don't know have you read Troilus eh it's er in Chaucer yes it's a it's 
an enormously beautiful story in case you don't 
know briefly the Trojan war is going on it's like the Titanic sinking you have 
a love story the love story is the prince of Troy Troilus and this beautiful 
woman who was a a noblewoman called Criseyde and they love each other in a very 
er courtly way there's no sex involved just love er though he would want it 
very much er and then eventually she abandons him for a man called Diomede 
[sigh] because she's afraid that she would be killed when the Greeks win yes 
and because we are reading the story we know her tragedy we know the Greeks 
have won so she abandons him for gri-, Diomede and poor Troilus just goes out 
and gets himself killed gets on his horse you know all kind of all courtly and 
he goes and gets himself killed right so here are two boys er one called Shah 
who's going to a sex shop and this other young chap who is unnamed who is er 
kind of concerned about er about romance and although this is the the s-, the 
idea i suppose was that the 
sex shop was a kind of commer-, the commerce of the sex shop was a kind of er 
and there's a thing about whores in a in a in a booth a set of booths right 
it's i-, in a sense it was a kind of a slave slave er slave setting yeah come 
with me to the hospital he urged me one day what's the matter i wanted to know 
man trouble he said smiling proudly that Italian slag gave me an itch i've got 
to get it checked out he had called round the previous week and persuaded me to 
accompany him to the West End where he said he had to purchase a special set of 
magazines now what are you reading now he asked as i put down the book and 
reached for my jacket i was labouring over Troilus and Criseyde reading an 
essay on Criseyde's character you love this rubbish eh he laughed 
you'll end up an old professor wanking by the fireside putting aside your pipe 
and warming up your hand first i should say this is not a autobiographical work 
[laughter] in any s-, in any way right [laughter] er 
sm0003: you've said that before [laughter] 
nm0001: warming up your hand first [laughter] i looked at him sternly only a 
joke man he said with mocking reassurance only a joke i sat on the bus deep in 
thought trying to work out why she should have betrayed him so easily why after 
all those pure shy exchanges the secret glances desperate kisses aching hearts 
poetic letters swearing honour and devotion the desire to lay down fortune and 
life for the sake of love why she should have abandoned him for Diomede it's 
not enough to say we are human i thought there must be something more to us 
some higher quality that we can 
only possess if we willed it believed it i knew that Shah's response would have 
been she was a cunt that Troilus dreamed over and his imagination refashioned 
into a pool of pure rainwater flecks of diamond glittering from below the 
surface as he leaned over to admire his face but she was only a cunt-doll just 
another pussy salty and oozing and begging for knight Diomede's prick to lance 
her er Shah talks like this throughout the novel right in the end she wanted to 
be frigged not fondled by a gentle Troilus or smooched at by his wet words what 
Troilus needed was to catch a rash and be a man we got off at Piccadilly Circus 
oh by the way you'll have to edit all of this because he's making a film for 
the University of namex right [laughter] 
om0004: 
nm0001: [laughter] we got off at Piccadilly Circus headed down some back 
streets and came to an area littered with sex shops massage parlours and 
cinemas it was a 
wonderland of coloured lights flicking on and off in shop windows amusement 
arcades packed with machines that flashed and uttered electronic sounds and 
large billboards of women offering their naked flesh to us the proprietors 
stood in the doorways beckon us ing-, beckon us i-, us in bawling out their 
wares of peepshow girls striptease videos toys Shah moved through this 
playground with ease stepping over the odd drunk sprawled across the pavement 
weaving between the bags of rubbish put out by restaurants winking at the girls 
waiting at street corners i followed raggedly squirming with self-consciousness 
staring ahead as if i was an innocent traveller on my way to another 
destination come on he turned round and shouted as i passed a shop window 
trying to catch sight of the display from the corner of my eye guilt quickened 
my steps and i caught up with him we turned into another street and crossed 
over to a sex shop Shah's local he 
entered confidently not pausing to look left or right as i did in case some 
some someone saw us i saw nothing as i entered putting on a serious face and 
looking at the floor the walls at Shah anywhere but at the racks of magazine 
and sex toys i stayed close to him out of fright as he lined up with the other 
male customers and thumbed through the magazines i picked one up idly and 
flicked the pages again seeing nothing after a while i put it down and picked 
up another not wanting to appear too engrossed in one article for the 
proprietor was staring in our direction Shah glanced over saw the pictures and 
immediately took the magazine from my hand putting it back on the shelf that's 
for queers can't you see they'll think we're a couple of poofs he whispered i 
looked at the magazine cover and noticed the photograph of one man leaned over 
a bench with another man spanking him he reached for the rack and pushed 
another magazine in my hand 
relax relax he urged under his breath as i fumbled with the pages it was full 
of pictures of a black woman standing imperiously over a white man lying on a 
sofa who was trussed up with ropes chains and blindfolds i could feel my 
shyness waning sight returned to my eyes five minutes had elapsed since we 
entered the shop and the longer we stayed the more secure i felt i put back the 
magazine and wandered around to the next rack without waiting for Shah to 
accompany Shah to accompany was crammed with mysterious devices i picked up a 
box of plastic spheres shaped like eggs and read the instructions marvelling at 
the language of the blurb which promised excitement beyond the grasp of the 
wildest imagination i wished i could write like that there was a peepshow at 
the far corner of the shop with three individual booths occupied by men their 
feet fidgeting against the curtain as soon as one of the 
booths was free i slipped in reached into my pocket and drew out some coins i 
wasn't sure what to do i felt about blindly from so-, for some slot and to my 
great relief found one beside the aperture i waited awhile for my eyes to get 
accustomed to the darkness and searched the area around the slot for further 
instructions there were none out of desperation and fearful that there was 
probably a queue of impatient men behind me i slipped some coins into the slot 
small ones to begin with so as not to overpay but as the aperture did not open 
i ventured a ten pence coin then another and another still nothing happened i 
looked forlornly at the few coins left in my hand some twenty-five pence enough 
for the bus fare home and a cup of tea what to do i had already used up a small 
fortune there were at least four days before the next Social Security cheque 
arrived and in the meantime i had only two pounds at home to buy food i 
lingered in the booth calculating knowing that 
it was better to cut my losses by leaving i pressed my ears against the steel 
wall hoping at least to hear what the woman behind was doing since i could not 
see her in a fit of desperate desire i put my remaining coins in the aperture 
remains obstinately closed i imagined i could hear mocking laughter from the 
woman behind the wall i searched frantically in my pocket found my door key and 
pressed its sharp edge against the aperture trying to force it open it slipped 
against the steel with a screeching noise i froze expecting any moment that an 
alarm would go off the lights would be switched on and i would be dragged out 
and humiliated in full view of all the customers in the shop i waited a few 
seconds nauseous with fright composed myself in a massive effort of will pushed 
aside the curtain and walked blindly towards Shah and so it goes on with this 
kind of er this idea of er a genuine really shock that i had when i was about 
nineteen and that passage is 
very autobiographical a very genuine shock that i had when i first saw in 
England something called a sex shop and er my friend Shah figure the Shah 
figure took me and it was genuinely i mean God i mean we're all grown up now 
but you never ever thought that you can have something called sex and something 
called shop together [laughter] do you know a shop a sex shop and er i i i 
remember being utterly puzzled and bewildered by this er not morally but more 
intellectually kind of bewildered by this er it's only much later in life do 
you realize that that's as when i was reading out to you the Thomas Thistlewood 
passages that's that's Thistlewood you know er except that we are now exploring 
it [laughter] er i think we'll take a little cigarette break and then i'll end 
up by reading some Turner yeah or i'll read one last passage and then er we'll 
we'll er we'll er this is from the new novel which is still in er type form and 
this is a this is a novel about slavery it's a novel about er well yeah 
it's a novel about slavery where er [sigh] where i wanted to do something 
grotesque with slavery and suggest that er and to suggest that er a kind of 
grotesque beauty a grotesque beauty almost a perverse beauty could could er 
could result from slavery very dangerous idea which you can't work 
ideologically or philosophically you can only do it in art where art confuses 
everything so art creates a kind of ambiguity whereby you could say that 
something beautiful emerges from slavery anyway this is a i have to unpublished 
so [laughter] so er it's still subject to er critical beatings er there there's 
a whole lot of dead people they're all dead actually but they come to life and 
they're on this slave ship and the captain is called Thistlewood i use 
Thistlewood but i'm just reading this passage as as more a sort of you know 
straight passage about slavery i lock myself in the cabin and await his coming 
but instead a mist seeps through hidden spaces and 
forms the shape of Ellar and Tanda and Kaka and Manu Ellar's skin is flayed by 
a sailor's whip she is streaked with colour like a mask of desire she's gaudy 
with bruises she wears the swelling of her lips and cheeks like haughty 
ornaments it is i who marked you all with the sign of evil she announces Kaka 
lies how can a beggar destroy the world and as she twirls around to confront 
him the folds of her skin loosen and lift and dazzle with the colours of her 
suffering Kaka gasps of the sudden revelation of Ellar's beauty he who knew her 
hitherto as the plainest of women deserving of admiration only from a base 
creature like himself and as Ellar faces Kaka she too is astonished by his 
image as if the comely man she sought all her life had suddenly materialized 
she lowers her eyes overcome by shyness speech abandons her Kaka's head is a 
palette of colours before his head shone monotonously monotonously like a 
constant 
sun tiring to look at but Captain Thistlewood had banged his fist into it 
obliterating the light in place of an ordinary roundness his head was indented 
in places small pockets bearing unfamiliar liquids raven black the pink of 
coral rouge of crab-back bubbling up through hidden spaces rubies of congealed 
blood hang from his ears here and there glimpses of clean white bone exposed by 
the Captain's cuff subdue the viewer's eye necessary foil to the decorative 
richness which threatens to overwhelm Ellar unable to face him lest he is an 
illusion of beauty turns to Manu for guidance Manu is the kind of magician of 
the village Manu opens his mouth but he has swallowed too much sea water to 
speak in his desperation to reach the shores of Africa Manu jumps overboard in 
his desperation to reach the shores of Africa he drank as much sea as he could 
to shorten the distance instead of words fish tumble out gorgeous and bizarre 
and dreadful in shape 
and hue and mingling among the catch worms sea snakes sponges and other 
nameless life the new nameless and exotic world he carries in his belly spills 
out onto the floor confronting them with a spectacle of their own 
transformation Manu himself stares at what lies before him as he would stare as 
it at his magical pebbles but out of stupefaction not wisdom each secretly 
longs for the familiarity of their ordinariness instead of the artifice that 
Captain Thistlewood had made of their lives hence Tanda's sudden cry and 
agitated recognition of a particular fish look look a tabla he gestures as a 
flat dull looking fish then another slithers from Manu's mouth and falls onto 
the floor we all stare at the tabla a common river fish which often swelled the 
net of Tanda's wife and the realization that Manu had reached Africa makes 
makes us weep he had swum and swum swallowing up the distance until he reached 
the mouth of the rid-, river lea-, leading to our village 
once more we turn to him for guidance wanting news of our village we want him 
to prophesy but backwards into the past into a time when we were still whole a 
time before Kaka's lies or Ellar's blood curse or my sinning with Saba or 
whatever it was that caused us to be murdered by the white man our nostalgia 
conjures forth other villagers from the mist they crowd into Captain 
Thistlewood's cabin swarming around Manu looking upon him with renewed 
reverence for his epic effort to reach home he who once failed to foretell our 
loss had found the saving trail back to our home jubilation breaks out in 
Captain Thistlewood restricted and Christian cabin Baju's nostrils clogged with 
dirt from the assault of sailors clears mysteriously she raises her nose to the 
air and sniffs dawn mushrooms and the flowers' first opening and the breath of 
a newly dropped calf the closed air of the cabin are scented with goat 
droppings of the raw earth of a freshly dug trench she detects shrimps peeled 
and ready to be fried fish hooked on twigs waiting to be smoked dough that soon 
will be sugared and baked and all the other preparations that mark the 
beginning of day and the smells and tastes of our village so revive our senses 
that speech returns not in the grunting of white man but in the melody of our 
own language good cigarette break now 
nm0001: 
er yeah all right i'll end up by er by reading some passages from this long 
poem called Turner which i published i think in er ninety-four which took me 
about five years to write about nineteen-ninety to about nineteen ninety-three 
four years yeah because er unlike prose which which you well prose you have to 
work at it er you know you have to nag it you have to work at it er on a 
regular basis because there's a kind of plot therefore the plot has to have a 
momentum therefore the momentum has to have a conclusion so in a sense writing 
prose is easier in terms of er discernible parameters and boundaries than er 
than writing poetry so this took me a long time to write er and er it's it's a 
poem called Turner by the way before i mentio-, before i return i should like 
to welcome my accountant namex the chap with a suit [laughter] i was talking 
about royalties earlier today well he makes sure that 
i don't pay too much tax on them and er [laughter] well welcome namex yes i 
mean it's not very often you do a reading and your accountant turns up right 
[laughter] he's been my my accountant for what five years now yeah namex the 
taxman er we're being antisocial not paying our taxes anyway er Turner is not 
about slavery Turner is about Turner this po-, this this this this poem is 
about Turner it's about it's about er Turner's painting and slavery rather than 
me writing on slavery and er basically in eighteen-thirty er thirty eighteen-
forty eighteen-forty Turner and he was obviously painting this painting for 
many years er created his masterpiece generally acknowledged to be the greatest 
Turner Ruskin Turner's apologist and critic said this was the greatest painting 
in England and it's the greatest Turner the subject of which was the the er 
throwing overboard of slaves which i don't have to go into but you know what 
that what that involved right so er er and it's based on a case in the 
seventeen-eighties 
i think about this the Zong case where all of the slaves was thrown overboard 
er and their insurance value was reclaimed er and of course i can i think i'm 
right in saying that a whole lot of slaves African enslaved people many more 
died probably er after the abolition of slavery than during well perhaps you 
can't count it but you know because it was illegal and you got a pirate ship 
and a whole lot of slaves going to Hispaniola and a British frig-, frigates are 
chasing you down you just chuck your cargo right it's like dumping cocaine 
basically right so er anyway Turner did this fantastic painting i mean a m-, 
big i mean it's as big as er it's big yeah and in the middle of it is a ship er 
caught in a storm and you know that Turner is brilliant at storms right so the 
ship is caught in a storm it's caught between the immensities of sea and sky 
and and the s-, the sky is absolutely livid and and er purple and you know 
crimson bloody sky there's a 
bloody sea right it's enormously passionate and er at the time it was called 
the sublime style yeah but it's an enormously passionate er storm so the sea is 
caught the the ship is caught in a storm in the mid-ground in the foreground 
there are these two little black legs peeping out of the water er very 
important footnotes in British history yeah perhaps some of the most important 
footnotes in British history but they're they're very much footnotes in the 
painting couple of black legs sticking out of the water and there's some some 
kind of kind of a neo-Gothic fish coming to gobble them up now those black legs 
are the Africans who drowned drowned head first right or in the painting 
they're drowned head first all i do really was er you know i just wanted to 
write a a poem about this painting was to awaken the dead African and er to 
give him a longing for er land memory er land 
family er er so basically what i do is in a sense it's like Pincher Martin you 
know that novel by er Golding where a dead person is awakened so i do a Pincher 
Martin with the African he's awakened he's been dead for about three-hundred 
years no he's been dead for about er eighteen-forty to today hundred-and-fifty 
years so he's now awakened so when you've been dead for a hundred-and-fifty 
years what do you remember what do you long for you know in this in this poem 
he doesn't he doesn't even have language he he he tries to recover a sense of 
the language after a while he even doubts he's a man he's been dead for so long 
and the sea has transformed him so halfway through the poem he thinks perhaps 
he's a woman [laugh] er so these are passages in which er this is the first 
passage is where he awakens as it were er the other part of the poem is that a 
dead and a er is it dead it's er aborted no not abor-, stillborn a stillborn a 
stillborn child is thrown overboard as well not in the 
Turner painting but in another painting in another ship and another century and 
the whole poem is about the movement of this stillborn child towards this 
awakened African and er explores the possibility of some kind of connection 
across time across paintings er between a possibility of a relationship between 
this er stillborn child and this er awakened dead African so obviously it's a 
bloody crazy poem and what i really wanted to do was not to write about slavery 
'cause you see to write about slavery is to evoke guilt automatically yeah it's 
like to write about the Holocaust it's automatically if i if i wrote about the 
Holocaust and did a reading in Germany even if i'm writing shit yeah the 
Germans will listen silently yeah so because i live in the West i didn't really 
want to write about slavery because you y-, because your writing can suffer you 
know because people don't e-, people don't impose a set of literary criteria 
that they might impose on say er i 
can't even think of an English writer but you know an English writer yeah and i 
didn't want to write slavery in a in a in a direct way that's why i wrote about 
the painting anyway this is er this is where he kind of misses his mother or 
tries to recreate a sense of mother so i'll read about three or four passages 
and and as i said the idea was to write about the sea i thought what i will do 
instead of writing about slavery write about the sea because the sea in the 
same way as the stories collide into each other in in the poem so you know that 
that was meant to reflect the the kind of the way the sea moves things crashing 
into crashing into each other the sea has brought me tribute from many lands 
chests of silver barrels of tobacco sugarloaves swords with gleaming handles 
crucifixes set in pearls which marvelled at but with the years grown rusty and 
mouldy abandoned cheap and counterfeit goods the sea has mocked and beggared me 
for centuries 
except for scrolls in different letterings which before they dissolve i 
decipher as best i can these and the babbling of dying sailors are my means to 
languages and the wisdom of other tribes now the sea has delivered a child 
sought from the moon in years of courtship when only the light from that silent 
full eye saw me whilst many ships passed by indifferently she hides behind a 
veil like the brides of our village but watches me in loneliness and grief for 
that vast space that still carries my whisper to her ears vaster than the 
circumference of the sea that so swiftly drowned my early cries in its unending 
roar there is no land in sight no voice carries from that land my mother does 
not answer i cannot hear her calling as she did when i dragged myself to the 
bank of the pond my head a pool and fountain of blood and she runs to me 
screaming plucks me up with huge hands lays me down on land as the sea promised 
in early days clasped and pitched me 
sideways in the direction of our village my dazed mind thought across a 
distance big beyond even Turner's grasp he sketches endless numbers in his book 
face wrinkled in concentration like an old seal's mouth brooding in crevices of 
ice for fish like my father counting beads at the end of each day reckoning 
which calf was left abandoned in the savannah lost from the herd eaten by wild 
beasts he checks that we are parcelled in equal lots men divided from women 
chained in fours and children subtracted from mothers when all things tally he 
snaps the book shut his creased mouth unfolding in a smile as when entering his 
cabin mind heavy with care breeding and multiplying percentages he beholds a 
boy dishevelled in his bed for months it seemed to speed me to a spot where my 
mother waited wringing her hands until i woke to find only sea months became 
years and i forgot the face of my mother the plaid cloth tied around her neck 
the scars on her forehead the silver nose which i 
tugged made her start nearly rolling me from her lap but catching me in time 
and when i cried out in panic of falling pinned me tightly always to her bosom 
now i am loosed into the sea i no longer call i have even forgotten the words 
only the moon remains watching and loving across a vast space and then there's 
these other passages are about the moon sometimes half her face grows dark she 
sulks impatient of my arms all my entreaties grappled in a storm of rain 
nothing will soothe her then she cries herself to sleep or curves like a sickle 
that will wake the sky's throat or curls her lip in scorn of me a mere unborn 
with insufficient cowrie shells when others men substantial bespeak beseech her 
favours with necklaces of coloured glass to loop around her breasts men of 
presence neither ghosts nor portent of a past or future life such as i am now 
sometimes her cheeks are puffed her face lopsided and i think i must have 
blasted her in some 
lover's rage my hand two centuries and more lifeless clenched in quick hate 
reached endlessly to bruise her face she disappears behind clouds for many 
nights a sudden thought writhes she might be dead i might never subject her 
again it was not her going but the manner of it like Turner's hand gripping my 
neck pushing me towards the edge that no noise comes from my mouth no 
lamentation as i fall towards the sea my breath held in shock until the waters 
quell me struggle came only after death the flush of betrayal and hate 
hardening my body like cork buoying me when i should have sunk and come to rest 
in the sea's bed among the dregs of creatures without names which roamed these 
waters before human birth jaws that gulped in shoals demons of the universe now 
grin like clowns tiny fish dart between the canyons of their teeth i should 
have sunk to these depths where terror is transformed into comedy where the sea 
with an undertaker's touch soothes and erases pain 
from the faces of drowned sailors unpastes flesh from bone with all its scars 
boils stubble marks of debauchery i gather it in with dead arms like harvest 
time we trooped into the fields at first light the lame the hungry and frail 
young men snorting like oxen women trailing stiff cold children through mist 
that seeps from strange wounds in the land we float like ghosts to fields of 
corn all day i am a small boy nibbling at whatever grain falls from my bro-, 
mother's breast as she bends and weaves before the crop hugging a huge bundle 
of cobs to her body which flames in the sun which blinds me as i look up from 
her skirt which makes me reach like a drowning man gropes at the white crest of 
waves thinking it rope i can no longer see her face in the blackness the sun 
has reaped my eyes i struggle to find her in the blackness of the bottom of the 
sea where the bright sunken treasure barely cleeps keeps its glow so that was 
part of that kind of search for 
family and er meaning and trying to connect up to the cosmos again in terms of 
kind of you know the romantic thing about the love for the moon and so the poem 
continues over about God knows how many pages until it reaches a climax er and 
i've always wanted to write something utterly utterly bleak you see i grew up 
in the eighteenth century which was the period of slavery and the greatest 
poetry of the eighteenth century is utterly utterly bleak the eighteenth 
century had a kind of eschatological imagination you know Hogarth's last print 
is called Bathos where the whole sun has collapsed the whole world has 
collapsed art has collapsed they really had a sense of utter collapse in the 
eighteenth century or early in the century you had Daniel Defoe's er Journal of 
the Plague Year where Defoe imagines that London is crumbling because of the 
plague i think why they really had this kind of eschatological imagination was 
because there was a period of bourg-, the 
rise of the bourgeoisie protection of property trade you know perhaps they 
possessed and so therefore they the sense of loss in possession was profound 
anyway i was very influenced by the end of er The Dunciad this poem by bla-, er 
Pope which ends in a way that you just have to you either have to jump out of 
the window or you just have to kind of you know just hold your breath right you 
know thy hand great anarch makes the curtain fall or it may be lets thy hand 
great anarch lets the curson curtain fall let me say that again anarch A-N-A-R-
C-H right thy hand great anarch lets the curtain fall and universal darkness 
buries all [laughter] i mean Jesus after that what do you do right [laughter] 
er what do you do that's the end of The Dunciad the great poem of the 
eighteenth century yeah right so i thought i'd have a go at being bleak huh so 
here is er here is the er here are the last bits where he he then makes up two 
sisters this awakened er African who by the way in the middle of the poem 
becomes an Indian yeah er 'cause Manu Manu his name Manu is a god in Indian 
mythology er you're a Hindu you probably know this Manu is the god of the flood 
in Manu is the Noah of Hindu mythology isn't he the jouti lay in different 
hands in different colours we stared bleakly at them and looked to Manu for 
guidance but he gave no instruction except and his voice gathered rage and 
unhappiness that in the future time each must learn to live beadless in a 
foreign land or perish or each must learn to make new jouti arrange them by 
instinct imagination study and arbitrary choice into a pattern pleasing to the 
self and to others of the scattered tribe or perish each will be barren of 
ancestral memory but each endowed richly with such emptiness from which to 
dream surmise invent immortalize though each will wear different coloured beads 
each will be Manu the source and future chronicles of our 
tribe the first of my sisters stout extravagant i will name Rima even as a 
child she tempts fate tempts the hand of my father blossoming at her face but 
she will still deny the sin and multiply his faith in her the more she doubts 
the more convinced he grows of her purity afterwards she bites into his 
reparation of jhal cakes with playful teeth she will steal my spears my 
warriors my fortifications she will interrupt the most careful of ambushes with 
a stomp of her feet mashing down escarpments gouging deep holes in the 
battleground with her unhewn toenail i report her to my mother who slaps me 
instead for playing at killing nor will my father heed but turns his face to 
the earth and hoes like a beaten man he's been vanquished by her freedom she is 
wayward and sucks her teeth talks above the voices of the elders will not 
shield her eyes before them when she grows up she will love women more fiercely 
than men and die at childbirth with her husband fanning her 
and marvelling at the deed the village idiot whom she married out of jest and 
spite she is all the valour and anguish of our tribe my beloved and we bury her 
in a space kept only for those who have uttered peculiarly those who have 
guarded our faith by prophecy who have called out in the voices of the hunter 
or betrayer so we could recognize before be we could recognize them beforehand 
and the women will come bearing stones each one placed on her grave a wish for 
her protection against kidnapping rape pregnancy beatings men all men Turner 
the first of my sisters i have named Rima i endow her with a clear voice 
fingers that coax melody from the crudest instrument melody that brings tears 
from men even Turner who sits cross-legged before her beguiled by song 
afterwards he will go to Ellar the secondborn whom he will ravish with whips 
stuff rab-, rags in her mouth to stifle her the rage rub salt into the stripes 
of her wounds in slow ecstatic ritual trance each 
grain caressed and secreted into her ripped skin like a trader placing each 
counted coin back into his purse her flesh is open like the folds of a purse 
she receives his munificence of salt by the time he has done with her he has 
taken the rage from her mouth it opens and closes no word comes it opens and 
closes it keeps his treasures it will never tell their secret burial places he 
is content he has made her the keeper of his treasures he unties her hands and 
lets her go each night he sits in rapture before Rima weeping Turner crammed 
our boys' mouths too with riches his tongue spurting strange potions upon ours 
which left us dazed which made us forget the very sound of our speech each 
night ap-, aboard ship he gave selflessly the nipple of his tongue until we 
learned to say profitably in his own language we desire you we love you we 
forgive you he whispered eloquently into our ears even as we wriggled beneath 
him breathless with pain wanting to remove his hook 
implanted in our flesh the more we struggled ungratefully the more steadfast 
his resolve to teach us words he fished us patiently obsessively until our 
stubbornness gave way to an exhaustion more complete than Manu's sleep after 
the sword bore into him and we repeated in a trance the words that shuddered 
from him blessed angelic sublime words that seemed to flow endlessly from him 
filling our mouths and bellies endlessly and then the last passage between this 
er stillborn child and this awakened African nigger it cries loosening from the 
hook of my desire drifting away from my body of lies i wanted to teach it a 
redemptive song fashion new descriptions of things new colours fountaining out 
of form i wanted to begin anew in the sea but the child would not bear the 
future nor its inventions and my face was rooted in the ground of memory a 
ground stampeded by herds of foreign men who swallow all its fruit and leave a 
trail of 
dung for flies to colonize a tongueless earth bereft of song except for the 
idiot witter of wind through a dead wood nigger it cries naming itself naming 
the gods the earth and its globe of stars it dips below the surface frantically 
it tries to die to leave me beadless nothing and a slave to nothingness to the 
white enfolding wings of Turner brooding over my body stopping my mouth 
drowning me in the yolk of myself there is no mother family savannah fattening 
with cows community of faithful men no elders to foretell the conspiracy of 
stars magicians to douse our burning temples no moon no seed no priest to 
appease the malice of the gods by gifts of 
precious speech rhetoric antique and lofty beyond the grasp and cunning of the 
heathen and conquistador chants shrieks invocations uttered on the first day 
spontaneously from the most obscure part of the self when the first of our 
tribe awoke and was lonely and hazarded foliage of thorns earth that still 
smouldered the piercing freshness of air in his lungs in search of another 
image of himself no savannah moon gods magicians to heal or curse harvests 
ceremonies no men to plough corn to fatten their herds no stars no land no 
words no community no mother