Kumukanda Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  The Colour of James Brown’s Scream

  Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee

  Fisherman’s Song

  Broomhall

  Winter Song

  Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly

  The Room

  Some Bright Elegance

  calling a spade a spade

  The N Word

  Alterity

  The Cricket Test

  The Conservatoire System

  On Reading ‘Colloquy in Black Rock’

  Varsity Blues

  Casting

  Callbacks

  Normative Ethics

  Curfew

  25 October, 1964

  Legerdemain

  How to Build Cathedrals

  Waves

  Malumbo

  Orientation

  How to Cry

  Loch Long by Ardgartan, Argyll

  Kumukanda

  H-O-R-S-E

  Alternate Take

  A Proud Blemish

  Orphan Song

  Grief

  The Nod

  In Defence of Darkness

  Andrews Corner

  Martins Corner

  Kung’anda

  ’Round Midnight

  Baltic Mill

  This poem contains gull song

  For those orphaned late in life

  Author’s Note

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Translating as ‘initiation’, kumukanda is the name given to the rites a young boy from the Luvale tribe must pass through before he is considered a man. Kayo Chingonyi’s remarkable debut explores this passage: between two worlds, ancestral and contemporary; between the living and the dead; between the gulf of who he is and how he is perceived.

  Underpinned by a love of music, language and literature, here is a powerful exploration of race, identity and masculinity, celebrating what it means to be British and not British, all at once.

  About the Author

  Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of two pamphlets, and a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015.

  I.M. Thomas Kareem Crosbie, aka PACE, 1988–2016

  KUMUKANDA

  Kayo Chingonyi

  The Colour of James Brown’s Scream

  for Steve McCarthy and Todd Bracey

  I have known you by many names

  but today you are Larry Levan,

  your hand on the platter in the smoky

  room of a Garage regular’s memory.

  You are keeping ‘When Doves Cry’

  in time, as you swing your hips,

  and sweat drips from your hair

  the colour of James Brown’s scream.

  King of King Street, we are still moving

  to the same sound, though some

  of us don’t know it is your grave

  we dance on, cutting shapes

  machismo lost to the beat –

  every road man is a sweetboy

  if the DJ plays ‘Heartbroken’

  at just the right time for these jaded feet.

  Teach us to shape-shift, Legba,

  you must know I’d know your customary

  shuffle, that phantom limp, anywhere;

  that I see your hand in the abandon

  of a couple, middle of the floor,

  sliding quick and slick as a skin-fade

  by the hand of a Puerto Rican clipper-man

  who wields a cutthroat like a paintbrush.

  Let us become like them, an ode

  to night, ordering beer in a corporeal

  language from a barman who replies

  by sweeping his arms in an arc,

  Willi Ninja style, to fix a drink our lips

  will yearn for, a taste we’ve been

  trying to recreate ever since.

  Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee

  I.

  117 Retford Road, Harold Hill, Essex.

  I can’t sleep because there are no sirens,

  no neighbour’s screams lulling me

  to lurid dreams of Natasha Laurent.

  There is no panoramic view for solace

  but in the right light this window

  shows, not this white-flight-satellite-town,

  but south London from seventeen floors up:

  the River Wandle a coiled snake

  swallowed by the Thames,

  friends crossing the road

  to the park in my absence,

  the alley between flats where Sacha blasts

  a tattered ball into the goal-net simulacrum,

  a wall against which his brother Stacey stands,

  hands shrouded in Goalie Gloves.

  It is our first night in this grieving house.

  I miss listening to Delight 103.0

  and with no tapes to remind me

  the best bet is Kiss 100 but they don’t play the songs

  for which my cheap headphones exist.

  When we pitched up the neighbours spoke of how

  the old girl, God rest her soul, wasn’t found for days

  and, though the family tidied up for a quick sale,

  there was a staleness when we prised the door open,

  its hinges stiff, wood swollen in the late summer heat.

  If you were to walk the four and a half miles to Crow Lane

  you’d see her name in their one stone, she fell asleep

  three years after him and they’re dearly loved, sorely missed

  but no less gone for that. When all is quiet I can still hear

  the sirens through gaps in the barred windows,

  still see the power station dusky and unused in a distance

  that seems to stretch to the edge of everything. The smog

  in which garage music lives and everybody’s got lyrics.

  I can still hear Peter Biggs saying:

  Enter with the Eastender

  Peggy with the breast cancer

  Tiffany try make baby

  Mark with the HIV

  In Harold Hill the girls ask if I’m from up London,

  smile when I nod like we’ve come to some understanding.

  Sensing I have a voice Mr Cox tries to make me join

  the swing band, I say no. I end up singing ‘Living La Vida Loca’,

  in midnight blue shades, anyway. For months the hours

  before mum comes home pass in the wake of drive-time pop.

  Until flicking through stations, one dark afternoon,

  I hear those click-and-clack-hi-hats and stop on Majik FM.

  II.

  ‘It was all about tapes, back then’ – Darryl McDaniels

  If I could navigate the fuzz of traffic

  reports, dinner table jazz and topical chat

  Majik FM! is where, in the stillness between

  last bell and the latch announcing mum’s

  return to dishes littering the kitchen sink,

  I’d rest the red dial of the Sanyo cassette player

  bought, part-exchange, from a now-defunct branch

  of Tandy on Wandsworth High Street. Hours lost

  to the underwear section of Littlewoods catalogue

  gave way to R&B on E numbers, hi-hats the hiss

  of hydraulic pistons, snares like tins dropped

  on tiled floors. All of it piped in from back room studios,

  s
heds, distant kitchens haunted by teenage DJs hunched

  over decks set up next to microwaves or, in pride of place,

  on a good table usually reserved for special occasions.

  We loved the casual bravado of emcees

  with forty-a-day voices and too many ladies

  to big up from last week’s rave; years out of reach

  but ours to keep on a TDK cassette, four in a pack,

  for a pound. Most days I couldn’t stretch,

  pocket money spent on pick ’n’ mix,

  I’d plunder my mum’s cache of cassettes

  for something she wouldn’t miss

  or couldn’t bring herself to admit

  she once loved. Lucky Dube and Prince

  were off limits. Kenny Rogers became

  slick lyrics I could earn stripes by reciting

  tomorrow lunch in front of anyone who’d listen,

  if I could cut just the right amount of Sellotape,

  make small enough balls of tissue to cover

  the notches along the apex of each cassette.

  Remember the days before your Walkman

  was banished to a life in the attic?

  How you cherished it, cutting a hole

  in the lining of your blazer so you could

  slip the silver box into the gap between the fabric,

  pass an earpiece up one sleeve, rest your head

  on one hand during maths class and ignore the talk

  of vertices, indices, factorials, Napier Bones,

  as you mouthed the lyrics,

  brow crimped in concentration?

  Soon, I’d used up all the dregs in mum’s collection

  and nothing was left save a black TDK, unmarked,

  without a case. Thinking that it must be something

  so laughable she couldn’t bring herself to label,

  I lifted it, weighed it in my hand, slid it cleanly

  into place, pressed the play button and waited.

  III.

  My name rendered in a kettle-drum pitch

  I knew to be my father’s voice from the slight

  twang of a lost tongue. How old are you?

  I knew the boy’s answer though I heard

  only the hiss of static. No, you’re lying,

  you are four years old. If I was still a man

  of faith I’d say he sat next to me that day

  as I rewound the tape and asked me again

  and again till streetlights bloomed through the still-

  open curtains and settled in the lacquer of the table.

  I started saving the odd pound coin here and there,

  buying cassettes in bulk so I could record emcees,

  study their lyrics, and pass off their bars as mine

  moving from yes, miss to Boom like TNT/the explosive

  commentary/there is no similarity/to my originality

  in the time it took the teacher on duty to round the corner

  and the regulars to form a rag-tag circle. I had a following;

  girls two years older asking my name and could you do

  the one about the cartoon characters again? Assemblies,

  talent shows, tours of local junior schools, and lunchtimes

  in the music room making haphazard recordings onto TDK

  cassettes, broken tabs Sellotaped, a surfeit of fame secure.

  Centre-stage, the keys dangling on a lanyard round my neck

  were the jangling links of a gold chain; my budget shoes

  doeskin loafers. Since I could spit lyrics every stone

  thrown by those two boys, whose cries of nig nog

  still follow me, bounced off my back; fell reverent at my feet.

  At night, after mum snuffed the light, I’d practise,

  under my breath, in bed; ape the latest tape

  down to the last big up ya chest sliding from

  sum ah dem ah ay sum ah dem ah love dis to

  in the venue we send you our menu that’s the combo

  emcee/dynamical lyrical tech emcee/I like it like the K-I-E.

  Soon I had my own chats. I was:

  k to the a to the y to the o,

  lyrical G with a badboy flow

  if you don’t know better get to know

  I’m k to the a to the y to the –

  Eminem ruined everything. I had to learn the words to ‘Stan’,

  borrow the nasal whine, slide into a drawl midway between

  London and New York and nowhere near Detroit.

  In time, I could rattle off The Slim Shady LP line for line,

  though no amount of practise could conjure the pale skin

  and blue eyes that made Marshall a poet and me

  just another brother who could rhyme.

  Fisherman’s Song

  What sadness for a fisherman

  to navigate the blue

  and find among receding nets

  strange, underwater blooms

  that look, at first, like bladderwrack

  but from a closer view

  are clumps of matted human hair

  atop an acrid soup.

  And what song shall this fisherman

  who loves a jaunty tune

  sing to lullaby his children

  when dark shapes in their room

  make the night a snarling monster

  only father’s voice can soothe

  and who will soothe the fisherman

  who navigates the blue?

  Broomhall

  In light of what my aunt calls

  the Arabic texture of my hair,

  I’m Abdi outside the only shop

  selling tamarind balls, Irish Moss,

  Supermalt in decent quantities.

  It is not enough to say I miss

  the smell of cassava roasted

  over open coals, expeditions

  in want of tilapia, kapenta,

  assorted meats of questionable

  provenance. How much, auntie?

  Barter and bluff and rough hands

  of stallholders glazed to a deep

  blue shameless blackness that is

  consigned now to another life

  before this one of middle-class

  white boys in reggae bands, who

  love roots and culture as if their

  love is enough to know the code

  that some of us live and die by.

  At least these boys who call me

  Abdi seem to be fond of Abdi.

  They ask why I don’t come

  round no more, what it’s like

  in Leeds and maybe, today,

  I can be Abdi and this shop

  can be all the home I need.

  Winter Song

  2002. Rapsz, Haystee, Kaystar,

  JD, Sickness, Ashley and me

  standing in the cold outside

  Smokesta’s house – Smokesta

  is the only one we know who

  owns a copy of Snowman,

  Wiley Kat’s latest white label.

  I remember this as my bus

  goes past what was once The Matapan,

  now dubbed The Beacon Tree to rid

  itself of infamy; this being the same spot

  where Charles Butler was chased

  round his car by a gunman, shot,

  and collapsed in the road.

  The songs we wanted to hear

  lived on tapes of pirate radio sets

  or in the first-hand crackle of vinyl

  from Boogie Times or Rhythm Division.

  When Snowman starts up, I’m back there,

  in the arctic north of boyhood, lost

  in the moment just before the bass drops.

  Guide to Proper Mixtape Assembly

  The silence between songs can’t be modulated by anything other than held breath. You have to sit and wait, time the release of the pause button to the last tenth of a second so that the gap between each track is a smooth purr, a TDK or Memorex y
our masterwork. Don’t talk to me about your MP3 player, how, given the limitless choice, you hardly ever listen to one song for more than two minutes at a time. Do you know about stealing double As from the TV remote so you can listen to last night’s clandestine effort on the walk to school? You say you love music. Have you suffered the loss of a cassette so gnarled by a tape deck’s teeth it refuses to play the beat you’ve come to recognise by sound and not name? Have you carried that theme in your head these years in the faint hope you might know it when it finds you, in a far-flung café, as you stand to pay, frozen, and the barista has to ask if you’re okay?

  The Room

  ‘When you sample you’re not only picking up that sound, you’re picking up the room it was recorded in’ – ODDISEE

  For the purist, hung up on tracing a drum break

  to its source, acquired in the few moments’ grace

  before the store clerk, thin voiced, announces closing time,

  it’s not just the drummer’s slack grip, how the hook line

  swings in the session singer’s interpretation,

  or the engineer’s too-loud approximation

  of the MacGyver theme tune, it’s that hiss, the room

  fetching itself from itself in hiccups and spools.

  Though there’s a knack in telling A-side from remix

  from test press that never saw the light of day,

  mere completists never learn a good song’s secret;

  air displaced in that room – the breath of acetate.

  Some Bright Elegance

  For the screwfaced in good shoes that paper

  the walls of dance halls, I have little patience.

  I say dance, not to be seen but free, your feet

  are made for better things. Feel the bitterness

  in you lift as it did for a six-year-old Bojangles,

  tapping a living out of Richmond beer gardens

  to the delight of a crowd that wasn’t lynching

  today but laughing at the quickness of the kid.

  Throw yourself into the thick, emerging pure

  reduced to flesh and bone, nerve and sinew.

  Your folded arms understand music. Imagine

  a packed Savoy Ballroom and slide across

  the dusty floor as your zoot-suited Twenties

  self, the feather in your hat from an ostrich,

  the swagger in your step from the ochre dust