ART THAT SINGS
Peepal Tree PressMarch 2020Selected by Jeremy Poynting
Marvin Thompson’s arrival on the scene was marked by a Poetry Book Society recommendation, glowing reviews and his winning the Poetry Society’s poem of the year. He was immediately recognised as a superbly skilled practitioner doing something different. He brings a depth of autobiographical honesty, but also the ability to create the voices of utterly convincing fictional characters, while finding humour and heartbreak in the same space and blurring the edge of reality and fantasy in rewarding ways. His Black Britain is utterly contemporary, and deeply informed by the legacies of empire and colonialism. — Jeremy Poynting
“The One In Which…”
1. The one in which my children discuss jazz while we set out to watch The Lego Batman Movie in Blackwood
A crow rises into the morning mizzle as mist clings to the valley.
Tired, I bark at my five-year-old Derys to “Focus”
on her seatbelt. She cries. I wipe mucus from her top lip
and tell her there’s liquorice in my rucksack. She kicks my bag.
Hayden (aged six) shouts, “This music’s angry!”
On alto sax, Joe Harriott’s abstract jazz swirls around us.
“Sad and crazy!” snaps Derys. We fall into silence.
As I drive, a smile curls – my Mixed Race children are listening
to something I want them to love: art that sings
Africa’s diaspora and raises skin to radiance.
But they haven’t asked to learn a history of defiance
or the blues’ dark beauty. Is this upbringing
or brainwashing? Below the grey-green hills in Hafodyrynys,
Hayden asks, “Does the trumpet sound like a forest fire or
an arrest?”
My best mate’s mixtapes melted during the policing protest
that blazed on Broadwater Farm. Should we tour the bliss
and sadness those high-rises hold for me? “Where we live’s
not racist,”
I was once warned. Cymbals shimmer. A loneliness rests.
“Whilst Searching for Anansi With My
Mixed Race Children in the Blaen Bran
Community Woodland”
1.
A fox lies still by a birch. “Dad, is it dead?”
asks Derys. Crouching down, I watch an ant
crawl through its ear fur. Inside my head
are Mark Duggan’s smile and last night’s heavy dread:
I dreamt his death again. A distant love
once stroked my cheek and said: “They shot him dead
only because he had a gun.” I still see red
and white carnations; a girl who now frequents
her father’s grave; brown birch leaves descending
a walk to school. ’85. Mum’s palm bled
sweat, Tottenham’s air strangely grey. Stagnant.
We passed my friend’s burnt front door – flames had fed
on parked cars. In tower blocks, rage had spread
like an Arab Spring: numbing unemployment,
the oppressive use of sus laws. “Is my friend dead?”
Mum answered with silence. Hunkered on mud,
my prayer withers, the birch’s leaves hang slant
and noonlight shrouds the fox. “Sorry. It’s dead.”
“It’s breathing, Dad,” shouts Hayden. “Listen, hard!”
2.
Crouched by the fox’s nose, I listen
to placate my son. The fox is breathing.
Should I leave it here to die? Its fur glistens
with drizzle – each breath makes my eyes moisten
as though a gospel singer’s voice is rising
from the fox’s lungs. Derys blurts, “Dad, listen,
it needs a vet!” In the dream, Mark Duggan
lay on the Gold Coast’s shore, smoke soaring
above ancestors whose dark necks glistened,
chains ready on docked ships from London.
I woke, limbs tensed, ancestors’ rage jumping
in my blood, the humid night laden
with sailors screams: “Masts ablaze!” Will Britain
learn to love my children’s melanin?
With their voices (“Yellow bird, high up…”) swelling,
I carry the limp fox. The grey mountains
are watching us. A buzzard’s circling.
I scratch and scratch my wrists. The vet stiffens,
holding her stethoscope. The fox’s eyes listen. ◉
The Broadwater Farm protests took place in a Tottenham council estate in 1985. They were triggered by the death of Cynthia Jarrett, a Black woman whose son had been falsely arrested. She suffered heart failure during a police search of her property, which stoked existing tensions in the area and caused violent confrontations between local residents and the police.
“Yellow bird, high up” refers to a calypso song made famous by the Arthur Lyman Group in 1961. Its original version was a 19th-century Haitian song whose lyrics were taken from the poem “Choucoune” by Oswald Durand, which describes the speaker’s love affair with a Haitian marabou woman.