A Just Sense of Proportion
Jay Bernard, Surge
Chatto & Windus, 80pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781784742614
reviewed by Jack Belloli
Whatever else Surge is, it never seems quite itself. The most prominent way this is the case is that it’s the title both of Jay Bernard’s first full collection and a performance based upon it (a ‘scratch’ version of the performance, Surge: Side A, won the Ted Hughes Award in 2017). Both emerge from Bernard’s archival research at the George Padmore Institute, investigating the records of the 1981 New Cross Massacre: a fire that claimed the lives of thirteen young black people, still among the largest death tolls for an event of its kind until the Grenfell Tower fire. In an author’s note to the collection, Bernard admits that, even as ‘a black British Londoner’, they only had ‘a piecemeal understanding of the event and the consequences that followed’; I, as a white one, should admit to first learning about it through Bernard’s work. The archive only cements some of that uncertainty: the fire’s long-suspected status as an arson attack remains unproven. But it offers a more complete picture of the racist police indifference which led to this lasting uncertainty, and of the forms that black activism took in response to it.
Indeed, coming to the conclusion that the case itself was ‘ill-concluded’, and that ‘the relationship between public narration and private truth’ became steadily ‘more vexed’ with more research, nevertheless led Bernard to ‘a final sense of coherence’: that, as their note concludes, ‘I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back’. One way of interpreting Surge, across all its forms, is as a new, subaltern model for imagining personal and social coherence. We are invited to accept that a collection will necessarily be a non-identical repetition of a performance; that the performance itself will combine Bernard’s performing body, its projected reproduction, and reproductions from a photographic archive; that the poems can come ‘after’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, or CLR James, or Grenfell victim Khadija Saye through varying processes of imitation, citation and tribute. Such doubling-up and overwriting is fitting for ‘[t]his century dubbed by migrants from the last’: a former colonial power’s history might start to become authoritative not insofar as it expresses progress or rootedness but as it allows for the multiplication of difference. It is also, explicitly, a queer concept of history: one in which the ‘blood archive’ in a trans person’s preserved menstrual cups can have an unfertilised ‘genealogy’ of its own; in which, at a Pride festival, people delight in finding new ways ‘to pass the root’. More quietly, Bernard also shows their commitment to sustaining difference whenever their attention is allowed to just rest, gathering material details without making them represent anything greater or other than themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever read verse that manages to sustain the effect of sounding prosaic so successfully:
Yet this same poem nevertheless ends with an almost Gothic image – of the house being able to ‘open / one red eye and spin it round / then snort, then fall back to sleep’ — towards which that dead, staring fish has always been leading. Bernard’s conspicuous imagination of their identity as a mutual haunting suggests that this new form-of-life is not a foregone conclusion; that it still needs to be argued for, against opposition; that, in the meantime, black life continues to be characterised by inadequacy and disorientation when set against a solid, legitimising whiteness. These characteristics are made most visible in those poems that mourn the specific black lives lost at New Cross. The perspectives of victims and mourners are shown to be already fragmented before Bernard ventriloquises them, caught up in the experience of looking at themselves being looked at. A ghost finds itself observing the police gathering the remains of its body from two places at once; a father reports an interrogation with a police officer to his dead son in such a way that the officer’s ‘you’ seems briefly to address them both; the son’s corpse, laid out on a table, notes that ‘[p]olice always looked at me like that’ while alive. The claims of Afro-pessimism — that the legacy of slavery as a practice of ‘social death’ continues to be experienced by contemporary black subjects — can sometimes feel abstract, even excessive, to unaccustomed white readers when they’re encountered in theoretical prose. These lyric situations make those claims with arresting force.
Perhaps the only way beyond this impasse is to continue to platform ‘di scale of di loss’ — and to find conditions in which common experiences of existential loss, across racial divisions, can be shared with a just sense of proportion. In ‘Window’, Surge’s most subtly allusive poem, a youth trapped in the fire finds himself ‘remember[ing] and ‘follow[ing]’ a Haitian revolutionary who, as recounted by CLR James, remained silent and defiant when burned alive. But Bernard pointedly concludes the poem by noting that this act was only memorable insofar as it was comparable to the (non-fatal) legendary heroism of Mucius Scaevola ‘whose smooth white body is in the Louvre, turning, saying, / “How cheap the body is to men”’: it is white sacrifice and vulnerability that continues to receive recuperative honour. A troubling recurring image in the book’s final pages is of figures who position themselves as beggars before Bernard’s relative privilege: ‘the man claiming to be the official underpass muralist / asking me why I have no money’ after Grenfell, or a neighbour who keeps asking Bernard and their housemates for ‘milk and tobacco’. How exactly do these men, whose race is unspecified, relate to the eponymous new ‘losers’ of the book’s penultimate poem, the avatars of white resentment unleashed by Brexit, who want back ‘[t]he thing that we won when the losers were kneeling and begging / before they came with their losing’? It’s no surprise that the burden of tolerating all this ambiguity and reflexivity eventually breaks down. Many of these poems build to expressions of heartfelt desire and frustration that are audacious in their sheer simplicity:
Far from being the stock in trade that some critics of contemporary poetry accuse it of being, Bernard’s recourse to self-expression here is hard-earned, and deployed with extreme care.
To say that this work needs to be judged according to new standards doesn’t mean that anything goes — or, as least, that there aren’t moments when the compromises involved in giving Surge the shape of a mainstream first collection are worn heavily. Tastes will probably vary here, but the techniques that Bernard uses to define and distinguish their speakers are occasionally disrupted by introducing conspicuously ‘poetic’ metaphors, which can feel interchangeable (‘the windows are cups of water filled with winter’). It’s also a shame that the structures that the performance develops for thinking about intersections in black and trans experience aren’t carried over as forcefully into the book: a mid-text epigraph from C. Riley Snorton’s theoretical text on the subject suggests a wider field than Surge can show.
But a collection can’t sparkle with promise if that promise is already fulfilled, and it’s likely that this fulfilment will not only come when Bernard writes more, but when more writing is done about and in the wake of Surge, to reveal what’s already here. Indeed, I found myself frequently reminded as I read of its Chatto & Windus predecessor, Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade: that collection now reads as a more experimental, more weirdly coherent book than it perhaps did in 2015, demanding the creation of new contexts in which it could be recognised as such. If Surge also feels like it uncannily contains its own future, it’s making good on the Biblical prophecy that Bernard announces in another epigraph: ‘we have not an enduring city, but we are looking for the city to come’. Whatever the future is, it deserves to be theirs — and it’s thrilling.
Indeed, coming to the conclusion that the case itself was ‘ill-concluded’, and that ‘the relationship between public narration and private truth’ became steadily ‘more vexed’ with more research, nevertheless led Bernard to ‘a final sense of coherence’: that, as their note concludes, ‘I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back’. One way of interpreting Surge, across all its forms, is as a new, subaltern model for imagining personal and social coherence. We are invited to accept that a collection will necessarily be a non-identical repetition of a performance; that the performance itself will combine Bernard’s performing body, its projected reproduction, and reproductions from a photographic archive; that the poems can come ‘after’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, or CLR James, or Grenfell victim Khadija Saye through varying processes of imitation, citation and tribute. Such doubling-up and overwriting is fitting for ‘[t]his century dubbed by migrants from the last’: a former colonial power’s history might start to become authoritative not insofar as it expresses progress or rootedness but as it allows for the multiplication of difference. It is also, explicitly, a queer concept of history: one in which the ‘blood archive’ in a trans person’s preserved menstrual cups can have an unfertilised ‘genealogy’ of its own; in which, at a Pride festival, people delight in finding new ways ‘to pass the root’. More quietly, Bernard also shows their commitment to sustaining difference whenever their attention is allowed to just rest, gathering material details without making them represent anything greater or other than themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever read verse that manages to sustain the effect of sounding prosaic so successfully:
('Kitchen')
I went back to my mother’s kitchen:
peas were soaking on the stove
and a lettuce was uncurling on
the counter. A plastic bag
filled with fish was deflating.
Yet this same poem nevertheless ends with an almost Gothic image – of the house being able to ‘open / one red eye and spin it round / then snort, then fall back to sleep’ — towards which that dead, staring fish has always been leading. Bernard’s conspicuous imagination of their identity as a mutual haunting suggests that this new form-of-life is not a foregone conclusion; that it still needs to be argued for, against opposition; that, in the meantime, black life continues to be characterised by inadequacy and disorientation when set against a solid, legitimising whiteness. These characteristics are made most visible in those poems that mourn the specific black lives lost at New Cross. The perspectives of victims and mourners are shown to be already fragmented before Bernard ventriloquises them, caught up in the experience of looking at themselves being looked at. A ghost finds itself observing the police gathering the remains of its body from two places at once; a father reports an interrogation with a police officer to his dead son in such a way that the officer’s ‘you’ seems briefly to address them both; the son’s corpse, laid out on a table, notes that ‘[p]olice always looked at me like that’ while alive. The claims of Afro-pessimism — that the legacy of slavery as a practice of ‘social death’ continues to be experienced by contemporary black subjects — can sometimes feel abstract, even excessive, to unaccustomed white readers when they’re encountered in theoretical prose. These lyric situations make those claims with arresting force.
Perhaps the only way beyond this impasse is to continue to platform ‘di scale of di loss’ — and to find conditions in which common experiences of existential loss, across racial divisions, can be shared with a just sense of proportion. In ‘Window’, Surge’s most subtly allusive poem, a youth trapped in the fire finds himself ‘remember[ing] and ‘follow[ing]’ a Haitian revolutionary who, as recounted by CLR James, remained silent and defiant when burned alive. But Bernard pointedly concludes the poem by noting that this act was only memorable insofar as it was comparable to the (non-fatal) legendary heroism of Mucius Scaevola ‘whose smooth white body is in the Louvre, turning, saying, / “How cheap the body is to men”’: it is white sacrifice and vulnerability that continues to receive recuperative honour. A troubling recurring image in the book’s final pages is of figures who position themselves as beggars before Bernard’s relative privilege: ‘the man claiming to be the official underpass muralist / asking me why I have no money’ after Grenfell, or a neighbour who keeps asking Bernard and their housemates for ‘milk and tobacco’. How exactly do these men, whose race is unspecified, relate to the eponymous new ‘losers’ of the book’s penultimate poem, the avatars of white resentment unleashed by Brexit, who want back ‘[t]he thing that we won when the losers were kneeling and begging / before they came with their losing’? It’s no surprise that the burden of tolerating all this ambiguity and reflexivity eventually breaks down. Many of these poems build to expressions of heartfelt desire and frustration that are audacious in their sheer simplicity:
(‘Pem-people’)
I take a yellow
Post-it note and try to write something true
but really I am hungry and tired, really
I have nothing, really I want to eat the bean stew alone[.]
Far from being the stock in trade that some critics of contemporary poetry accuse it of being, Bernard’s recourse to self-expression here is hard-earned, and deployed with extreme care.
To say that this work needs to be judged according to new standards doesn’t mean that anything goes — or, as least, that there aren’t moments when the compromises involved in giving Surge the shape of a mainstream first collection are worn heavily. Tastes will probably vary here, but the techniques that Bernard uses to define and distinguish their speakers are occasionally disrupted by introducing conspicuously ‘poetic’ metaphors, which can feel interchangeable (‘the windows are cups of water filled with winter’). It’s also a shame that the structures that the performance develops for thinking about intersections in black and trans experience aren’t carried over as forcefully into the book: a mid-text epigraph from C. Riley Snorton’s theoretical text on the subject suggests a wider field than Surge can show.
But a collection can’t sparkle with promise if that promise is already fulfilled, and it’s likely that this fulfilment will not only come when Bernard writes more, but when more writing is done about and in the wake of Surge, to reveal what’s already here. Indeed, I found myself frequently reminded as I read of its Chatto & Windus predecessor, Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade: that collection now reads as a more experimental, more weirdly coherent book than it perhaps did in 2015, demanding the creation of new contexts in which it could be recognised as such. If Surge also feels like it uncannily contains its own future, it’s making good on the Biblical prophecy that Bernard announces in another epigraph: ‘we have not an enduring city, but we are looking for the city to come’. Whatever the future is, it deserves to be theirs — and it’s thrilling.