Leanne Ellul interviews poet MALIKA BOOKER ahead of the 2024 edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival organised by Inizjamed.
LE: Malika, you’re the fruit of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. You identify as British-Caribbean. To what extent does your identity shape your poetry?
MB: I identify as a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage and regard myself as a diasporic woman shaped by a transnational upbringing. I was born to parents who were part of the Windrush generation, a pioneering adventurous generation of Caribbean young women and men who migrated to England after the war in the 1950s and 1960s.
They had been invited by the British to come to the UK as British subjects to help the post-war country to rebuild. The racism my parents experienced in this country led them to return to Guyana when I was born in 1970 as they did not want their child subjected to the racial abuse they were subjected to.
I returned to Britain when I was 11 years old to a Grenadian household – my mother’s family. By this time my nuclear family was split between Grenada, Guyana, Brooklyn (New York) and Brixton (London). These Caribbean diasporic experiences have shaped me and been the inspiration for my poetry.
I write from a British Caribbean upbringing shaped by the food, music, dance, culture and rituals we adhere to. My poetics is shaped by the legacy of the middle passage, and my ancestor’s existence on a brutal plantocracy society, and how that shaped and impacted on them today.
LE: Food is part and parcel of your poetry; they both feed each other as themes and as circumstances. For one, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen brings together “poets by emphasising craft, community and development”. How did this concept come about? Where is it leading you to?
MB: I am interested in the role of the table, as a place where family and friends can gather to break bread together and the way it correlates to writers gathered around tables in a room, writing, developing their craft and sharing food.
Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was hatched in the kitchen in my home one evening in conversation with the poet Roger Robinson. Roger and I had just completed a course called ‘Afro Style School’ with the poet Kwame Dawes, and we had learnt so much, we wanted to pass on this knowledge to our peers.
At that time, Black and working-class writers were marginalised from the literary scene, workshops were not open to us or even safe spaces and we wanted to grow and develop our craft as writers, which is why the organisation ‘Spread the Word’ organised ‘Afro Style School’ with the Ghanian/Jamaican poet Dawes (who had just won the Forward Prize for Poetry).
Afro Style School had been a safe, nurturing space, yet rigorous and developmental. It enabled so much growth in our work and our poetics and I was sad that it could only occur when Dawes visited the UK from North Carolina (where he lived and lectured).
Sitting with Roger in my kitchen, I spoke about how instrumental it had been in creating a community of black writers, enabling us to develop our craft and what a shame it could not continue. And Roger said – we can start our own. What shall we call it? I asked. Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, he responded. When should we start? I asked. Next week, he said. And so, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was born.
We used June Jordan’s book Poetry for the People edited by Lauren Muller and the Blueprint Collective as our blueprint. And Malika’s Poetry Kitchen is now 24 years old and our members have had a significant impact on the British Literary scene, getting published and winning prizes.
Malika’s Poetry Kitchen was hatched in the kitchen in my home one evening in conversation with the poet Roger Robinson- Malika Booker
LE: By performing poetry, we feed poetry to our audiences in a different way. How do you go about performing a poem? Does the performance part come after the actual writing? Do you write as if you are performing the work? Have you ever written works which were never performed? And do you think direct speech injects a stronger sense of liveliness to your poems?
MB: The act of writing means sitting at a desk trying to find the right language to articulate an idea and it is quite separate from live performance. Once I have the first draft I begin to edit the poem for the page. I consider punctuation, line breaks, imagery, and maybe I begin to mutter the poem out aloud and pace with the words in order to finesse the musicality (through alliteration, assonance, internal rhyme and rhythm). I see if the musicality of the poem reflects the emotional tone I want the reader to experience.
I am conscious here that the poem will be read by a reader whose only access to the work is through the page and there is a need to actively score the work to enable an engaging reading.
However, once the poem is written, I then have to move the writer out of the way and look at the poem as a script in order to craft it for live readings/ performances. I have to realise that my voice and body is the stage and think about the text as a performative piece and score it accordingly.
This involves using elements of drama – tone, pauses, eye contact, enunciate, emphasis, demonstrating changes in register, mood and cadence.
Instead of using the term performance I use the term engaged reading. I see the performance as me communicating a story to a listening audience using a variety of strategies to appeal to their aural skills and knowledge and therefore engage them. These also include gesticulation, facial expressions and using the body to provide physical metaphors, which enhance the reading.
There are works that I have had difficulty performing because of the psychological effect it has on me as opposed to it being a ‘page poem.’ I think that every poem I have written can be communicated to an audience, because my work is vivid, emotive and engaging.
Yet it is the deeply autobiographical poems examining hurts and grief that I find difficult to read without giving in to my emotions. Even so every so often I try to include these poems in my set as a challenge.
I do think that ‘direct speech’ enables the enacting of other voices in the recitation that enables a performative form of communication, that is at once conversational and on the other acting (enacting other voices). This is quite effective.
The Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival will feature seven authors from five countries: Malika Booker, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage; Irene Chias, an Italian novelist residing in Malta; David Aloisio from Malta; Mario Cardona, also from Malta; Raymond Antrobus from the UK; Josep Pedrals from Spain; and Maja Ručević from Croatia.
The festival, organised by Inizjamed, will be held between August 28-31. All events are going to be held at the Valletta Design Cluster and the MCAST Campus in Paola. Tickets for the final nights can be purchased from showshappening.com/inizjamed/il-festival-mediterranju-tal-letteratura-ta-malta-2024-2. For more information follow Inizjamed on Facebook, Instagram and website inizjamed.org.