Week 4. Surge - Jay Bernard.
- Hendrikje
- Jun 6, 2020
- 7 min read
With the increased momentum in the Black Lives Matter movement, Surge, the collection of poetry by the incredible, Black, non-binary writer Jay Bernard was playing on my mind. When I first read the collection about a year ago, I was struck by Bernard’s ability to draw together the individual and collective experience with an urgency that asks, “Will anyone lessen the losing?” (from ‘Losers’). I have spent the last two days re-reading and analysing the collection and it serves not only as brilliant body of poems but as a reminder that the UK is not innocent. This country is built on hundreds of years of oppression and racism. In Surge Bernard launches a daring enquiry into the 1981 New Cross Fire in London (soon after dubbed the New Cross Massacre), exploring the fire that killed thirteen young Black people and the aftermath of the disaster “against the backdrop of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the xenophobia of the Windrush scandal and Brexit” (Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian). The poems bridge the gap between the personal and the documentary: through the research Bernard did as writer in residence at the George Padmore Institute they have been able to embody those affected and speak for those who, in death, are unable to tell their own stories.
The History:
On the 18th of January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road — Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her sixteenth birthday with a party and the fire quickly spread, killing thirteen young people and injuring twenty-seven others. Many people believed that the fire had been a racist attack, resulting in the fire quickly being labelled the New Cross Massacre. However, police investigations yielded very little and the origins of the fire still remain unclear — some of the teenagers who had been at the party retracted statements they had made, saying they had been intimidated and coerced. Bernard writes that “the police were at best indifferent and at worst party to the hostility”; the prejudice and racism of the police is a prevalent theme throughout the collection. The government and press remained almost entirely silent on the matter, highlighting a lack of regard for Black lives amongst those in power. On the 2nd of March 1981 occurred what is now known as the Black People’s Day of Action, with thousands of Black people and allies gathering at Fordham Park in Lewisham. At the time, it was the largest political gathering of Black people in British history. Angered by the government’s silence, chants included “13 dead, nothing said”. When the protestors approached Blackfriars, police pushed the crowds back and many people fled in Fleet Street where they were further assaulted by journalists leaning out of their windows, spitting and jeering at those passing below them.
In retaliation to the Black People’s Day of Action, the police ostensibly went about reducing crime in South London (which, basically, meant increased racial profiling). SUS laws (from ‘suspected person’) gave rise to operation SWAMP 81, where approximately a thousand people of colour were stopped and searched in South London in only five days. The name of operation SWAMP is seen as a reference to Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 speech, where she declared that, “people are really rather afraid, that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture (…) people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in”. During this period of unrest caused by operation SWAMP, the attempted arrest of a man who had been stabbed catalysed the Brixton uprising (also known the Brixton riots) in the April of 1981.
Bernard writes that “the archive became (…) a mirror of the present, a much-needed instruction manual to navigate what felt like the repetition of history”. The Grenfell fire in 2017 showed that “institutional indifference to working class lives had left nearly eighty people dead”; the Windrush scandal “was reminiscent of right-wing calls for black repatriation”. There is no closure, no responsibility, no accountability at the core of these issues. Like the police officers who face no charges for murder; the governments that systematically underfunded public sectors and enforced austerity, remain in power. At the conclusion of the author’s note, Bernard powerfully writes: “I am from here, I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back”. And I say, to minimise the injustices of the future, we must educate ourselves on the injustices of the past and the present and we must be ready to make a lifelong commitment to change.
The Poetry:
For me, the poems that have stayed with me most closely are ‘+’ and ‘-’, the pair of poems representing the conversation between a father and the son he lost in the New Cross Fire. Both poems are laid out as blocks of texts with thoughts separated by dashes, relating a sense of panic and an inability to process the pain in a conventional way, because the pain of losing a child (or, in the case of ‘-’, losing your life) is never conventional. Furthermore, the absence of prescribed formatting suggests a going into the unknown and the lack of cohesion that accompanies this — time is blurred as thoughts are repeated and rolled into one. ‘+’ tells the story of a father whose son is missing, finding out that he has been found dead and disfigured from the fire. The poem opens with the lines:
“the officer said — oh, it’s very common for culprits to go missing — I said my son isn’t
a culprit, how dare you imply it —”
These opening fragments highlight the presumed guilt that Black people face in the eye of the law. Towards the end of the poem we discover that his son was killed in the fire — he was a victim but before anything had been discovered, he was assumed a criminal. The phrase “I said” is also repeated consistently throughout the poem, suggesting a frustration with his voice not being heard. Desperately, he is trying to be heard by the white police power and he is trying to communicate with his dead son. Despite being dead, it is his son who hears him and responds in the poem ‘-’.
As ‘+’ is the cry of a father trying to reach his son, ‘-’ tells the experiences of the son and is a letter from the dead to the living. It is laden with fear and desperation and is heartbreaking to read. But it is so necessary to remember that those who died were so young and they must have been so scared. Bernard captures this youthfulness when they write:
“come back — don’t bury me — I can’t stand it — I can barely stand it when the lights
go off — (…) I want to crawl between mum and you — in your bed, in your sheets, dad
— that’s the only kind of burying I want —”
This devastating concluding thought of the poem shares the voice of a terrified teenager who wants the comfort of the safeness his parents represent. The address to “dad” is repeated throughout the poem, once more highlighting his youth and intertwining the two poems as the conversation between father and son. Also, the use of the dash instead of a full-stop to end the poem creates an indefinite ending suggesting that the pain caused by the fire continues. This ties in with Bernard’s anger at the lack of closure provided to the families because of the inadequate police investigation and the government silence. It also shows the cyclical nature of the loss and the lack of true progress that is made in the fight against racism (as is seen by the ever-present and ever-necessary outrage at the killing of George Floyd).
Several other poems in the collection relate the search for identity and heritage Black person faces. In particular the poems ‘Ha-my-ca’ and ‘Kombucha’ explore what it means to be searching for your history as a Black person and the importance of language in this search. In the poem ‘Ha-my-ca’, Bernard relates the exploration of the form of one’s body after being asked by a taxi-driver:
“whether I knew that ‘Jamaica’ was from Spanish,
ha-my-ca, he said, ha-my-ca.”
Allowing the speaker in the poem to come to the realisation that:
“Had I asked what name it had before
I might have learned a word for my body, not felt so alone”
Showing that language, heritage and body are intrinsically connected. To know one is to know the other. To find power in one is to find power in the other. Knowing your ancestors and the history you are a part of, including the history of colonialism and the time before that, allows you to not feel “alone” in the world. It lets you feel that those you came from are still around you, acting as protectors. It is therefore so necessary that the school-system actively teaches Black history, allowing a gateway to the discovery of more personal histories. It is also important that white people are taught about the privilege they are born into, so they are able to recognise it and take steps to use that privilege to create spaces for Black people. In Kombucha, Bernard writes:
“They say that we exist inside our mother’s sac of eggs when she is but a sac of eggs
laid inside her mother”
This highlights the search for ancestry that Jay Bernard undergoes through the writing of poetry. They search for a heritage that is consciously hidden from them. Those in power know that there is power in knowing your history — it is by no mistake that they hide this, it is by no mistake that the literature and history you read at school is so predominantly white. It allows white oppressors to cover up the oppression carried out by their ancestors — by keeping people blind to their past they are holding them down. It has been time for years for this to change; this power imbalance should never have existed; these curriculums should never have been devised. However, we now have a moment that we must make into a movement. We have to commit ourselves to consistent change and it has to be a lifelong change. Educate yourself. Question authority. Make yourself uncomfortable and talk about race. Because making a change will take hard work, but it is hard work that we must do.
Resources:
To buy the collection (which I would sincerely recommend):
To learn more about the New Cross Fire:
To learn more about Jay Bernard and Surge:
Black Lives Matter resources and practical ways to help:
Thank you for this important post and for writing about Jay Bernard. Reading their poems forces you to think in a most un-forceful way. Information, analysis, emotional engagement, speaking out --- they go together. So I very much agree with your imperatives at the end.
If anyone wants to add resources, petitions, places to donate, etc. that they have found -- please leave a comment!