12
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 5 MAY 2019
CAMPUS LITERATURE WEEK 2019
Kalu’s Kaleidoscopic Life
B Y J E A N E T T E G A W A I
Things scribbled in margins. The spilled fruit-seed of gardeners, linguists, carvers, in their
crossings, hauntings, meridian measurings; a constant shifting of the phantom cargo of memory,
interweavings, trailings, pathways. I pause at the crossroads, as Eshu arrives…
A Moko Jumbie Incantation.
Does that help you
understand? No, it was truly a you-had-to-be-there
moment at the 21st annual Campus Literature Week
Gala Reading and Closing Ceremony on March 29,
2019. Under the theme,
Creating Lasting Words
, MFA
students from the Department of Literary, Creative and
Cultural Studies (DLCCS), Faculty of Humanities and
Education (FHE) and MFA programme coordinator,
Dr Muli Amaye hosted the final event in a week-long
celebration of literature.
The 2019 Writer-in-Residence Peter Kalu took
to the stage to read excerpts from books throughout
his career – the signature reading component of the
evening’s event. But, the gala ceremony was anything
but traditional, and neither is Peter or Pete or Carl
Peters (more on that later).
Williams who fired anger in my youthful heart.” This
resulted in his first sci-fi novel,
Black Star Rising
an
attempt to include black people in a future which
erased their presence. Similarly in the autobiographical
Children and Young Adult (CYA) novel,
The Silent
Striker
, by Pete Kalu (a shortened name to appeal to his
younger audience), his aimwas to create a story with a
deaf protagonist that wasn’t a tragic one. “I never read
a character in which we are the hero. I wanted to show
the character’s passion for football while dealing with
the black experience in Britain.”
Trinidad continued to be an inspirational
touchstone for Kalu throughout his career, particularly
when he started a
moko jumbie
band at Leeds Carnival,
long before it was popular to do so: “When I told
people, we’re all going to walk on stilts, at the time in
Jeanette G Awai is a freelance writer and marketing and communications assistant at The UWI St Augustine Marketing and Communications Office.
off of murk, mud, pushing through jetsam, in this way,
newness shakes its holy dusted head and leaps into the
world: hybridising, creolising...
Kalu remembers sound. “I started going deaf,
hearing at lower registers at 16 or 17. Before that I loved
language, I learned French and Spanish and I ended
up by some bizarre route singing opera in German for
the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
Now, I combine a memory of earlier sounds with what
I hear and feel now.”
“The incantation, I spoke it myself first, to give
an idea of its intended rhythms. Dr Muli Amaye
recorded it and we sent it to Roger, but I had no inkling
that Terrenaissance would transform it so skilfully.
I thought it was a beautiful leap they made. They
reinterpreted those rhythms to reflect their Caribbean
Hear me now: écoutez bon, digame lo que pasaba–
stories from the perfumeries of Sevilla, of los negreros del
rio Guadalquivir, los conquistadores buscando el oro, los
barcos dolorosas, the stenching folly of the Oyibo – tell
me everything.
“We have to thank Roger and the band!” Peter
sits excitedly across from me explaining how the
performance of the Moko Jumbie Incantation came
to be, thanks to Roger McFarlane, staff member of
DLCCS and his band,
Terrenaissance
, who took on
the task of bringing a multilingual piece to life using
poetry, dance and music. To tell that story, we must
first learn about a man that criss-crosses languages,
forms and easy categorisation.
Born to a Danish mother and a Nigerian, Igbo-
speaking father in overwhelmingly white Manchester
UK, Kalu has been focused on hybridity through his
identity fromthe start. “Before I wrote, I was radicalised
by the work of Trinidadians like CLR James and Eric
England, people looked and me and said, ‘Pete, are
you feeling ok?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care, I’m going
to do it!’ I’ve always tried to follow my passion and
whatever difficulties arise, I’ll overcome them in doing
the thing. Just as in writing, you have to write what
you’re passionate about.”
Funny enough, his best-selling book,
Diary of a
Househusband,
written under the pseudonym Carl
Peters, was the result of a genre limitation. “In my
crime fiction, they took out all the jokes and those
jokes got put into
Househusband
.” The MFA students
he met during the programme, he noted, are also
dealing with writing for genres, “There’s a lot of YA
writing and a lot of experimentation... it’s promising
and fluid. The students I’ve met are very assiduous,
focused and ambitious and my role is to show how
it may crystalise and what the result would be if they
follow certain energies in their work.”
From under this hash and hex, by the throwing
experience. They brought their own artistic chops to
the piece and brought it alive as perhaps no other
band could.”
...Yes, newness comes swirling into the sweep of
archipelago, sliding across the chopping stilts of moko
jumbie: Eshu is alive…
A Moko Jumbie Incantation came to life in
Trinidad, but it took Kalu back to Nigeria during the
time of his late father’s funeral: “You come to one
place and see an influence from another place and
everything is in motion in a multiplicity and that’s the
spirit that informs everything I do.”
To read the Moko Jumbie Incantation in full,
please visit Peter’s website:
.
Applications are still open for theMFAprogramme
in CreativeWriting until
May 31
. Visit
edu/apply for details.
Peter Kalu
PHOTOS: ANEEL KARIM
