Gabriel Gbadamosi’s cultural highlights

Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic. His London novel Vauxhall (Telegram, 2013) won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was the AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in British, European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. His plays include Stop and Search (Arcola Theatre), Eshu’s Faust (Jesus College, Cambridge), Hotel Orpheu (Schaubühne, Berlin), Shango (DNA, Amsterdam) and for radio The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 (BBC Radio 3) which won the first Richard Imison Award. He presented BBC Radio 3’s flagship arts and ideas programme Night Waves.

Maps:  The London Underground

London’s topological tube map (which shows colour-coded tube lines and their connecting stations, but not actual distances) has been added to by the Elizabeth Line (formerly Crossrail, but named for the late Queen) and six newly named overground lines: Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver and Windrush. Take a moment to ponder those names… Many of us wanted the ‘Ian Wright Line’ to connect up the much-loved London homeboy’s two football clubs, Crystal Palace and Arsenal, but he definitely took one for the team and let Windrush go for glory. I can spend hours looking at this map, its wheelchair access icons strung like necklaces of pearls along the new routes. The blue Victoria Line (another Queen), which put my station Vauxhall on the map when I was a boy, is only one strand in a glorious, interconnecting diagram of London’s fast-paced, multicultural future, evolving out of darkness into light.   

Painting: Cato

Once you’ve seen the large paintings of the young, mixed heritage Jamaican English artist Cato, there’s no going back from their haunting, iconic capture of the souls of black folk. I’ve seen exhibitions in Battersea and Camberwell, but they clamour for his work in New York and Los Angeles. Techniques drawn from his work in animation, collage and photography produce profoundly moving oil paintings of people and scenes so full of life they seem to escape the canvas in response to the music of what happens. He says the scale of the paintings is simply how his body works best (he’s very tall), and the soulful rhythms in how he puts the images together seem to spill over from his work as a musician. The world is a better place once you’ve seen what Cato brings to it.

Books: Nelly Sachs, Revelation Freshly Erupting: Collected Poetry approximatively translated by Andrew Shanks (Carcanet, 2023)

If ever a poet were overdue a re-introduction to English language readers it would be the 1966 Nobel Prize-winner Nelly Sachs, and particularly through these ‘approximative’ versions of her poems by translator Andrew Shanks, a theologian and priest in the Church of England who has worked on rendering them into stark and vivid English for over 40 years. Sachs’s poetry deals with her response as a German Jew to the attempted extermination of the Jewish people, and the implications of genocidal violence for the human being. Her poems insist, in that nightmare moment ‘when sleep like smoke invades the flesh’, that the persecuted ‘should not become the persecutors’.

Film: Andrei Tarkovsky: The Sacrifice

While Trump gambles in the Oval Office with World War Three (psst… the idea is to get rid of your cards, not hold on them), this Swedish film, The Sacrifice (1986), by the very greatest of Russian filmmakers, Andrei Tarkovsky, surged back onto Channel Four and the film platform MUBI as the song of my life’s nuclear nightmare. I can never forget the scene, composed like a still life, of a clay jug of milk beginning to tremble on its shelf as the sound of nuclear Armageddon builds, eventually shaking the jug to the ground where it smashes, pouring out milk in a tidal wave of human unkindness that flooded me. The film lays out all the human meanings of sacrifice I ever came across, and stops you feeling it’s only made of celluloid.

Music: Ezra Collective on Radio 6 Music: Dancing in Jamaica, Brazil, Nigeria and London

British jazz quintet Ezra Collective, Mercury-Award prize winners and Music Artist in Residence on BBC Radio 6 Music, present a series of four musical journeys: Dancing in Jamaica, Dancing in Brazil, Dancing in Nigeria and Dancing in London. Listen to those dancefloors here – https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m0028m5fI – and enjoy everything from The Skatalites to Jorge Ben Jor, Femi Kuti to The Clash… Brixton-based Ezra Collective emerged out of our local carnival youth music outfit, Kinetika Bloco, in which my children cut their musical teeth. Just saying, I’m proud of them all. They light up the world.

Gabriel Gbadamosi

Gabriel Gbadamosi is a poet, playwright, essayist and critic.