Clementine E. Burnley’s cultural highlights

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley lives and works between the UK and Germany. Her first pamphlet, Radical Pairings, was published in 2023. She’s a joint winner of the 2024 James Berry Poetry Prize.

Album: Transparent Water, Omar Sosa 

Transparent Water is an album by the Cuban composer, bandleader, and jazz pianist Omar Sosa. I listen to it when I need to be immersed in the tones of ancient string instruments, rhythm and percussion: in short, for vibrant joy. Sometimes, I write to this music and sometimes I just must jump up and twirl dervish style. Senegalese singer and kora master Seckou Keita, Paris-based koto player Mieko Miyazaki, and the Chinese sheng player Wu Tong of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble are all chance-met artists. Together they make magic. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAA3IxB55rk

Book: Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Tastebuds 

Yemisi Aribisala’s book is an exquisite ode to a very specific food culture. Why is Nigerian food hardly known outside its borders? To my Cameroonian palate, it presents a range of entirely familiar tastes. My mouth waters as I read about the food of my Yoruba aunts in 1950s Lagos. Aribisala’s culinary world is a place populated by giant black land snails, okra plants, and locust bean trees. Nigerians call all the starchy, staple accompaniments to the more exciting sauces by the prosaic name ‘swallow’. Aribisala unpicks the gender and food politics of the magnificently complex soups with which you may wash down your swallow. A guilty secret: I skipped kitchen duty, so I can’t cook the dishes in my memories. Reading these cleverly constructed stories, my heart sang and broke a little, too. 

https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/longthroat-memoirs/

Theatre: Lament for Sheku Bayoh 

I was lucky enough to have a front row seat for a performance of Hannah Lavery’s important, powerful, lyric play. The audience was still as the tragedy of this violent death unfolded in Patricia Panther, Saskia Ashdown and Beldina Odenyo’s voices. Lavery observes the aftermath of loss acutely and beautifully: loss of life, loss of dignity, and a further loss of humanity in how the press reports on Bayoh’s death. Listening and watching, I feel outrage, grief, and love. The playwright doesn’t turn a forensic or documentary gaze upon a family’s battle for answers. Instead, she conveys the emotional impact of events which led to Shaku Bayoh’s death at the hands of the Fife police. I’m jolted by the knowledge that Kirkcaldy is just across the Firth of Forth, from where we sit in the audience in genteel Edinburgh. Lament for Sheku Bayoh was written and performed long after the Sunday morning, when the young engineer from Kirkcaldy in Fife, died. Seven years afterwards, to be precise; and yet the drama feels evergreen. The actors repeat Sheku Bayoh’s name again and again. This humanising of the dead is a salve for those who loved him, for the family of Sheku Bayoh, and his lawyer who, unbeknownst to me at the time, are sitting in the audience. We watch and lament.

https://www.nationaltheatrescotland.com/past-performances/lamentforshekubayoh#explore

Film: The Piano Lesson  

The Piano Lesson opens with a crime. A young boy watches a group of men surreptitiously manoeuvre a hardwood piano down the hallway of a darkened house. This act is the long wick to an incendiary finish. The Piano Lesson is black horror of the best sort, where characters escape the confines of rigidly drawn identities. I was at the Glasgow premiere on the eve of the streaming release. I prized the wealth of aesthetic qualities: lighting which flattered a range of darker skin tones, period costumes, a killer soundtrack, richly detailed internal worlds, and the tightly controlled plot which switches from raw comedic dialogue to real menace. If the assignment of the film is to rescue distant figures tarnished in past narratives and thereby write a different present for the characters, The Piano Lesson surely succeeds on the terms set for themselves by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson and the film’s director Malcolm Washington, son of Denzel and Pauletta Washington. In the end, the audience is left to decide what the real crime is.

Art: Scottish Mission Book Depot, Keta by El Anatsui

This summer, Edinburgh University’s Talbot Rice Gallery gave over their resplendent spaces to a retrospective of the Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui’s wooden reliefs, paintings and aluminium bottle top works. I hear the first piece, ‘TSIATSIA – Searching for Connection’ (2013), immediately after I see it. Short, hand-twisted segments of copper wire link old bottle caps. The monumental sculptural piece tumbles gorgeously down the outside wall of the gallery building. The wind creates a soundtrack of tappings, clinks and scrapes. The thirteen-metre-wide exhibit  ‘Scottish Mission Book Depot, Keta’ (2024) reminds me of the ubiquitous colonial Mission bookshop, where, like El Anatsui, my parents took me to buy school supplies and books. I love the bottle top works for the memories they evoke, and I don’t always know what to make of what I see. The exhibition text says that ‘Royal Slumber’ (2023) is ‘displayed in a specially created sleeping chamber.’ No matter how hard I look, I can’t find the King. 

https://www.trg.ed.ac.uk/exhibition/el-anatsui-scottish-mission-book-depot-keta

A Favourite WritersMosaic Writer 

Eric Ngalle Charles combines unusual standpoints, stunning lyrical prose, and images that explode off the page. Sometimes this writer makes me cackle out loud before he brings tears to my eyes.

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley

Clementine Ewokolo Burnley is a multilingual author, writer of poems, short stories and non-fiction works.