Emily Zobel Marshall’s cultural highlights
Emily Zobel Marshall is of French-Caribbean and British heritage and grew up in North Wales. She is Professor in Postcolonial Literature at Leeds Beckett University. Her research specialisms are the cultures and literatures of the African Diaspora, with a focus on the folkloric trickster figure, and she is widely published in these fields. Emily has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform and network that aims to bring the critical, creative, academic and artistic aspects of carnival into dialogue with one another. She develops creative work alongside her academic writing and her poetry collection, Bath of Herbs (2023), is published by Peepal Tree Press.
Exhibition: Bharti Kher’s Alchemies at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Bharti’s Kher’s works are woman-centred and deal with patriarchal, societal and domestic restrictions and the possibility of magical transformations. Alchemy is an ancient art which focused on transforming base metal into gold – a practice which long inspired and captivated magicians, scientists and occultists. Drawing from Tibetan and Hindu mythology, Kher’s instillations and sculptures also play with the possibility of change, yet her life-size female figures often seem perpetually constrained – by choking saris, by domestic appliances, by their own adornments. In one of the most brilliant and unsettling pieces at the gallery, we walk into an imprisoning chamber, ‘The Deaf Room’ – each brick made with melted glass bracelets once worn by women. I visited Kher’s exhibition with my 11-year-old daughter who was both transfixed and disturbed by the full-scale sculptures of women in liminal states, part female, part deities, part animal. The sculptures are cast from bodies of women Kher knew personally and she describes them as ‘mythical urban goddesses’ who are ‘part truth, and part fiction, part me, and part you.’
https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/bharti-kher
Book: The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud
Every year I turn to Facebook for book recommendations – I know many writers, poets and friends whose judgment I hold in high esteem, and I am so immersed in the fiction I teach for my Postcolonial literature courses that I often don’t have the time to explore books which don’t appear on my module reading lists. Top of the list of suggestions was The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh (Faber, 2024) by Trinidadian author Ingrid Persaud. So much Caribbean literature and poetry I read focuses on people of African descent, so it was fascinating to explore the love stories of four Indo-Trinidadian women and their complex, destructive relationships with the violent gangster and supreme manipulator Boysie Singh. Although the novel could have fallen into the trap of creating easy stereotypes – the devoted partner and mother Mana Lana, the feisty sex worker Popo, the light-skinned, ambitious, snobby Doris and the tough lesbian Rosie – the narrative manages to keep each character fresh and unpredictable. The Patois dialogue crackles with wit and venom. A storming plotline and a gripping insight into how patriarchy controls and destroys the hearts of women.
https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571386499-the-lost-love-songs-of-boysie-singh
Documentary film: I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
I know so many of you will have already watched this film – the German/American documentary directed by Raoul Peck and brilliantly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Blistering and unforgettable, Baldwin’s writing sings and stings here, as does the footage of him delivering lectures and being interviewed. I was struck once again by his incredible eloquence, his poise, his inexhaustible drive and desire to speak truth to power and push the ignorant to confront the realities of the racism at the heart of American society. Most devastating is viewers’ inability, at times, to make out if footage of police violence against Black Americans (and protests against it) are historic or filmed very recently, highlighting the unchanging nature of police brutality in the US. In many ways, Donald Trump is everything that Baldwin tells us is rotten about America – in human form. What would Baldwin make of him? With great satisfaction, I imagined a 2024 political rally during which Baldwin unleashes his calmly controlled eloquent fury towards him. If you’ve watched this documentary already, watch it again. It is more relevant than ever.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5804038/mediaviewer/rm746915328/?ref_=tt_ov_i
Book: Passiontide by Monique Roffey
I waited for this novel with bated breath and was thrilled to be invited to the London book launch by Roffey in July. As a researcher of Caribbean carnival cultures and the role of women in carnival, Passiontide (2024) already really appealed to me. ‘Passiontide’ is a name for the last two weeks of Lent, and the novel takes place during this time on a fictional island which resembles Trinidad. It riffs on historical events; in 2016 a young Japanese steel pan player, Asami Nagakiya, was found strangled after carnival wearing a yellow bikini. The former major of Port of Spain, Raymond Tim Kee, was reported to have argued that the ‘vulgarity and lewdness’ of women on the road during carnival was partly to blame for crimes against them (Powers, The Washington Post, Feb 26). In response, Calypso Rose wrote the song ‘Leave Me Alone’ (2017) and hundreds of Trinidad carnival goers wore t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase ‘Leave She Alone’ to call attention to the crime and highlight ongoing violence against women. Roffey’s story fictionalises these events, and her characters, in particular the electric dynamic between a Black sex worker and a white English detective, hold us captivated, as does the pace of the novel and the sense of urgency and excitement around escalating feminist protests against the murder. This is a political novel – for Roffey, I expect, it’s a kind of feminist fantasy of what could be achieved if men and women united against femicide. As a bold and searing exploration of the position of feminism in Caribbean politics and the normalisation of violence against women, this is an important and immersive read.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446129/passiontide-by-roffey-monique/9781787303188
Film: The Swimmers
Directed by Sally El Hosaini, The Swimmers (2022) stars real-life sisters Nathalie Issa and Manal Issa and tells the true story of the Syrian Olympic swimming champions, sisters Yusra and Sarah Mardini. I have never watched a film that has brought me so close to the lived experience of refugees and asylum seekers and depicted the terror of crossing the Aegean in a small boat so viscerally. As war breaks out, the sisters’ middle-class family ignore it, until the slow creep of violence and the destruction of infrastructure make it clear they must leave for Europe. At the mercy of people smugglers, they finally make a nightmarish crossing to Lesbos, where second-hand life jackets discarded by those lucky enough to survive the crossing are piled like sand dunes across the beach. In the final credits, we are informed that one of the sisters, Sarah, returned to Lesbos as a volunteer to support incoming refugees in 2016 and was arrested. She now faces trial for alleged human trafficking, money laundering and fraud, which carries a long-term prison sentence. In the climate of increased divisive government rhetoric against ‘small boats’, this film invites viewers to walk in the shoes of some of the world’s most vulnerable people and reflect on the nature of courage.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8745676/fullcredits
A favourite WritersMosaic writer
My favourite WritersMosaic writer is Colin Grant. Grant has the rare ability to bring complex ideas and arguments to the page through writing which is clear, engaging, entertaining and profound. This is a unique skill and requires careful balancing – Grant’s writing is a breath of fresh air in my often elitist and jargon-riddled academic world.