Exploring Jay Bernard's 'Surge'
I remember first reading Jay Bernard’s ‘Surge’ – and then reading it again, and again, and again. Not just because it was my assigned reading for that week of my module, but because the words struck such a powerful chord within me.
Bernard penned the collection after being invited to the George Padmore Institute as writer in residence. The collection serves as both an insight and an artistic recount of the events of the New Cross Massacre – a house fire which killed thirteen young black people, and it is often regarded as the result of a racist attack by white supremacists. Initial police investigations discovered an incendiary device underneath a window, which was later retracted to say that the fire has instead begun in the centre of the room. Utter radio silence from both the media and the government, prompted a group named the New Cross Massacre Action Committee to supervise their own interviews – which predominantly informed Bernard’s writing.
The incident stands in conjunction with recent tragedies such as Grenfell, the murder of Mohamud Mohammed Hussan in Cardiff earlier this year, and the treatment of Meghan Markle in exemplifying the racism within British systems. To this day, the New Cross Fire case remains unsolved (with a 2004 report accepting that the blaze was intentional, but explicitly rejecting the motive as racist) and justice for the thirteen young black people killed in the fire, with one survivor taking their own life eighteen months later. Shockingly, the only response to the incident addressed the activists, rather than the families mourning the loss of their children.
The climate in which Bernard wrote ‘Surge’ is in the wake of the Grenfell disaster and the Windrush Scandal. The climate in which I’m writing about it is one which has seen national uproar over a white woman’s murder, but Black women’s murder and disappearance have gone largely ignored. I’m appalled to only have learned the names and stories of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and of Blessing Olusegun from vigils and demonstrations in Parliament Square over the past few days.
Bernard writes that “the most chilling aspect of this was the lack of closure, the lack of responsibility, and the lack of accountability at the centre of both the New Cross Fire and Grenfell.”
The poem ‘Ark’ addresses Bernard’s process of working through the archives. It speaks to itself, in acknowledging both the archives and history. The line “when a crowd black as my hand gathered one morning, came over Blackfriar’s Bridge, were heckled by press” sets itself as immanent in history. It simultaneously constructs and exists within a narrative, with its manifestation of the artefacts within Bernard’s hands and its poetic reimagining of the scene. The idea of the poems giving life to the narrative is directly juxtaposed by the reminders of the scene in which Bernard is discovering them, conveyed through lines such as “I file it under fire, corpus, body house”.
We also see this idea of birthing a narrative mirrored in the lines “mi brudda dead, mi brudda dead, mi brudda dead-o mi sista dead, mi sista dead, mi sista dead-o” – we don’t know whether this is a quotation from an audio clip within the archive, or Bernard’s own reimagining of the mourning families. The musical lyricism of the lines is reminiscent of the melodic arrangements associated with the civil rights movement and transatlantic black culture, embedding the lines within the historical fight for equality.
This is more noticeable in the poem ‘Songbook’, which was inspired by Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘New Cross Massahkah (1983)’. The poem directly mimics dancehall rhythms and is written in a Patois, showing again Bernard’s incredible ability to write poetry that both speaks to itself and its history. Victoria Adukwei Bulley wrote on this exact idea, saying that the poems are spoken by ‘voices who transcend notions of presence as contingent upon the physical body’. Bulley characterises the personas of the poems within ‘Surge’ as existing outside of the historical narrative; they exist separately to the binaries of life and death. Jay Bernard sings Songbook in performance, you can listen to it here to give an idea of how the upbeat melody of the poem contradicts the harrowing images of the fire within the poem. The masterful change of tone and rhythm – which is best conveyed through Bernard’s performance of the poem – seeks to mark the macabre mood which intensifies throughout the poem, culminating in stanza thirteen
“me seh black smoke ah billow at di house in New cross/
me seh black smoke ah billow at di house in New cross/
me seh blood ah goh run for di pain of di loss/
me seh black smoke ah billow at di house in New cross”.
‘Songbook II’ truly exemplifies this eradication of the binaries of life and death; following the semi-mythical character off ‘Miss D’, it sets her both within the other speakers of the collection and the grieving parents. Meaning that, the speakers of Bernard’s other poems are either dead or alive, but Miss D occupies both binaries – she transcends the barrier between the living and the dead.
‘How many times has Miss D died?
How many times has she given us life
How many children does Miss D have?
As many as the people hearing this song’
This stanza seems to confirm that Miss D defies the boundaries of life and death, in the direct juxtaposition between ‘how many times has Miss D died?’ and ‘how many children does Miss D have?’ Although the stanza as a whole serves the contradiction between whether Miss D is dead or alive.
Interspersed with pictures and posters, the poems in the collection give voice to the young black people killed that night, and the black community who took a stand against a racist government. It is both a commemoration and a call to action.
You can buy a copy of Surge here.
Written by Emily Taylor-Davies
Emily is an English and French undergrad at King's College London and works part-time as French Language ambassador. When she isn't staring into the abyss of Microsoft Teams, Emily loves reading about Art History, fangirling over Virginia Woolf, and discovering cool new coffee shops.
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