Surge and Assembly

boundaries, race, form, archives, narrative

argument

Racism undergirding social, political and economic boundaries governing Black experience in UK

Connections of history to the present: larger patterns beyond current issues

The cultural archive: “a roadmap to navigate what seems like a repetition of history”

Surge: 18th Jan 1981 New Cross Fire + 2017 Grenfell Fire

Brown: dismantles Black female success story

Both polemical narratives in poetic-anthology/archive and prose forms, acting in proximity to creative criticism: the life beyond the critical Affect

Form: argument

Urgency and crisis of the immediate chafes up against convergence with history: both are in the spaces of reverberating aftermaths

Theories of the contemporary deal not only with breaking past from present but explore through formal means the interrogations of continuity—form has active force in shaping this

Surge form argument

borrows from written and visual archives, the limits of the archives

“The vexed relationship between public narratives and private truths”

The archives left behind in surge—> begins with the archive—> the anthology itself as a counter-archive, yet sensitive of its limits

Ark: “now shall we see what can

And cannot be kept?

Ark: “the rusted paper clip…

its brittle red remains

Ark: which words to file/

the damp smoke and young bnes udner

Ark: fire, corpus,

body, house

Saidiya Hartman: critical fabulation

To tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling

Hiss

Bridges the gap between slave-past and New Cross

Hiss vertebrae or fetters?

bedsheet or slave skin?

Hiss: whatitwas whatitwas

whatitwas

^^^historical reality consigned to non-language

Andrea Brady: dangers of archive

careful lyrical invention…resist[ing] voyeurism

Assembly form argument

self-consciousness on a metafictional level of its effect

A counter-narrative to what is actually told in assemblies

Tension between the always contemporariness of prejudice and the particular context of the post-windrush, post-financial crash right now

Fractured into vignettes—> flurry of micro-aggressions

Katrin Becker: Black Bildungsroman

1990s-2000s popular form

A “master plot of individual upward mobility” tempered by Assembly’s exhaustion

Its a story.

There are challenges

^^ meta-conscious, invites suspicion of its own construction—how much do we trust text as experiential archive?

After years of struggling…i’m ready to slow my arms…

i’m exhausted. Perhaps its time to end this story

Systemic erasure of black archives

the government-sanctioned frenzy of mass document destruction

A deliberate…exclusion…within the country’s national curriculum

The erasure tiself was erased

Assembly form: social criticism

Turns to manifesto/textbook/creative criticism

Assembly: boundaries of form/language

The colonial forms of language and knowledge

The boundaries of the form itself—> the master narrative of upward mobility

Yet remains experimental—> a tension

My only tool of expression is the

language of this place. Its bias and assumptions

Silence surely was

the least harmful choice (is it?)

Surge 1980s social turning point: race riots

2nd March 1981: Black People’s Day of Action

SWAMP81: nearly a 1000 black and brown people interrogated or detained within 5 days in South London

April 1981; Brixton Riots

Scarman Report: found the police responsible for the riots—> not serving the community

Acts as a fulcrum for social politics, and Black experience

Clearing: he takes my head and

puts it in a plastic bag

^^ apostrophised dead body

Clearing: I watch his face

turn away

The poster: Black People’s Day of Action

WE WILL NOT LET THE POLICE PLAY AROUND WITH OUR LIVES

Songbook: two step fahwah an

ah two step back

^^ Bernard performs with rhythm, as song

Gyal love reggae

this wicked emcee

Linton Kwesi Johnson 1981

New Crass Massakah

Inspires songbook, combining culture and grief in patois dialect

Duppy

Caribbean spirit/ghost

I see my picture on a sign

The crowd passes through me

Andrea Brady: community resistance

conviviality as a “resistant trope” of “communal belonging…in the aftermath”

Assembly economic boundaries: argument

post-imperial/windrush pressure and the myth of meritocracy perpetuated to future generations

A counter-story to this: a dissatisfaction story

Pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves…

Up. Overcoming. Transcending, et cetera

The word “transcending” comes back at the end: what does this really mean?

Boundary-crossing into middle class

codeswitching framed as play-acting, generalising identities into types

Play this part with the veneer

Of new-millennial-money coolness

Ali Meghli: blackness and the middle class

A symbolic boundary is deployed between middle-class culture…and black folk

The other day, a man called me

fucking n____r

I am what we’ve always been to the empire:

pure fucking profit

How many women and girls

have i lied to?

Natasha Brown: Black Bildungsroman

we can have a dissatisfaction story too

This is everything.

i have everything

Surge: past and future argument

cross-generational traumas and grief between New Cross and Grenfell

Ark II

repetition across counterpart

Travelling through anthology like travelling through time—> yet repetitive

Prose poem: fractured with dashes—deconstructed

Ark II: night meets me

Near Ladbroke Grove

Repeated Ark II: warm

June mornings

Ark II: imagistic convergences

underpass—> the memorial

A friend sends me a link to the burning tower effigy/in the 80s people sent letters

Romero-Lopes: memory and witnessing

whereby post-memory meets witnessing

I am haunted by this history

But i also haunt it back

Surge past and future: immediacy and longevity

what do you include and how do you make it last

Archiving as the official process of destroying and reshaping narratives

There is a constant remidner of what we don’t/cant see—> the text is self-reflexive of this

Peg

Personal interlude

Sexuality and gender

Tonight we are

boys together

Peg: tracing the city

loughborough camberwell shakespeare rd

Now we are

boys together. Bend.

Chemical: screaming crackle.

frayed spirit.

Chemical: black…the last twisted shape

their bodies will take

Losers

internal and end-rhymes

Alliteration

Frustration and suffocation

Lose and lose. To be the last

in the lotto of loss

Will anyone lessen the losing/

will anyone lessen the loss?

After the war the crumbling empire

sent again for her colonial subjects

Joanna Biggs: time in Assembly

Time goes forward and yet she doesn’t want to tbe part of this

Workers who were

grateful and industrious

This is it, end of the

line. I am done

The cancer

As a deus ex machina delivering an end to the story

Yet the book does not end with hander, doesn’t let us off the hook

She says i’m

strong, a fighter

Katrin Becker: survival

part of late capitalism- “the cultural imagery of…survivorship that overemphasise[s] individual agency”

Surviving makes me a participant

in this narrative

Pain: transcendent—the

undoing of construction

The idea of transcendence returns in a different light: freedom in form but not talking about freedom—> the form is essential to this esape—the novel sprints away from us the whole way through: unnamed characters, general shapes

Surge-1980s turning point but Assembly: the always of capitalist cycles

seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable

Consumes and subsumes all of previous history