Hiram Maxim invented many things, some less destructive than others. A pine vapour inhaler, for example, that he claimed could relieve asthma, tinnitus, hay fever and catarrh. He fondly named it ‘Pipe for Peace’. Others called it quackery. His first patent was for a hair-curling iron. Later came mousetraps, sprinklers, devices to discourage ships from rolling over, and the invention for which he is most famous: a recoil-operated machine gun. “If you want to make a pile of money,” a friend advised him, “invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.” Well, he did. And, they did. They also killed Africans (see Hilaire Belloc’s ‘The Modern Traveller’: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not”). It was a killing machine, and earned him much more praise than when he applied himself to inventing an “apparatus to prevent human suffering”, i.e. that stupid inhaler that he hoped might unblock people’s noses. The Maxim gun was an essential tool of imperial conquest; the ‘Scramble for Africa’ wouldn’t have been the same without it.
This is useful backstory if you want to fully appreciate Francis-Xavier Mukiibi’s poem ‘To The One Who Holds the Maxim Gun’, which was itself a response to an exhibition at the British Museum.
Mukiibi’s entry has strengths. He uses the tools at his disposal to maximise the impact of his poetry. We’re in a war zone – we don’t know exactly where – among infantrymen of the British imperial army. Staccato sentences and broken phrases mimic the uneven rhythms of combat; pauses, quick changes of pace and prompted audience claps reflect the rat-tat-tat of gunfire fading in and out. Even the stark blue lighting is on his side, not to mention whoever edited the video. The cuts match the line breaks. Overall, it is a slick, immersive production, building in a crescendo to a climactic (though ambiguous) pop. A gunshot. Whose? Mukiibi enunciates well, projects confidence, and has clearly thought about how best to bring life to the words he’s written. He has also written a decent poem: light on description, figurative when it needs to be (“trigger tremors through your bone until / your body reborn as blitz”), with repetition and quick line breaks to build pace and tension.
But it is not the best of this year’s shortlisted performances. Nor is Takunda Muzondiwa’s ‘Diamonds’ or Maureen Onwunali’s ‘When I give up my seat for you’, though they too have their strengths.
‘Diamonds’ begins in the voice of a wedding celebrant – “We are gathered here today”, etc. – but subverts the register in order to highlight the suffering caused by the global diamond trade.
So, with this diamond ring
do you take joy
in how many Africans died mining your happily ever after?
To my mind, Muzondiwa abandons the conceit too quickly (and with too little subtlety), and the setup would mean more if the question were less rhetorical. In other words, I want the celebrant character to be more believable, to fool the audience for longer. The fact that the question can only have one answer – er, No – means the rest of the poem risks sounding like a rant. Perhaps the point is to be unsubtle, the subject matter demanding directness. Unless you’re a venture capitalist with an imperial bent, there aren’t really two ways to feel about the manufactured scarcity of diamonds, let alone blood diamonds. But poetry as a medium allows for so much nuance and ambiguity. Muzondiwa succeeds in her handling of colour and symbolism. White, innocence, sacrifice: she hates how the diamond “mimics ice, cold like the corpses that died to unearth them”. Red, blood, guilt: “We all clap till our hands bleed raw / leaving us all red-handed”. But the play structuring the poem, which begins to lull us into being guests at a wedding – a false sense of security – fails to realise its full potential.
So many unnamed men have been sacrificed
in the name of Michael Hill and Tiffany’s.
So tell me, is it wicked of me
to call this wedding a funeral?
Maureen Onwunali’s message is very different. ‘I used to think we were doomed as a civilisation,’ she says in her interview segment with the Forward Foundation. ‘And then I got on the tube.’ Hurrah, hope at last! Onwunali finds solidarity and society deep underground, in the “accidental eye contact” of strangers in a moving carriage of a London tube. “When I give up my seat for you,” she says in her poem (of the same name), “I mean, their attempts to divide us will always fall short. I know you were also born scared. We share the same furrowed brow.” Delivered with a knowing, unassuming half-smile, theatrics reduced to a few hand gestures, Onwunali evidently has faith in the words of her poem. As such, she doesn’t so much take us on a journey as invite us to sit. Sit with her – indeed, in her seat – and sit with the idea that strangers being cordial in a fast-moving underground box is, in and of itself, evidence of civilisation. ‘When I give up my seat for you’ belongs in the artistic tradition of locating beauty in the mundane, romance in the aromantic, and so on. It is a well-trodden path and, oddly enough, would seem more hackneyed and overdone were it not for Onwunali’s calm, steady delivery.
When I give up my seat for you on this London tube I mean
‘stranger’ is just an eight-letter word for blood that flows outside of me […]
Come share this recycled breath with me
But if it were up to me, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Performed would go to either Ellie Rose Amit’s ‘Frozen Fruit’ or Biff Smith’s ‘Dumbarton East’. The former for poetic flare and unfurling like a flower, the latter for taking me by surprise, and making me laugh out loud more than once.
‘Frozen Fruit’ is about Amit’s first love, or first kiss. First extended bout of kissing, maybe. “We kiss for the following hour, in the MUGA”, Amit and Ruby, aged thirteen or fourteen, testing and dispelling the myth that being gay is contagious, and “this time the blade does its job”. The performance is tight, with controlled, precise cadence and well-held pauses. Repetition, subversion and a conversational tone make it engaging, accessible and delightfully light-footed. Amit told the Forward Foundation that a “seamless merging of theatre and poetry is what I hope to do with my work”. Their writing influences form an eclectic lineup, from James Baldwin to Little Simz via Leonard Cohen, Kae Tempest and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. A year at Jacques Lecoq Theatre School in Avignon may have rubbed off: Amit has poise and timing; their movements are subtle and deliberate. And the poem stands up on its own, with changes of pace and mood written into its structure and syntax. Images echo throughout. Ruby is ruby, like ruby-red chard or the ruby Amit affixes to their crown – “a real queen”. Frozen fruit in the Nutri-Bullet; “I can’t move, I’m frozen fruit”; fruit melting and spilling “out of me and eventually onto Ruby”; “Wet. Wet. Ruby …”; until it comes full circle:
I am diced. I am dyked. I am fruit, in and around the Nutri-Bullet tip.
My hips are weak, hardly childbearing, my mother tells me the next
morning as she pours a kale and carrot juice into her glass with speckles of
ruby-red chard.
And so to Smith, Biff Smith, who insists, “Go to the open mics. There is much to be learned here”. Wise words, and Smith appears to have heeded them. ‘Dumbarton East’ is the most interesting of the five poems shortlisted by the Forward Prize, partly because it is not about any of the spoken word poetry topics typically filed under Done to Death. (Also because it is tightly rehearsed, varied, and weird.) Stage poets often mine deeply personal experiences for their poems. There are good reasons for this: relatability, scope for emotional connection, therapeutic value. But it’s also a get-out. At worst, emotionally manipulative. The most common downfall is being unoriginal. Earning solidarity is one thing, getting audiences to actually like your poem – your poetics – is another. What Smith achieves with ‘Dumbarton East’ is the delicate act of hinting at something deeply personal by talking about something completely different, and trivial. It is about a train station, and the idiosyncratic configuration of the Scottish rail network. Thank God!
“This is a love poem,” he opens. Black shirt, black trousers, boots. Intonated in crisp Glaswegian. “For a train station...”. Critiquing it feels like picking apart a joke, which only rids it of its humour. Yet here we are, our attention drawn to the fact that some towns (e.g. Dumbarton) have an East and a Central train station, but lack a West. Others have a West but not an East. “Odd, that,” muses the poet, building slowly and steadily this, er, train of thought. “Lopsided. Almost as though the town-planners overestimated just how much Dumbarton there was.” Quite. “Well, clearly not enough to balance the compass.” These are mundane thoughts; it is absurd to be imbuing them with meaning. And yet Smith brings them to life with ample silence, occasional flamboyances – just enough theatricality – and dynamics. He is absolute sincere; his movements are studied. He knows when to speed up, when to stop, and when to look quizzically at his open hand or suspiciously at the audience. (They’re laughing, by the way.) “Let us deal with one disappointment at a time.” The stark lighting also helps: this poem is about binaries, sort of, “a balancing of books, if I may”. For me, it just works. It’s tight, crisp, bizarre and delightfully funny, yet manages to hint at questions about why we love, what we love, how we find meaning in life … while sticking close to Smith’s preoccupation with, of all things, train stations.
I think then of the peace that comes in being forgotten.
And then how getting lost was the escape route all along.
And I wish for you your turn to ride on a one-way ticket
clattering happily down the Never Line, calling at Atlantis!
Shangri-La! El Dorado! Elysian Fields and a Wonderland!
Arriving at last at the one you never had and so loved the best
Dumbarton West.
Bruno Cooke is The Friday Poem’s Spoken Word Poetry Editor. He has lived in China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, cycled in more than 50 countries, and written for several news, opinion and humour websites. Find more of his creative writing on his personal Substack publication called My Special Interest.
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