-------------Forwarded Message-----------------
From: Alan Halsey, INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
To: [unknown], INTERNET:[log in to unmask]
Date: 25/02/99 12:00
RE: Mr Tapscott by Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths' poem Mr Tapscott (Amra, L3) probably won't get
widespread coverage as a contribution to the current debate about
'institutional racism' but is relevant as could be. The poem focusses on
the doubtful conviction of Ray Gilbert for murder in Liverpool in 1981;
the account is embedded in a snapshot documentary history of Liverpool,
as background to the constant marginalisation of its immigrant community
by the white power-structure. With attention to the wider historical-
political-philosophical sweep of the breakdown of the British Empire and
the establishment of the so-called Commonwealth with its reification of
white England as a peculiarly privileged historical site. If it were
straight documentary it would impress - so much raw material condensed
into a quite short pamphlet - but more than anything it's Bill's ability
to compress the material in one jump into poetry, flashes of phrase &
image twenty-five to the dozen. I haven't come across anybody else who
can write it that way. The Guardian, predictably, prefers the puffy
rhetoric of Benjamin Zephaniah.
--
Alan Halsey
Thanks for the piece on Bill Griffiths poem.
Maybe not Benjamin Zephaniah (which I didn't read), but I remember Michael Smith reciting Shelley
in Westminster Abbey in the Arena film of 1982. His poems were published as "It a come"
(Race Today, 1986). More recently "teragaton" by Anthony Joseph (Poisonenginepress, 1997),
with a forward by James Oscar. But to quote Anthony: "When I came to London in 1989 I
realised that in order to adapt to the city with my sanity intact, certian adjustments would
have to be made. If not I would be recolonized. The resistance is stronger than memory
but europeisinmyass. relentlessly. The text represents a hyperspacial discourse in which
Euromericafricaribbean agents all have offices in the belly of this beast".
Finally a poem of "mine" from 1986 (also year of memorial reading for Michael Smith).
It is in fact an entire marginal entry in an issue of The Voice, an unremarkable event.
Black 1
A man died in Hyson Green prison
in his cell was only a mattress and a slop bucket
an investigation found that he died
due to a chemical imbalance in his body
caused by lack of water
he had tried to drink his own urine
(Hula Hoop)
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