A NOVEL IDEA
Like most people in the English-speaking world (and probably beyond), I’d heard that everyone had a novel in them. I too may have had one, but I wasn’t thinking of writing one. When I won the BBC Young Playwright of the Year Award in 1998, the producer Jeremy Mortimer kept telling me I must write a novel. I said yes to keep him happy, but didn’t think seriously about it until Emma Matthewson came into my life.
Emma had been my editor at Puffin, and through her I learned how important editors are. She could read a poem with a child’s mind, and she taught me how to use constructive criticism to my advantage, but she also taught me how to stand my ground when necessary. Emma was a rock. I had by now done three books with her at Puffin, then suddenly she went to Bloomsbury. She was going to a job she wanted, which was cool, but I was losing her, which was bad. After working with Emma I felt that my key relationship with a publisher was with the editor, rather than the contracts department. This was before I had an agent. So when my editor moved, I felt my partner in rhyme had deserted me.
But it wasn’t long after Emma joined Bloomsbury that she asked me if I would consider writing a novel for teenagers. She had spent many hours listening to me tell her stories about myself as a teenager, and she knew I had a strong empathy with young people, but I wasn’t sure that meant I could write a novel for them. I told her I’d think about it.
A few weeks later I found myself in Ramallah, in Palestine, where I was touring with a great Palestinian poet called Mahmoud Darwish and other poets from the region. With us there was a British poet and translator called Sarah Maguire. Sarah had been a friend of mine for years, and over that time we had given each other advice on various matters, so I trusted her. She was one of a large group of poets who think we should stick to poetry, and that writing a novel is like selling out.
I told Sarah about Emma’s offer and asked what she thought. She said: ‘You go back there, Benjamin, and stand in front of her, stamp your feet and tell her you’re a poet and not a novelist.’
So I did. I went back to see Emma, and although I didn’t stamp my feet (I just placed them gently on the ground), I said, ‘I’m a poet, not a novelist. I write poems, not novels.’
Emma heard me out and then smiled. She said: ‘Okay, Benjamin, here’s a cheque. Go away, write a couple of chapters, and if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry, keep the money and forget it. But if you like what you’ve done, then carry on.’
I’d often been told I had it in me to write a novel, and other people had watched me entertaining their children, but what really persuaded me wasn’t the lack of black authors generally, but the lack of black authors writing for young people. I felt there was a need to write about issues concerning black youth, and more importantly that young people needed to see black writers on the bookshelves of their school libraries.
I had nothing to lose, so I decided to give it a try.
Word began to get round that I was doing this, and I became acutely aware that many people were expecting me to write a ‘black novel’ – one set in Brixton, Moss Side or Handsworth; one that would have obvious connections to my poetry and was at least a little autobiographical, but I wanted my first novel to take me into a different world. It didn’t need to be immediately identifiable as having come from a black writer, and it didn’t need to be set in the black underworld.
However, I did want to write about discrimination, so instead of writing about racial discrimination or sexual discrimination, as I had been doing for most of my life, I came up with the concept of facial discrimination, and the story slowly developed. The main character in the book, called Face, is Martin, a good-looking fourteen-year-old white boy who wants to be an actor and model, and seems to have everything going for him until he suffers severe injuries in a car crash and is terribly scarred. Then his life and outlook change forever. His face is no longer what the acting world needs; he isn’t going to work as a model, for sure, and his friends change. Most importantly he learns not to judge people by their looks.
Normally the time spent writing a poem from beginning to end isn’t too long, but I suddenly found that I was living with characters I’d invented. I might be standing at a bus stop and I’d start wondering what a character would be thinking. A woman might smile at me (that happens from time to time), and I would ask myself, would she have smiled if my face was disfigured? I would go into a shop and wonder what a particular character might buy. I began to inhabit the world I was creating.
Before I started writing Face I used to listen to white, middle-class writers on Radio 4 talking about how their characters would take over and walk into rooms and places without their permission. I would mock them and think them deluded, but then it started happening to me. I became my book, obsessed with everything from the way my characters thought to the way they breathed. It was a beautiful torment, a creative madness I would come to crave.
Officially my novels were for teenagers – well, that’s how they were marketed – but deep down there was a lot in them that I also wanted to say to adults. Teenagers knew a lot about what I was writing about, so I wanted old adults to look into the world of young adults. I’m amazed at how quickly adults forget they were children. It’s as if after they’ve outgrown their childhoods they get envious of the next generation and so blame them for all society’s ills and curse and scorn them for having young fun.
In twenty-first-century Britain it’s unacceptable to say, ‘I hate black people’ or ‘I hate white people’; you cannot go around saying you hate someone because they are disabled, gay, straight, dyslexic or even eccentric, but somehow it’s okay to say, ‘I hate kids.’ Posh people say it at dinner parties, sexy people say it to sound forever sexy and comedians say it to sound funny. We can’t all be black, white, gay or straight; we can’t all be posh, sexy, funny, dyslexic or eccentric, but we were all once kids. Can we really hate our young selves that much?
The response to Face exceeded expectations – well, they exceeded mine – and the publisher was pleased too. When I began to write it I thought it would be my one and only novel, and when it was done I thought, Cool, I got away with it! But an excited Emma came back to me with the sales figures, others began comparing me to all these big names in children’s literature, and my readers started asking for more. Emma said I should get an agent, so I did, and then I got to work on my second novel, Refugee Boy.
Again, I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old. This time I created the character of a young man who has just left a war situation in Ethiopia and moved to a strange country called England. It struck me that most people thought of refugees as adults, and I could understand why. In news reports the cameras usually focus on the grown-ups, and the big questions are always about whether they are ‘real’ or bogus, and what to do with them. But I would watch the children they had in tow, and I’d always wonder how they coped with what was happening to them.
I knew what it felt like to go from city to city, but what would it feel like to go from country to country? Kids need friends and family; they like to play, and they like stability, so what would it be like to have those things taken away, or to have seen war and brutality at such a young age? These were the questions I wanted to explore in Refugee Boy.
I didn’t turn my back on poetry, as some people feared; I began to appreciate it even more. I read a lot more, and even found myself doing a residency. It started with a guy called Chris Mead, who was the director at The Poetry Society. He had the idea of placing me with the International Red Cross. I was asked to do an interview with them, which I did, but during the conversation I began to interview them. For me, the biggest issue was about neutrality. When I asked them how far they took this principle they told me it was absolute.
I understood how they needed to assure all parties they would stay neutral if they were to be allowed to work in war zones, but I told them that if I saw an atrocity being committed, or knew for sure who had committed any such act, I would have to speak out. I understood them as an institution but I also knew me as an individual, and so I said, ‘This is not going to happen.’
Chris Mead wasn’t put off by this; in fact it inspired him to think again. We talked about the possibility of me being a writer in residence in a police station, which I thought was a good idea, but we went with a residency at Tooks Chambers, a legal firm headed up by Michael Mansfield QC. Michael and his family was already like family to me. I can’t remember how I first met them – I’m sure it had something to do with campaigning work, or trying to get someone out of jail – but I do know that we became very close over the years, and I have a special place in my heart for Freddy, Michael and Yvette’s son. I watched him grow up to become a deeply caring and creative poet, rapper and teacher.
The placement at Tooks Chambers was just right. I already knew most of the team there, and I was familiar with the work they did, but being attached to them gave me a much deeper insight into legal processes. Having been in court myself a few times, it wasn’t strange territory for me, but being in court as a creative person provides a unique opportunity to express the emotional aspects of what actually takes place.
I gave a poetry reading to mark the end of my residency. Michael Mansfield sat behind me, Doreen Lawrence stood at the side of me, and many barristers stood in front of me. Most people knew Doreen as the mother of a murdered young black man called Stephen Lawrence, but I knew her as a lover of art and poetry. That other stuff was put upon her by the evil that men do.
After the reading I noticed that more than half of the attendees were in tears. I spoke to many of them afterwards. I didn’t just come out and ask, ‘Why are you crying?’ I asked in a general way how they felt the reading went, and they all said roughly the same thing – which was (to paraphrase) when they are in court they are so involved in the case and the need to deal with the facts that they detach themselves from what may be going on emotionally. And that’s just what I didn’t do. I had a minor interest in legal procedures, but I was more interested in using the power of poetry to capture what was happening to all those involved emotionally, and that included the judges.
For some reason unknown to me, the judge in the Ricky Reel inquest asked me to sit next to him. Every now and again he would ask me if I was comfortable, and then he would carry on regardless. The residency was the main inspiration for my 2001 collection of poems, Too Black, Too Strong.