Two London fires and a critique of grievability: Mournful protest, the Black elegy, and Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019)

ABSTRACT

Although as a response to the New Cross and Grenfell Tower fires Jay Bernard’s collection Surge (2019) engages with the themes of loss and mourning, no critical attempt has been made to approach this complex sequence of poems from the perspective of the poetic elegy. This paper argues that reading Surge as a neo-elegy sheds light on Bernard’s intervention in current discourses on the grievability of Black lives in order to carry out their work of mournful protest. I intend to show the ways in which Surge endorses and enhances the ethico-political purpose and innovative expansiveness – regarding time, voice, and place – that characterize the contemporary Black elegy to address the past and ongoing struggles of the Black British community. Even if rooted in British postcolonial history, Bernard’s project in Surge resonates with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter global movement and the body of Black elegiac poetry developing around it.

KEYWORDS:

• Surge
• Jay Bernard
• neo-elegy
• grievability
• Black British poetry
• Black Lives Matter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Within two days of the alleged arson attack, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee (NCMAC), chaired by John La Rose, was created to protest the handling of the case by the police, the media, and the government. Two inquests were held, in 1981 and 2004, both yielding open verdicts.

2. For an analysis through the concept of “dysgraphia of disaster”, see Kanagavalli Lakshmi Jayakumar-Hazra (2022); for an analysis of Surge alongside other cultural works dealing with the Grenfell tragedy, see Claire Launchbury (2021); for an ecocritical perspective on specific poems, see Lara Choksey (2021).

3. In Caribbean culture and particularly in Jamaica, a duppy is “an apparition” or the “unhappy and sometimes headless ghost of somebody” that returns to haunt the living (Allsopp and Allsopp 2003, 207).

4. See Césaire (1995, 87), from where I also take the quote used in the title of this section, “words vast enough to contain you”. In fact, Césaire raises issues of disposability and grievability on a global scale: “one could grab him [a Jew-man, a kaffir-man, a Hindu, a man-from-Harlem] at any time, beat him up, kill him – yes, kill him too – without having to account to anyone, without having to apologize to anyone” (1995, 85).

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Lourdes López-Ropero

Lourdes López-Ropero is associate professor in the English Department at the University of Alicante, where she teaches contemporary literature in English. Her primary research focus has been in the fields of postcolonial studies and memory studies, with an emphasis on Caribbean and Black British literature. She is the author of The Anglo-Caribbean Migration Novel: Writing from the Diaspora, and her articles have appeared in Commonwealth, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, English Studies or Social Identities, among other journals.