REVIEW: Caleb Azumah Nelson at The West Cork Literary Festival
A small town in West Cork hosts the biggest names in Literature
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The Marino Church is a tiny stone building at the far corner of Wolfe Tone Square in Bantry, West Cork. It is slightly elevated from the main road to Glengariff and Kenmare that runs past it and sits in the shadow of Marino Terrace which snakes up the hill behind it to the Customs House - which may or may not still be in use. When the church was built there was a railway line that took goods and people to the nearby port which is now the site of a supermarket. If you were to sail directly West from Bantry harbour, after passing Whiddy Island and entering the North Atlantic, your first stop would be St. John’s Newfoundland. The church is no longer used for worship but instead gathers people together to celebrate the arts.
I was there a couple of nights ago for one of the first events of the West Cork Literary Festival which brings some of the biggest names in Irish and international literature to this rural and bohemian corner of Ireland.
The venue was full for an evening with two contrasting writers: from Dublin Ronan Hession and from South London, the man I had come to see, Caleb Azumah Nelson.
I am no familiar with Hession’s work but will certainly look up his latest novel, Ghost Mountain, which is about a mountain that suddenly appears in the middle of a town and how this affects the members of the community.
The venue felt like the perfect fit for Azumah Nelson’s writing. The building like the writing is small and intimate but carries a much larger meaning. Caleb’s first two novels, Open Water and Small Worlds, are written in a close intense narrative voice that make them feel at once intensely personal and universal ( See my review of the books here ). Again I couldn’t help thinking about the way that religious people talk about their relationships with their Gods being very personal although the teachings that mono deistic religions preach are intended as universal truths.
The event was hosted by Irish Times writer Nadine O’Regan who is a knowledgeable and warm host who has an unfortunate habit of asking long and complex questions. Her interview technique was like a musician finding the right chords to make a key change between two songs in a medley that are unsuited to sit together. And as successful and talented as Ms O’Regan is, there is a basic rule of hosting which is to ask short questions and let the Guests speak because the audience has paid to see the stars.
Azumah Nelson spoke about his creative process and the interplay between music and his writing and the importance of finding the right playlist to write to. He described songwriting as ‘condensing story whereas a book allows you to expand’. There is a precision in music with time signatures, keys and notes while at the same time, he says, it offers the opportunity to “express emotions that evade language”. The writer understands music from having played violin and being immersed in his dad’s vinyl collection of 90s R&B bangers. In his books there is music in the character’s lives and during the event he spoke about the rhythm of his words being influenced by music but also observed that when his character Stephen makes a musical mistake, his friend Del and the rest of the band follows him and from that mistake something new, beautiful and exciting is created. What a clarion call to creatives and the population in general.
O’Regan asked about Caleb’s time as a scholarship boy at a prestigious private school. This could have led to an extended interrogation of the English class system and how class / privilege / wealth identifiers are used by specific groups to recognise and reward and how this manifests in Caleb’s work and society. Much was left unsaid and implied and it would have been fascinating to hear from someone who has lived a duality - Ghanaian parents, British born, working class boy, rich man’s school - but the host jumped in too soon and spent time and energy trying to translate the questions and topics into something that might also be found in Dublin while shoe horning in a reference about diversity in Dublin. The thing is, it’s ok if Dublin doesn’t have the same history of multi-ethnicity as London and if some subjects don’t correspond between countries - the importance in Caleb’s response was the specificity rather than the universality.
Caleb Azumah Nelson writes about Peckham and now lives in Gipsy Hill, which is an area of South London just around the corner from where I used to live. He brings South East London to life in his writing so much so that the city becomes an integral character in each story. I spoke to him about this and because he brings to life the challenges faced by some communities in London I asked if he feels hope that positive change will happen with a new Government in the UK. He said that for him hope comes from the personal, from the community that he knows, from his neighbour leaving him meals to eat when he returns home from travelling or from his mother telling him to come round and get his washing done.
This sense of having to be self-reliant, of knowing that the people, systems and institutions that are in place to care for us do not function for everyone permeates Caleb’s writing.
He is not setting out a grand political manifesto of ‘and let me tell you another thing that we need change’. He is not writing bluntly “young black men are 42 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the Police than young white men” but by writing about a character and community that is affected so much by institutional action that it becomes part of their everyday he makes the point much more forcefully.
As Caleb put it in Bantry, he has his characters move quietly but fully through their lives and the spectacle in his work comes from the mundanity. The personal becomes universal.
The JasonWard Creative Substack is for readers like you. I really appreciate your time spent here and invite you to support my work by taking out a subscription. A paid subscription gives you access to exclusive content plus the entire archive of over 100 articles, reviews, interviews, podcasts and playlists all full of creative insight designed to help you develop your creative projects and practise.
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE WEST CORK LITERARY FESTIVAL CLICK HERE
TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CALEB AZUMAH NELSON AND HIS WORK CLICK HERE