“For here, we have not an enduring city, but we are looking for the city to come”: Dysgraphia of disaster and wayward Black futures in Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019)

ABSTRACT

Building upon Christina Sharpe’s concept of “dysgraphia of disaster”, this article interrogates how Jay Bernard’s poetry collection Surge commemorates all young Black British people who died prematurely in the New Cross and Grenfell fires in 1981 and 2017, thereby contesting the official narrative of the coroner and government and exploring alternative forms of legal expertise. Bernard’s work seeks to resuscitate and empower the voices of the dead, following the Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Immersion into the archives of Black British history, mainly of the George Padmore Institute, discloses the poet’s “queer archival journey”, which establishes a paradigm of embodied delight in foregrounding the intersection of Blackness, queerness and archival work. It also displays the poet’s work of auto-designation which frees Bernard from the classification that subjected Black queer men and women to surveillance and punishment and destabilizes both proper subjects and subject matters of queer theoretical inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• Black British poetry
• New Cross fire
• archives
• multilingualism
• queer
• police brutality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Department of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, especially Rachael Gilmour, Molly MacDonald, and Rupert Dannreuther for organising the interview with Jay Bernard and for their guidance. I am also grateful to the Stuart Hall Foundation for hosting a discussion with Jay Bernard, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Roger Robinson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Cathie Kanagavalli Lakshmi Jayakumar-Hazra

Cathie Kanagavalli Lakshmi Jayakumar-Hazra is a teaching associate at Queen Mary University of London. She specializes in Black diasporic literature, human rights, and postcolonial theory. Her current work focuses on the topics of solitude, migration, and human rights in British Caribbean novels. Previous research projects include eco-criticism, the role of water in African and Caribbean literature, and decolonization of museums’ practices.