A beautifully read - equally poignant and hopeful, Resurrection of a Black Man takes readers on a journey of all parts love, loss, pain and pleasure, exploring male family dynamics and the Black (British) experience. “Using language that aims to transcend global trauma”, this book offers tales that strike close to the heart of those that identify with any one of the many themes of this book, such as racism, migration, homophobia, fathers & sons, black femininity, intergenerational trauma, and love that often successes all of the above.
The book starts off with a page entitled “100 Ways of Saying Black”, with adjectives from A to W like a painful alphabet of categorisations and stereotypes. This section immediately breaks down the binary of what exactly Black is to those who assume they know so. Including descriptors such as “Barbarian, Refugee, Tar Baby, Half-breed”, the words jump off the page fiercely, prefacing the waves of visceral trauma and pain this book has readers swimming in at times.
What strikes me about Jenny's poems and writing is how freeing the structure feels, not held to strict ideals of sonnets and perfectly timed rhymes, it feels more like a stream of consciousness that evokes the senses and allows readers the ability to travel in time and space with each word. There is a vividness to the picture she paints and a soulful understanding of what it means to be Black, particularly in relation to the lens of others and the experiences of othering. At times it feels like it flows between a love letter and a breakup poem to England, mixing perfectly the complexities and dualities of being Black in Britain.
Standouts for me include Sestina for a Black Policeman;
“He does not know what comes to life inside his back.
Africa - the entire continent - moves in him like a tide”
And like a tide, I feel the pull of my own ancestors as I read, and a deep recognition of feeling more than just myself as a person of colour.
Or Black Men Carry Flowers;
“they grow
on any street. If you look up. see men are grand
estates. a wealth of plants. since torn
from land. they burgeon in the wild”
A delicate ode to Black men and their souls; ripped out from soil yet still continuing to grow amongst the concrete.
And perhaps my favourite - A Man in Love with Plants;
“I’ll start this by transforming his last words.
Help me, please! becomes I have gone upon a mission.”
A heartbreakingly beautiful use of the force of fantasy to reimagine painful endings and words into a powerful declaration of intent.
Packed into a modest 75 pages are years, perhaps centuries of research, information and lived experiences that are intuitively laced and outputted into poems that read like feelings. The structure of the book seems to get looser the further I read, yet the story becomes clearer, pictures come into focus and characters become people I feel that I know. I am left feeling both heavy and light if possible, once I put the book down.
If there’s one thing I can take away from this read, is that this book is a book for the senses. I felt the sticky Jamaican sweat and the harsh English port breeze. I heard the birds hum and the sea lap. I smell the flowers, growing in the most unexpected of places. I taste the rum, a little bitter on my tongue, and I see a history of the complexities of Black masculinity and Black lived experience. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.