Poor

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A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road. Arriving full of dreams about saving others through poetry, he had a rude awakening and quit after two years. This book flows from the fabric of boyhood to the politics and architecture of agony, from the material to the spiritual, always moving, always real. As artists, both Coel and Femi have both done something revolutionary, political and vital with their art form, foregrounding the lived inner-city experiences of black people in the UK today.

It’s likely that Femi and I might have passed each other on the street, sat next to each other on the bus. Gallivanting, really, falling in love with girls, immersing myself in other things like music,” he says. Soft and caressing at parts, angry and demanding at others: there is a perfect balance here of emotion and issue.Caleb has documented the journey and experiences of not just many black youths of this generation but he captures the experience of all disadvantaged youths who are full of promise, hope and talents. Yes, he says quietly, they lived in the same wing, though they were a couple of years apart in age and went to different schools. Femi dedicates his poem “How to pronounce: Peckham” to Damilola Taylor, a name once known to all Londoners, and beyond, when he was killed at the painfully young age of ten. Caleb Femi will be in conversation with Brenda Emmanus for a live-streamed event with Penguin Live and Theatre Peckham on 5 November.

I feel like it was important to make this work, but henceforth I’m solely preoccupied with being a merchant of joy,” he declaims, rising to his feet with a rhetorical flourish. What a thing it was, to be nearly forty, having been an avid reader from childhood, and to finally find, for the first time, my home, a deprived council estate in inner-city southeast London, represented in poetry. Indeed, Coel (whose review of Poor graces the front cover of the 2020 Penguin edition) seems to have responded in the same way to reading Femi’s book: ‘Oh my God, he’s just stirring me. In Poor , Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham.It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name.

Trauma is a Warm Bath’ is the piece that hit me the hardest, and I’m sure readers will have their own one that follows them around for a while after.

In an interview with Vulture, Michaela Coel considered the impact of a childhood lived beside the brutalist architecture of inner city towerblocks: ‘I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. The bespectacled 28-year-old, who sits across a table from me in the deserted cafe of a theatre near his south London home, is astonished when I remark on how dark I found the collection. I literally gasped/caught my breath/cried as I read Femi’s poetry collection, just as I had gasped/caught my breath/cried watching IMDY. He has written and directed short films for the BBC and Channel 4, and poems for Tate Modern, the Royal Society for Literature, St Paul's Cathedral, the BBC, the Guardian and more. He had only properly met his parents less than a year earlier, because they had emigrated to London from Nigeria when he was a baby, leaving their children behind with a grandfather and an uncle until they had saved enough money to bring them over.

Coel, who was in full creative control of the project from start to finish, was rightfully showered in critical plaudits for her exploration of power, consent and lived experiences of black people. There is something reminiscent of William Blake's visionary poetic in Femi's commitment to a realistic worship for places like Aylesbury Estate and North Peckham, as well as their communities . When I read Femi’s great first collection of poetry, I tremble at the genius, and tear up at the sight of his testimonial.I May Destroy You and Poor foreground those stories criminally overlooked, neglected or silenced in media and literature (arguably also in society more widely). Home was “one bedroom and seven bodies making do” on the 13th floor of a tower block: “But all of a sudden that space was transformed by my eight-year-old imagination into a wonderland where everything felt shiny and bouncy,” he says. The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the structural disadvantages of being poor and urban, he points out.