CALEB FEMI London’s most recent Young People’s Laureate shares his words of wisdom

The young bard of London

Caleb Femi

“Poetry sets out to take a snapshot of a particular human experience in its rawest form and captures the essence of that experience,” says Caleb Femi, London’s most recent Young People’s Laureate. The writer, teacher and filmmaker has made it his mission to raise the visibility of poetry in the UK capital, while inspiring and nurturing talent. Not a problem for someone who steadfastly believes in the power of poetry to express and navigate one’s life.

Femi was born in Jos, Nigeria, and moved with his family to North Peckham Estate in south London, aged seven. “Through the eyes of a child the estate seemed very pleasant,” he recalls. “The curtains were pulled from my eyes when a little boy who I used to play with died. Then I was more aware of the reality of crime that infested that place.” The boy was Nigerian ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who was stabbed on his way home from school and bled to death in 2000. The case became one of the most written about of its kind in British history.

When Femi was 17, he too was stabbed, and shortly after that he was shot. Around the same time, he started to discover poetry, using music as a gateway. “I loved reading lyrics — Frank Ocean, Bon Iver, The Streets. I’d just play songs over and over again to hear all the words,” he says. “I started writing poetry as a way of making sense of my experiences, not really understanding that it was a therapeutic thing. I was writing about myself and my place in the world, the future, Peckham.” In those early days he was hesitant to call himself a poet. “I didn’t understand the institution of poetry. I didn’t identify with the poets I appreciated, like TS Eliot. I didn’t see myself in him. Then I realised a poet is someone who calls themselves a poet. That’s all.”

Femi’s work has remained autobiographical ever since: distillations from his childhood, being an immigrant, his first experiences of girls and love, and the violence he encountered on the estate. “Being an artist has made me comfortable talking about my past; it has helped me process it and move on.” He’s reluctant however to represent a certain demographic, or take on a reductive label. “I’m a Nigerian, I am black, I am also British. I’m talking about all of that simultaneously.”

Words are not Femi’s only outlet. He also has a keen interest in photography and film, and his poems are often paired with visual narratives. Most of his work online is in video format — short films that feature him performing his work. “It takes a lot longer to get published and have your work in written text than it does to film something and put it online,” he says. “But I still can’t dictate how people will interpret it. Those words were mine when I wrote them, but once they reach your eyes or ears it’s up to you how you want to receive them.”

It’s a generational thing, too, he explains. This is poetry for a modern world where people don’t always have the time to read. “It’s sad, but it is true. The experience of reading poetry has been fucked up. Some schools don’t nurture a love of reading. A lot of passion and creativity is taken out of poetry in exchange for more rigid analysis. Poetry is supposed to be about wonder, creativity, not ‘water means sadness, winter means death’”. Femi speaks from experience — having studied literature at university, he became an English Literature teacher himself for two years.

Femi’s accolades include commissions from Tate Modern and the Royal Society for Literature, and he has performed everywhere from the Royal Festival Hall to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He’s won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam and Genesis Poetry Slam, and has released two documentaries, What Did Love Taste Like in the 70s? and Heartbreak & Grime. He is currently working on his first printed collection, which will take the form of a book filled with photography, poetry and essays. He has also just toured South Africa, Nigeria and Singapore, and appears in a video piece about London playing on screens at Heathrow airport. Having debuted his autobiographical play Goldfish Bowl at the Roundhouse, it is reprised at Battersea Arts Centre this June.

He summarises his life, and the play, as such:

‘Born in Nigeria. Climb a mango tree. Get hit by a Peugeot 405. Move to the North Peckham Estate. Fall in love with Khami. Have a fight by the PE gym. Start writing Grime lyrics. Begin selling drugs. Get my heart broken by Abigail. Get stabbed. Get shot. Move to Marylebone. Become an English teacher. Become a poet. Make a play.’

PUT THEM IN THE ROOM OF SPIRIT AND TIME

Boys who know roadside sun and know where to find fruiting lamp posts. Boys who were raised on the empty shell of a fridge sit with rocks in their stomachs and laugh. Boys who feel like Halloween costumes who wear winter coats in summer heat. Boys who do road, actually do road ten toes on a opp block road. Boys who don’t go to the corner shop on their ones because of boydem or boys like them. Boys who felt grief and its economies of scale in the budget of burial. Boys who look to polar bears for lessons on how to grow white fur on black skin. Boys who always swear they’re five minutes away who know that time is a promise of smoke. Boys who know that a wheel-up bar in a Grime rave is a loop of better days that may not come. Boys whose names sound like the rip of duck tape or the boom of a 12th bell. Boys who sleep in cupboards and in back seats of burning cars. Boys who can’t explain why they flinch at the knock of a door. Boys who live by the code and stay sealed by the liquid of wax. Boys who stopped waiting for a spirit in a holy place and stopped breaking for the morning. Boys in search of a hyperbolic time chamber whose days are tumbling sand in an hour glass.