Interview with InUa Ellams

We are incredibly honored to have spoken with Inua Ellams, a London-based poet, playwright, and performer, and for the chance to share his words and poems now. Over the conversation, he spoke to us about how he chooses a medium through which to tell a story and about his beginnings as a creator. Inua also talks about clarity in poetry, giving his words air as he connects to readers and audiences, ending the interview with a resonant reading of his poems from #Afterhours (2017). To watch the interview, visit our Instagram IGTV at https://www.instagram.com/napkinpoetry_review/channel/

How would you describe your beginnings as a poet and your writing process?

A great English teacher when I lived in Ireland taught us a lot about language and precision and poetry and craft. When I left Dublin and returned to London, I had a really difficult immigration status which meant that I couldn’t work. So, I walked through the streets of London with ideas in my head and I slowly began to write them down. Poetry is one of the most accessible art forms, if not the most accessible art form because all you need is something to write with and something to write on and even those aren’t necessary—it’s far easier to write a poem than it is to write a symphony or learn to play an instrument as a mode of self-expression.

I always start with myself when writing poetry. There’s something Steven King wrote in his book On Writing, I’m going to paraphrase it a bit, but he says you should write with the door closed and edit with the door open. That is my approach to writing: when I sit down, my main goal is to create something that is entirely for myself, and then I edit to make the door open. For me, an open door is to imagine that a complete stranger may walk into the room and sit beside me, and I want to write text that is clear enough for them to understand fully what I mean and what I mean to say and who I am. This means to write with a lot of air and awareness and universality. But I think this has to do also with my immigrant background, having grown up in Nigeria, grown up in England, grown up in Ireland, having to navigate that plurality and trying to create safe spaces for all of those parts of myself mixed and that are represented. I think this creates work that is more inclusive than it is exclusive.

As you work with many different mediums—poetry, screenwriting, graphic design—how do you choose which medium is best to tell the story?

I let the work speak to me and let it tell me which might be its best form. Sometimes, out of trial and error you get a sense of what might fit where and why. Usually, my first impulse is to write poetry and sometimes, in trying to tell the truth the poem breaks out into a series of poems, or sometimes the poems break out into a series of voices and I try to tell counterpoints to that voice and then it becomes a conversation. It might just start out as a scene or it might grow to become a play or a screenplay.

Poems:

This is a poem called “The Aftermath,” and it’s written after a poem by the same title by Sir Andrew Motion. In #Afterhours the book, I rewrote poems by classic British and Irish poets, and I do encourage you to purchase my book and read their poems alongside my own. This one is about going for a walk in London.

THE AFTERMATH 2002

Part 3, from A Long Story

#After Andrew Motion

I feel like an exiled child going walkabout by night

for the first time, packing everything I can imagine

I’ll need: spare socks, rain coat, assorted fruit, map

of central London, notebooks, pencils and a torch.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to loose myself with,

exploring the hard labyrinth of the city. In fact I am

already lost, and only half an hour out of the block

of flats, when the landlady sees me, Mrs Adeyemi,

dragging a trolley of yams and plantains; I can just

make out her faded ankara head wrap, and imagine

its pattern of fleeing falcons frozen as I am, mid flight.

She doesn’t know I’m off to find new space. She thinks

my backpack is stacked with biographies, novels

and films from the library which are long overdue.

The soft blanket of dusk is falling from the sky

and the landlady is vanishing into its darkness –

she is the last thing I see before the main road,

which is excessively proving its name, deafening

with the stupendously huge thunderous passing

of fire trucks and sirens, when all I’d prepared for

was the plodding procession of rush hour traffic,

meagre fish-tailing cyclists clicking by and trickles

of head-phoned-pedestrians wanting to be moved

by another beat but in truth, like me, tied to the city’s.

It was that time of year, the aftermath, and when

I ducked under a barrier on the far side of the road,

a monstrous building site was lying entirely desolate.

I had never been there before, and had never felt

such vast enclosed emptiness. With greasy puddles

and a solitary steel-rod rammed into a square

pool of cement, pointing upwards at the sky,

which at the same time was filtering light onto me

– with all this, my head was travelling

at ground level, hunting for a sense of balance.

Did I keep moving forward? I did, at a mouse’s pace,

tumbling through a speckled nest of cigarette stubs,

then squeezing past a broken chainmail of crushed

beer cans and crown caps. Everything was an obstacle

but fascinating, and I had to list down the least detail:

a belt buckle, a razor, a used condom like a flattened slug.

How did I miss the old multi-story carpark mid-centre?

By keeping my head down, as I say, by not looking

at larger things, or what was happening. But there

were real and solid sign posts which announced:

bursting dustbins, proud bollards, parking spaces

– their grey lines like tired arms open to embrace cars.

Everything was as it should be, yet the newspapers

crunched so quiet underfoot I might have been on air –

and it was warm, too, though the moon still danced

round the carpark on all sides, throwing in broad beams

and sword-blades of light at me, hitting home each time.

I found neon signage near the centre, a poor thing

with its wires burnt and hanging out, its black paint

like a shedding second skin, and straight away

sat down, dizzy in the fug of asbestos-dust.

Two pigeons took off in a flurry, then came back

with a synchronised display of ballroom quickstep,

a Rorschach test of a moth fluttered from shadows;

the moon-blades kept up their ninja-like lancing

and struck me so often, I might have bled to death.

I had never planned it, but I felt myself solidifying –

my heart racing to fullness, my brain expanding out,

all of me alive in a mote-dance of dust and soot

and happy, until the moonlight sheathed its blades,

the carpark warmed and brightened, and the sharper

noises made a rhythm that merged with my own beat.

The thing I could not see, stumbling past street lights,

across traffic islands and then the main road, was how

it’d still be going on for years to come, still go on now.

In the long aftermath since, I’ve tried to reach there again,

setting off in secret across the cold urban courtyard

with the landlady lifting her head wrap, the backpack

packed well and sturdy in my hands, the traffic noisy,

and the vast building site opening before me, in which

I never find a single street lamp, much less a carpark,

but the whole enclosure empty, and flat for ever.