How a family tragedy inspired the best poem of 2020
Perhaps three years ago – “three or two, it just seems like a blur,” she says – Malika Booker found her mother Clara collapsed on her kitchen floor. She had suffered a debilitating stroke. Since that day, Booker and her two brothers, Philip and Kwesi, have felt adrift. “It’s a really horrible storm that we’re caught in,” she says. “We’ve been living in it.”
As a poet, and a creative writing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, Booker usually turns her experiences into writing. But her mother’s stroke, made worse by early dementia, was something she found almost impossible to process.
It wasn’t until the following summer, when she was coming back one day from feeding Clara at a care home, and feeling happy that she had helped her mother to eat, that she realised she could write a poem celebrating those small moments – “each spoonful of pureed food slipped into her mouth/ like a tender offering,” as she eventually put it in a poem called “The Little Miracles” (below).
This Sunday, “The Little Miracles” won the ￡1,000 Forward Prize for the year’s best poem. It’s an award that’s previously boosted the careers of some of the UK’s most celebrated writers, including Don Paterson, Jackie Kay and Alice Oswald. When we speak, Booker, 50, is still reeling from the news. “I’m really, really, really – I could add 25 reallys – excited, overjoyed, shocked...”
So, how do you write a thousand-pound poem? In Booker’s case, it took help from a Nobel Prize-winner and a psychologist. Booker wrote out Nobel-winning poet Tomas Transtro?mer’s A Winter Night again and again in her notebook, circling words that struck a chord with her – “echoes”, “nails”, “constellations” – which eventually worked their way into her own poem.
Meanwhile, a conversation with the psychologist Lowri Dowthwaite gave her a new way of thinking about her mother’s illness. “When people have an illness that’s changed them, we’re never in the present with them,” Booker explains. “Because we’re thinking about how she was, or we’re in the future thinking ‘Oh my God, she’s not going to get better, she’s going to die.’
“Instead of having the memories flood you from the past, and instead of projecting into the future, [Braithwaite says that] you can make memories that are uplifting in the moment.” So, in the care home, they lived in the moment: they sang hymns together, and recited Clara’s favourite passages from the King James Bible.
Clara was an NHS worker who had come to Britain from Grenada after the Second World War. A keen student, she took as many nursing qualifications as she could. “In another time and place, she probably would have gone on and tried to be a doctor,” says Booker. “The Little Miracles” poignantly describes how Clara had to begin her education all over again, with her own children teaching her simple words: “we her children hold on like drought holds out/ for rain, learning what it is like to begin again, start/ with the, the, the dog, the cat, the date, the year, the stroke, the brain”.
Living alone in Leeds during the lockdown this summer, the first summer since her mother’s stroke that they had spent apart, Booker found that “creatively my output was cooking. You know the meals your mum does, that you just never cook because your mum did it? I started getting recipe books, and talking to family members, and trying to do all her stuff.”
The kitchen has always been a creative place for Booker. In 2001, in the kitchen of her old home in Brixton, she and her friend Roger Robinson started a workshop for writers from disadvantaged backgrounds. “When we first started writing poetry, there wasn’t that space for diverse voices,” she says. Just one person turned up to the first session, but over the next two decades, Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (now based at London’s Poetry School) would attract some of the most talented writers of a new generation.
Warsan Shire, whose poems are featured on Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, honed her skills in the workshop. Fellow alumnus Inua Ellams – whose play Barber Shop Chronicles was a major hit for the National Theatre – has called Booker “a titan” of the poetry world. And her Kitchen co-founder Robinson won this year’s TS Eliot Prize. Booker only occasionally leads the classes herself these days – instead, there’s a starry line-up of guest tutors, such as Bernardine Evaristo.
For new poets, Booker’s advice is do what she does – read widely, discover poems you love, and learn from them. “The motto of Kitchen is ‘if you’re not reading, you can’t write’.”
For more information about the Forward Prizes, visit forwardartsfoundation.org
The Little Miracles
After ‘A Winter Night’ by Tomas Transtro?mer (translated by Robin Robertson)
Since I found mother collapsed on the kitchen
floor, we siblings have become blindfolded mules
harnessed to carts filled with strain, lumbering
through a relentless storm, wanting to make
our mother walk on her own again, wanting to rest
our palms on her left leg and arm like Jesus, but
constellations do not gather like leaves in a teacup,
so what miracle, of what blood, of what feeble wishes
do we pray, happy no nails hammer plywood, building
a coffin, to house her dead weight, happy her journey
crawls as we her children hold on like drought holds out
for rain, learning what it is like to begin again, start
with the, the, the dog, the cat, the date, the year, the
stroke, the brain, the fenced in walls, she struggles
to dismantle brick on brick. She cannot break this,
we reason, watching her left hand in her lap, a useless
echo. We chew bitter bush, swallow our howling storm,
reluctantly splintering under the strain of our mother’s
ailing bed-rest. We smile at each of her feats: right hand
brushing her teeth in late evening, head able to lift
without the aid of a neck-brace, her off spring’s names
Malika, Phillip and Kwesi are chants repeated over
and over as if staking us children as her life’s work,
her blessings, showing how much we are loved. The days
she sings walk with me oh my Lord, over and over, walk
with me oh my Lord, through the darkest night… and I sing
with her, my tones flat to her soprano, just as you changed
the wind and walked upon the sea, conquer, my living Lord,
the storm that threatens me, and we sing and sing until
she says, Maliks, please stop the cat-wailing before
you voice mek rain fall, and look how the weather nice
outside eh! Then we laugh and laugh until almost giddy,
our mood light momentarily in this sterile room, where
each spoonful of pureed food slipped into her mouth
like a tender offering takes us a step away from feeding
tubes, and we are so thankful for each minuscule miracle.
First published in Magma Poetry
