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VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW
Contemporary Poetry and Poetics



 
 
Q&A with Bernardine Evaristo
 

~KAREN MCCARTHY~



BERNARDINE EVARISTO INTERVIEWED BY KAREN MCCARTHY


Bernardine Evaristo's debut novel Lara — an epic ancestral odyssey that tells the story of a Nigerian-Irish mixed-race girl growing up in 1970s Britain — was published in 1997 to widespread critical acclaim.  It established Evaristo as a luminous new talent and a writer who has stretched the linguistic elastic of the novel form to great effect.  She won the EMMA Best Book of the Year Award in 1999, and it was also a book of the year for The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman.  Her new book, like Lara, is also a novel in verse and it confirms her reputation as one of Britain's most distinctive, witty and original poetic voices. The Emperor's Babe is set in Roman London, AD 211 —  "a city of slum tenements and sumptuous villas, of orgy queens, drag queens and drama queens.  A city where the currency is often sex, where children go to work aged five and marriage is a career move."  Karen McCarthy, the editor of Bittersweet: Black Women's Contemporary Poetry talks to her about the writing process, Zuleika the book's feisty heroine, and how The Emperor's Babe was born.
 
Karen McCarthy: 
The Emperor's Babe is set in Roman London, some 1800 years ago.  What made you choose this period in history? 

Bernardine Evaristo: 
It chose me, in a sense.  I was writer in residence at the Museum of London in 1999, a museum devoted to the history of London.  I wanted to write some poems about London's black history then I found the Roman galleries, which are a recreation of Roman London: rooms, shops, etc, and felt inspired to write about this period.  I created a character, Zuleika, wrote one poem imagining her life, and it eventually turned into a 250 page novel in verse.

McCarthy:
In it you describe a fantastic carnival of characters that people the city, including Zuleika its heroine, whose parents are Sudanese shopkeepers.  Is the Londinium you describe anything like it is now in terms of cultural diversity? 

Evaristo:
We'll probably never know how multicultural Londinium really was, but it was a busy port city, and we all know about port cities.  It would have been peopled by people from the Roman Empire — but how multiracial it was, who knows?
     The Roman Empire stretched over 9000 kilometres at its greatest extent, including North Africa, the near east and they traded with Asia, and the Romans had excellent roads and means of transportation.  Rome itself was very multicultural with people from all over the empire living there.  To date, the earliest evidence of Africans living in Britain is the legion of Moors who were stationed at Hadrian's Wall in the North at the beginning of the 3rd Century AD, which is when The Emperor's Babe is set. 
     Britain has always been multicultural, and to a greater or lesser extent, multiracial, certainly from the 16th Century when there were significant Black populations in the country.  So, in one sense, The Emperor's Babe is a dig at those Brits who still harbour ridiculous notions of "racial" purity and the glory days of Britain as an all-white nation. 
     Of course, today London is incredibly multicultural, with over 300 languages spoken in the Greater London area alone.

McCarthy:
You describe many fantastic feasts and potions — from "powdered mouse brains" and "sliced flamingo tongue" to "bear cutlets" and "fried jellyfish."  I was curious as to whether the Romans actually ate food like this?

Evaristo:
Yes they did!  It's all true! 

McCarthy:
At the age of 11, Zuleika is spotted at the baths by a powerful senator, who is, as she puts it, "thrice her age and thrice her girth."  Zuleika rails against the marriage internally, but knows she has no choice.  How true to life is her story for a girl at that time?

Evaristo:
Pretty accurate.  Girls were married off at around that age and of course they had no say in the matter.  In that sense, Zuleika's story is very similar to the situation for many girls in parts of the world today.

McCarthy:
To what degree did you find that as a character Zuleika claimed her own voice? 

Evaristo:
The book is told in Zuleika's voice, with other characters' voices coming in through her, and with dialogue.  She introduces herself in the prologue as this feisty, passionate, slightly bitchy, slightly petulant, drama queen and through the book we discover all the nuances of her personality.  I think that characters do claim their own voices, at least in my case.  With Zuleika I imagined what sort of person she was in terms of family background, age, etc., and I remember thinking that I wanted her to be strong.  Then I started writing and the character came through the act of writing.  Thatâs why writing is magic!  I didn't sit down beforehand and think that Zuleika will be feisty, bitchy, etc.  The most important thing for me was to give myself the freedom to take risks with character and language and hope that it would work. 

McCarthy:
Did you plan to write a love story, or was Zuleika's affair with the Emperor Severus something that developed in a similar manner? 

Evaristo:
I wanted to include Severus in the story because he was from Africa, the country we now know as Libya, and he was Roman Emperor for over forty years, which was no mean feat; and he had been ridiculed when he first arrived in Rome because of his thick African accent.  From surviving images he looks North African/Arabic.  Once I'd made this decision to include him, I needed to find a way to engage him in Zuleika's life, and a love affair seemed the most rich for exploitation. 
     Zuleika's husband Felix buys her two Scottish women as slaves and I was interested in the way Zuleika reacts to them. What struck me is how rarely we read about slavery as something that occurred outside of the black/white axis· 
     When I first began to write The Emperor's Babe people assumed Zuleika was a slave, simply because most people associate the presence of African people in the west, in the distant past, with the slave route.  I wanted to turn this on its head.  The Romans enslaved across the board, slavery wasn't based on skin colour or race.  Zuleika, as a rich married woman, would have had slaves that she would have treated according to the mores of the time.  What she finds difficult to take on board is the fact that they are suffering because of their position as slaves.  She'd rather not dwell on their pain as her own is at times so overpowering. 

McCarthy:
I think the relationship between historical accuracy and story in literature is interesting.  Did you find that difficult to negotiate as a writer, or did the story win out every time? 

Evaristo:
I think it's true to say that I stay faithful to history in terms of how the Romans lived, their occupations and general lifestyles.  What I then do with this is to play with history and use my imagination.  The novel is full of anachronisms, which help create the humour whilst also drawing attention to comparisons with today's society.  For example, the Romans did love to give recitals of their poems and other works, they did have parties for this, and sometimes people would go on for five hours.  So the performance poetry scene that I describe is simply taking liberties with what really happened.  It wasn't difficult to negotiate history and the story; in fact it was tremendous fun to spin history and fiction into the air and to see what happened to it. 

McCarthy:
You use language to create a very contemporary feel to this ancient world.  I think one of the effects this has is to make this period far more live and accessible.  Do you think we need to be less "precious" about history in some ways? 

Evaristo:
History is recorded by those with the power to do so.  Fact.  There are always different versions of the "truth."  I don't feel at all precious about British history because I know that so much has gone unrecorded as well as undiscovered.  There are many parallels to be made between Londinium and contemporary Britain/London, and I simply played on this to make the period more lively and accessible, as well as using language to do this.  The language that Zuleika uses is very now, very hip.  The novel is peppered with Latin, Italian, Cockney-rhyming slang, patois, American slang, pidgin Scots-Latin, and in the case of Severus, broken English.  Using language in this way greatly aids characterisation as well as making the text dynamic.  No, the Romans didn't speak all of these vernaculars or languages, but it enriches the story for me to do so.  And we mustn't forget that the English language itself is a hybrid of several other languages, so I'm just continuing the tradition. 

McCarthy:
Do you think that poetry in the novel form becomes more accessible to people who wouldn't normally read poetry? 

Evaristo:
I've read a few novels-in-verse and they are all so different in terms of form that it's hard to generalise.  Some are accessible, others so clogged up and dull that they give the form a bad name.  Certainly one of the attractions of Lara and The Emperor's Babe is that lots of people have read it who wouldnât be seen dead near a poetry collection, and have not only lived to tell the tale but enjoyed it.  The thing to remember is that accessible writing need not be simplistic or any less sophisticated than more obscure, denser work.  While my books are accessible on one level, they are also complex and layered; there are depths, references and allusions to plummet. 

McCarthy:
You've written two highly, successful novels in verse, Lara and The Emperor's Babe.  What attracted you to that particular form? 

Evaristo:
At the risk of sounding crass, the form found me.  I first wrote Lara as a prose novel that was two hundred pages worth of uninspiring prose.  So, after three years of struggle I chucked it in the bin and then re-wrote the story using poetry, eventually recognising it as a novel-in-verse.  As soon as I switched to poetry, the text came alive.  With The Emperor's Babe, it began life as a single poem, which became, interestingly enough, the epilogue of the book.  Then I built it up to a sequence of poems, and, because the story wouldnât let me go, expanded into a novel-in-verse.  My forthcoming novel is in prose, but it began life as a novel-in-verse, then it was a prose novel, then a novel-in verse again, and finally now a prose novel.

McCarthy:
What is it about? 

Evaristo:
It's a prose novel, with some very poetic elements, that involves a car journey across Europe in 1988 alongside a journey into European history going back centuries. 

McCarthy:
Which writers have influenced your work? 

Evaristo:
So many writers have inspired me over the years, sometimes with just one book such as Suskund's Parfum or Okri's Famished Road, and at other times with their entire oeuvre such as Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott. 
     Other names that come to mind: Gloria Naylor.  John Updike.  Dylan Thomas.  Tennyson.  Yeats.  Keri Hulme.  Ann Michaels.  Kazuo Ishiguro.  Alice Walker.  James Baldwin.  Kamau Braithwaite.  Patrick Chamoiseau.  Ben Okri.  Bessie Head.  Michelle Cliff.  Patrick Suskund.  William Kennedy.  Keri Sakamoto.  S.I. Martin.  Matthew Kneale.  Albert Camus.  Shakespeare.  Bertold Brecht.  Louis de Berniere. 

McCarthy:
If there was one book or one poem that has changed your life, could you name it? 

Evaristo:
I guess there is no one book.  It's not just writers who influence me as a writer — I am influenced by all the art forms, especially music, as well as the small and big screen. 

McCarthy:
Was there a moment when you made a conscious decision to be a writer and a poet? 

Evaristo:
It evolved through writing for theatre originally. I do remember making a conscious decision to get published, and several years later I made a decision to earn my living from my writing, which is what I do now.
 
 



 
 

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