This is a brief review of a relatively brief text, although the brevity of the text does not reflect its significance or relevance. Caleb Femi has already enjoyed considerable recognition as a poet, for his debut collection, Poor (which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2021.) Prior to this, he was London Young People’s Laureate for London from 2016-18. It remains the case though, that regardless of his success, he retains a sharp, subversive edge, at a time when so much of the poetry coming out of the UK reads as defeated, retreating from engagement and experiment, and solipsistic and inwardly-focused.
The Wickedest is a house party. The Wickedest is also a fantasy space for love, solidarity and escape. Like most parties it can also be a real space for these. Femi celebrates dancing and talking and drinking and raving and loving. That’s what the poems here are about. This is raving not as resistance – that would be going maybe too far (although would it really? After the murder by cop of Chris Kaba, Jermaine Baker et al., aren’t just surviving and refusing to hide now acts of resistance?)
Raving sustains though as a radical way of holding each other up, holding each other tight. And radical because there is an element of anonymity to the blues party, the night club –people encounter each other and move on. They might touch in passing, lock eyes, flirt, smile, or dance together, but what matters is the solidarity contained within the chance encounter.
The Wickedest is fresh and original because, unlike so much of the dull tepid quag of contemporary poetry, it is about something other than itself. Moreover, it doesn’t vaunt poetry as an artform that has a higher value than photography (Femi’s own photography shadows the words throughout the book) or a club flyer, or a bassline or a classic tune. One form of communication is worth as much as another – whether it communicates, resonates, is how we determine its value.
It’s important not to overlook Femi’s photography. He has a way of capturing bodies as actors in motion and colour in the club space that brings to mind Beth Lesser’s celebrations of the 1980s Kingston dancehall scene, Richard Renaldi’s portraits of queer Manhattan nightlife, or Ewen Spencer’s work documenting the UK garage scene. However, Femi also brings into his photography his own sense of the utopian element that haunts the poetry here. The space between transition from one moment to the next that all photography documents ( potentiality frozen between instances) is explicit her – the passage from possibility to possibility is caught ,as well as the moment itself. As Femi’s poetry describes it, “every grain contains the memory of a night.” Everyone on camera is in motion. Somehow the act of capture by Femi’s lens doesn’t suspend that motion. The photographs here are simple, but beautiful and special, “particles in the air”, seeing everything.
In The Wickedest, the house party is celebrated as “the oldest community project”, a “secret city of flair”. The club is where we escape from being “choked by the asbestos of worry”. In The Wickedest, clubbers dance together and “corny shit sounds glorious” like “we danced inside the soft guts of the stars.” And within the dark space and the dancing and the joy, the real world still lurks, waiting to spoil the party, ruin the momentary other- world. “You sound like a fire truck when you laugh/ I used to have an allergic reaction to the sound of sirens.” The basslines and the loving only keep the hard-edge of strife at bay for now. “This could be our last dancing night/ The day is dangerous/we know that.”
There are some nice clever touches here. A poem written into the spaces on the Met Police 696 risk assessment forms, which used to be used to ban grime and garage nights. Dancing figures sketched out with accompanying poems as comments on the sketched-out dance routine – some comments droll, some sad. Poems as DJ shout-outs throughout. They all work because they fit with the overall mood, of the coming together of a roomful of people looking to make something euphoric from night-lives that can be a daytime war. “Humour will keep your abs in great shape/ and make it easier to stomach/ the terrors we are force fed.” As Femi puts it, the dance is “where we come to rinse away our failures/ & cool our feet.”
This has been a good year for books that take dancing and dance music seriously – Emma Warren’s Dance Your Way Home, Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s Where We Come From, and Ed Gillett’s extraordinary Party Lines. Caleb Femi’s The Wickedest joins them in recognising what it is about the dancehall space that matters so much: that “There will be strife, burnt days…but there will be this.” A “this” that we make ourselves, through being together. Femi quotes June Jordan at the start of his book: “This is how we should begin to build another way, another kind of humankind, a really new nation.” Femi celebrates the culture that is made and remade every time a group of people come together with a DJ, music and a rig of speakers, and:
If the outsiders ask
tell them you saw nothing, no poetry
or anything worth calling (art)
only cobwebs, stinky food
and trick mirrors.
