Poet in motion pulled in all directions

By MARGIE THOMSON

You've heard the expression "a foot in each world". Well, British performance poet Malika Booker - in Auckland as a guest of Ignite03 - can do better than that. Her identity is like a game of Twister: one woman stretched between London and Guyana, between Grenada and New York.

There were occasions, of course, especially as a teenager, when the pull from one country to another was difficult, even heart-rending - but out of such experiences art flows, and the noises, images and mood of these different landscapes make their way into her poetry, yielding depth and a breath of the exotic.

"For a writer it's actually a wonderful experience," she says.

Born in London in 1970, her family soon after moved to her father's homeland, Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. They lived there until Malika was 12 and her parents divorced. Her mother planned to take Malika and her brothers back to London, and Malika went first, only to have then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher change the immigration rules, making it impossible for the 12-year-old's family who, unlike her, were not British citizens, to join her.

Instead, her mother took her young sons to live in Grenada (and later New York), which she had left in the 1950s, full of optimism for the opportunities waiting at the heart of the old British empire. Malika, though, stayed in London with an aunt.

"Everything seemed hard," she recalls, "although it's always hard when you're a teenager. I'd transferred from being the eldest child to the youngest, from being the most popular at my school to being an outcast, from sun to ... well, I still can't take the English weather. And then going through that whole teenage thing, and the change of body ... When I read my diaries I see I was really melodramatic: everyone's conspiring against me, if I die here in this room no one will notice. That sort of thing."

She was "the child who stood in the corner of the playground reading, not playing, consuming vast amounts of literature". For fun, she would buy postcards, fill them with "fantastic" writing and send them to friends. When she was 18 or so, she went to an event where a friend stood up and read aloud to the crowd in words so beautiful that Malika rushed up afterwards to congratulate him, and he told her, "That was your card, that you sent me a year ago."

So she got thinking that if she liked her own work so much, once she had a bit of distance from it, perhaps that was what she should be doing. Now 32, she has carved out a professional life that, like her personal identity, is without the usual boundaries. "Why do we need labels?" she asks.

Primarily known as a poet, she performs her work alone and with others (tonight she appears with hip-hop dancer, tragedian and comic Benji Reid), as stand-alone poems and as "monologues" where she scripts a story that weaves around particular poems, telling a story. She has also written, on commission, a musical play called Catwalk about the fashion industry, co-produced a poetry film to commemorate the Royal Festival Hall's 50th birthday, and is working on a novel.

Her poetry is personal - she describes it as "epiphany poems" that capture tiny moments of personal revelation and then are reworked to capture universal themes, such as For Clara, about her relationship with her mother, Clasped, about the thrilling beginning and sad end of a love affair, and My Father's Letter, about the danger of letting too much time go by in close relationships.

For Absolution, she interviewed a lot of people who had come from Guyana and Grenada in the 1950s, as had her parents. She thus had the real stories, full of similarities and differences, and from that starting point she constructed a layered, imaginative work. "Poets are meant to be noticing the small, the ordinary things of life, and illuminating them," she says.

When we think of performance poetry we may assume the outrageous, the melodramatic. Malika's performances, though, are subtle, tender, deliberate.

"There are poets," she says, "who believe their work is sufficient on the page - that you can simply read it and know the work. I don't believe it. If an audience comes to see the work, they want a bit of magic. They want you to experience what you put into the work.

"I'm more like: the audience is one person and I'm having a conversation with you, and you need to lean in to hear it."

Performance

* Who: Malika Booker

* Where: Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

* When: 8 tonight