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Death is personified as an overworked black woman in a modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit
In poet Salena Godden’s debut novel, death is personified as a series of black women: one minute she’s an old “homeless black beggar woman with knotty natty hair”, the next she’s a “kind black lady”, then she becomes a young, “shimmering” Nina Simone. This allows her to pass through the world incognito, because, as she points out, “there is no human more invisible, more easily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past” than a black woman.
After an eternity spent shape-shifting among the ranks of the unseen and unheard, she desperately wants to share her stories, and she selects as her amanuensis Wolf Willeford, an east London poet described in gender neutral terms. Wolf was traumatised as a child after their mother died in a fire with echoes of the recent Grenfell disaster: “My mother died, friends and neighbours died, they were jumping from the windows, trapped in the stairwell, bodies cooked in the lifts. We still don’t even know how many lives were lost and how many lives were affected because of that one fire, that one night.” Continue reading...