Caleb Femi’s joyous poetry documents chaos and community at a legendary house party in South London.
The Wickedest, by Caleb Femi,
MCD, 84 pages, $18
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Poor, Caleb Femi’s first poetry collection, from 2020, was about boys from the endz. From a public-housing estate in Peckham, South London. A place that, in his telling, was the very definition of hostile architecture. Hungry youths, blades and bullets (everywhere, useless), the staring flatness of CCTV. Trap houses. The blue lights of police cars. Behold, behold—“at the back of our block there is a wall full of RIPs.” “On the 19th floor you can see everything but the future.” Too bleak? In 2000, one of Femi’s friends—Damilola Taylor, Nigerian, like him—was attacked with a glass bottle and left to die on a stairwell on the estate. He was ten years old.
These “likkle bwoi” weren’t just walking dead. They dreamed, laughed at dumb shit, were always up for another helping of their mothers’ jollof and curry goat. One poem was called “While the Pastor Preached about Hell, His Son Was Texting Girls.” It’s not surprising that, in some quarters, Femi was heralded as the latest bard of the banlieues, sending dispatches from forgotten—or never-glanced-at—modern Britain. That kind of praise struck him as less belittling than a boxing-in; in the future, he told one interviewer, he intended to be a “merchant of joy.”
Joy’s the joint, the goal, the juice in The Wickedest. This new collection, a documentary drama, is also set in South London—at a secret location—and shares its name with what Femi claims is the longest-running house party in that neck of the woods. Over the course of an evening, from sparking lighters in the air at 10:45 pm to looking for post-clubbing bagels at 4:45 am, a cast of characters shares the spotlight: Lala, the organizer, who inherited the space from her grandfather; Fredrick, turfed out of his bedroom after his uncle comes to stay, who’s looking to unwind, to escape “the asbestos of worry”; lover man Jermaine.
Early on, the Wickedest is described as an “institution for flight . . . The oldest community project.” Other definitions offered: “country, homeland, nation, state.” (You might call this Funkadelic lingo.) Elsewhere, it’s hailed as a “fortress,” a way to stay youthful, a spell to ward off the darkness outside its walls (to dance, says an unnamed narrator, is to “pivot around destruction / as I move through the days”). The resource-starved and penny-pinching council has closed the local ice rink, but here “for the night / we would glide over a fleeting territory.”
Many clubs like to talk up communion and community. The best, though, thrive on mess and métissage, chaos and collision. Femi’s at his most winning when he tries on voices, plays around with registers, presents the Wickedest as a rhetorical scrum. There’s a section titled “The 7 Disc Jockey Principles” (number 5—“cos the music brings in / the boats that are not steered”). Another is “Famous Party Lies” (“There ain’t no party like an S Club party,” a nod to a turn-of-the-millennium English bubblegum-pop band founded by the Spice Girls’ ex-manager). There are plenty of “DJ’s shout-outs,” too—my favorite being one I’ve never heard any actual MC employ: “Juice your cup & hold a leng gyal / between your arms before / she finds someone who will. / Charm each other. / Tonight, you and her might fuck.”
Femi’s not just a poet but also a filmmaker (for commercial clients such as Louis Vuitton), as well as a photographer. Images stud and punctuate this collection: fake flyers for the party, an architectural plan of the building (which he calls an X-ray), Keith Haring-esque diagrams of dancers busting out moves. There are also photos—mostly color, often blurry, sweat-mist-obscured, like streaky EEG monitors—of clubbers milling around outside the venue, couples making out, the murmur of dawn across the city as seen from a rooftop. Stanzas are scattered and distributed across pages like shifting dance-floor formations.
So far, so eternal. Black British history has always been forged partly at night. In the decades after World War Two, it was a tradition for intrepid reporters to try and get access to the colony within—inner-city shebeens and basement blues parties whose weed-fug and jump-up noise they’d chronicle for their titillated readers. These dances, often held in terraced homes or small community halls because the landlords of more traditional venues didn’t want immigrant punters, had the heightened intensity of a survival shelter or an insurgents’ safe house. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, in “Dread Beat an’ Blood” (1975), captured the compression best (“Rocks rolling over hearts leaping wild / Rage rising out of the heat of the hurt”), while, more recently, Steve McQueen’s film Lovers Rock (2020) tabbed the women caterers, the technical nous of the soundmen, the rhythmic mutations as the hours slunk by.
But there’s an important here-and-now to The Wickedest. The poem “Noise Disturbance,” the collection’s most ingenious, documents police efforts to bust the party. It reproduces Form 696, “risk assessment” bumph that London’s Metropolitan Police introduced in 2005 to force event promoters to list the personal details of performers and the ethnic makeup of their expected audiences. After “Maximum Capacity of Premises,” Femi has the promoter write: “Unknown (it was built by the same architect as the TARDIS).” Form 696 has gone, but panics about black Londoners coming and shaking together never end.
“Amapiano drum patterns / sound like yassified gunshots,” begins “Benny the House Regulator.” It’s one of few references to the kind of music that might be heard at the Wickedest. Does it really exist? House parties tend not to last generations. This one is missing sweat. The hustle and edge that McQueen zoomed in on is mostly absent, too—perhaps because Femi is so bent on jonesing for joy. Only when he lets language possess him (in “Lala,” he name-checks “the leg-workers, the gossipers, stoosh gyal serving face, fingers rassing trumpets, lotioners, block bleeders”) does the collection catch fire, memory-kindle Elizabethan neologists such as Thomas Nashe, become road rhapsodical. It’s then that The Wickedest stops being a manual on social cohesion, and celebrates parties—black or otherwise—as places not just to come together or to be found, but to dissolve, to be lost lost lost.
Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University. A former Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards, he writes for the Guardian, makes radio documentaries for the BBC, and runs the Texte and Töne publishing imprint.