The Wife of Bafa comes from Nigeria, she speaks Nigerian English, she references Ibadon University and the exclusive Lagos district, Victoria Island; but the poem takes place in ‘This London’. As I lived in London for sixteen years it tends to feature regularly in my work. I didn’t have a particular London setting in mind (in contrast to Jean Binta Breeze’s dynamic The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market).

London is the implied setting but in reality, the poem would be set wherever I got a gig! Alice Ebi Bafa has sold lace, linen and Dutch wax on several continents…

The poem was a long time coming. It was conceived in an A’level classroom in Colwyn Bay 28 years ago. I lived five minutes from the sea and firmly believe that winter walks along the prom, with waves crashing on the sea road, helped channel my teenage angst into gritty poetry. (I regularly brainstorm in the shower – water clearly inspires me). I first encountered Chaucer’s General Prologue and fell for his irony and the flamboyant, three-dimensional Wife of Bath. My English teacher set us homework to write a character sketch in the style of Chaucer. I got my only ‘A’ and subsequently wrote a General Prologue to the Colwyn Bay Tales. It’s a sequence of portraits of mods, rockers, New Romantics and scooter boys. So here’s one I prepared even earlier:

The Prologue whetted my appetite. I vowed that one day I’d do justice to the Wife of Bath’s character. I finally wrote the piece ten years ago, my first attempt at a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is first-person poem that reveals the character’s own psychology and the dramatic situation. Once I decided to make her Nigerian, I let her character take over and paid little attention to the dramatic situation. I never set out to make her sell something to her audience. Yet there she was, stepping out of the page trying to sell cloth by line 6! It’s later been suggested I was inspired by the end of The Pardoner’s Tale when he tries to sell fake pardons to his fellow pilgrims. As this was another A’level text it must have influenced me subliminally. I’ve written an analysis of The Wife Of Bafa, but at the end of the day, readers and listeners will always find more meanings than I ever imagined…

Sey forth they tale, and tarie nat the tyme;
Lo Depeford! And it is half-wey pryme.
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne.

Then, there’s the settings within the tales themselves e.g. The Miller’s Tale is set in Oxford, and the Reeve’s, a retaliation, is set just outside Cambridge. The BBC filmed six tales in six different locations on the London-Canterbury route. I’m all set to follow in their footsteps.

So how will location impact on my work? As a reader, I detest long descriptions of places. I claim to have read Hardy’s Return of the Native but in fact, skimmed the entire first chapter, the description of Egdon Heath. Sacrilege! Egdon Heath’s one of the main protagonists of the novel. The Victorians needed those descriptions in the absence of the BBC to do all the hard work for them.  But I’m a lazy, good-for-nothing poet who finds it difficult to make that imaginative leap from long physical description to visual image. One strong metaphor will do quite nicely, thank you. And that’s what I hope to achieve with my adaptations, a strong sense of place through one strong metaphor…

 

Between London and Canterbury, before the Thames becomes the North Sea, sits the literary capital of the universe: Gravesend. It’s where Pip, Herbert and Magwitch rowed in Great Expectations; where the ship was moored at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; where the BBC filmed their adaptation of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. This town’s gritty, not pretty. It’s where I live and, more importantly, where I write. It will be the setting for one of my own Canterbury tales.

But where will I create this masterpiece of intertextuality? Unlike famous novelists whose studies get photographed in the Guardian’s ‘Writers’ Rooms’, I don’t scrawl longhand in the converted loft space of my Victorian villa, sitting on a distressed brown leather chair that used to belong to Jean Paul Sartre; I write in my through-lounge that looks out onto our garden with its unpruned apple tree, trampoline and sandpit. Not the river view I originally envisaged but strangely inspiring and five minutes from the Thames. Today it’s snowing on damp ground so let’s rewind to three months ago when I took this photo. This is my place:

Mexico seems a long time and way away from the depths of the year.

What I’m mulling over here is what kind of new sense of place we are developing in a world of cheap travel, wi-fi and giant-sized carbon footprints.

Where do we belong when we can carry with us the store of photos, documents, music and communications that used to be what we went home for. We can keep a circle of friends around us wherever we are on earth.

We can fashion new identities and avatars for ourselves whenever we like, live in second, third and fourth lives, with a different name and persona in each, and then on the other hand Facebook has placed us in a cutesy global village where we lay out our holiday snaps and business contacts for all to see.

I believe we’ve hardly begun to explore the implications of all this on our sense of self/selves. Or rather, some think and write about this kind of stuff lots while others don’t even see it happening.

We can participate virtually in Iranian politics without leaving our seats, conduct affairs in Second Life with trolls and gods, network our way into hundreds of friendships with those we don’t know. I don’t think as a society we’re more liberated nor are we repressed, we’ve created space to be whoever we want to be without disturbing normality.

And being ever an optimist I reach out  for the conclusion that we’re creating a new spirit of community from all rhis, a potential for something very radical and positive to come into being via digital means, and that this open source spirit is at least as powerful as the dark side of weblife, alienated, bullying, voyeuristic, controlling.

My reality is walking into Crouch End to a café everyday and shopping for food. It’s also listening in and participating in a global debate about the book, I chat daily to a colleague in Australia,  I could do a pretty good job of living in Mexico from here, buying Tequila, reading Mexican papers and watching the TV, I could exist in that culture like a colleague whose always in the next room.

The present is good for storytelling but lives don’t have beginning middles and ends these days. Question for the poets: how to express the richness of engagement taking place in people tapping tapping tapping at their screens? Come here please and talk to me about it.

Growing older, the sense of home gets more and more dispersed. I’m at home in any of the cities where I can remember where the bus routes go, at home with a sample of friends from many different eras and places, I’m at home now on Twitter if I’m honest, that place feeling more like a real community of interest than some bizarre and spurious cyberworld.

:::::::> At the Guadalajara Book Fair I did an interview for the Book Fair’s YouTube TV channel. I thought being relentlessly upbeat about the future of literature while cheerfully predicting the demise of pretty much all the existing infrastructure of the publishing world might provoke a response here. “But will the bookfair survive?” asked the Interviewer.

“Well, probably not but, hey – all things must pass.” I didn’t put it quite like that, but realise I now feel at home taking those kinds of positions, but can understand completely why others find them terrifying.

There was a Christmas tree and nativity scene in the foyer of the Hilton, bright sunshine and palm trees outside. The British tend to forget it’s pretty hot in Bethlehem in December, but this still seems wrong. Out of place.

One of my favourite images is the Steinberg view of the world from 5^th Avenue. My place is a building, some people, some objects, some music, writers and artists -  an assemblage of identity, more like a homepage than a property.  Put together my choice of itunes, my friends on facebook and perhaps that’s my place, now accessible anywhere, no need to stick with one piece of earth.

Of course that’s just for us mobile ones with the cash to waft through free global wifi zones or hang loose with a dongle.

And there I was in another kind of place: the bookfair, familiar and always strange, everywhere the same, with stands, cafes, huddles, grouchy security people, ferocious networkers cramming in meetings.. this could be London or Frankfurt,  and books in languages I can’t read.  So all I can see are the trappings of the art – is this a great poet? Does he look and act like one? That’s all you have togo on.

At Christmas I find notes on the laptop written in Mexico and read “I now have one more hour in Guadalajara, in this perfect heat, at this place of books, in a mood of calm.

“A good spot to consider where my place is. I think it’s here, with laptop and notebook and coffee, the potential for scrounging a cigarette from a polite stranger if needs be, for some interesting and attractive passer-by to smile and enter into conversation, and meanwhile just enough relaxation, just enough pressure to write to let the juices flow.”

But to be honest, they didn’t flow very far.

Nor tonight. I’m knackered. Good night. Festive doodahs.

from which I’ve now recovered to find Christmas and multiple deadlines approaching like a pile up waiting to happen and the cold so cold and in this state I am honoured and delighted to be starting to guest blog here, having kept some notes and shot some film on my flip camera during the week, so will include flashbacks thus:::::::::::::: >

I’m on an airplane half way to Mexico, thinking about place, thinking about the millions of people on this earth right now in transit somewhere, some cruising for pleasure, some homeless and wandering, some cosy on trains and planes, some lost in transition, some in silent reverie, some tapping on laptops or watching virtual worlds.

Across the aisle from me a man with a laptop a bit like mine appears to be composing music. He wears big headphones, taps a while, makes intricate movements with his hands, playing a very delicate air guitar, then smiles to himself. Next to him his daughter plays on her Nintendo while on a murky screen in the centre of the cabin the credits of Harry Potter roll. In a tin box hurtling through space we do what we’re used to doing, at home with ourselves and our technology, till the batteries go. And still, going abroad, preparing to step out somewhere warm after leaving somewhere cold and wet, travelling for twelve hours to arrive just 6 hours later… this is still extraordinary magic.

<:::::::::::on the way home I meet Pablo and his mum, Irena, him at twenty on his first flight ever, first chance to test his English on a real Englishman, him shaking with fear and joy at the amazement of take off, his first view down onto clouds, caught up entirely in the actuality of this flying place::::::::>

I’m going to the Guadalajara Book Fair to give a talk on a panel about e-readers.

I’m thinking about worlds of imagination as found in books and what worlds we’ll build in future, and also on my mind are life decisions. The kids have left, the house seems large and knackered from all those years of family life, needs either to be jettisoned, exchanged for some smaller, funkier space, or refurbished and recommitted to. (All that flaming property angst we fortunates go through, lucky enough to actually have shelters to flog.) Every week we seem to imagine a different future for ourselves.

And at if:book we’re talking about new kinds of story structure. What narratives work for lives in which we can walk with one person and chat to another on the other side of the earth; where we may have to travel less but can have multiple online personas and boldly go virtually.

if:book is involved in the development of an iPhone app which does geo-loating things so it’s feasible to publish a story that knows where you are and shapes itself accordingly.

And meanwhile those Hardyesque plots involving fateful missed opportunities become ever less plausible, though later this week I’ll hear of two digital friends who arranged to meet at a restaurant but still managed to miss each other, one inside one outside all evening, both with batteries low…

(And here I am right now struggling like mad to get to grips with the method of posting here, let alone the nature of place in the digitalwigitty age, feeling like one inept futurist, wanting to get this first post up and over.)

This is part one: