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Book Review: A CULTURED LEFT FOOT by Musa Okwonga
- By Paul Dunbar
- Published 08/8/2007
- Book Reviews & Excerpts
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Paul Dunbar
Seeking out poetry and literature articles on the Internet. Attributing this service to the spirit of a great African American writer
View all articles by Paul DunbarBook Review: A CULTURED LEFT FOOT by Musa Okwonga
Musa Okwonga talked his mother into letting him apply for Eton, then went on to become a lawyer, a football fan, a performance poet and, as Sarah Maslin Nir learns, a crusader for the spoken word
MUSA OKWONGA COULD BE forgiven for wishing that he wasn’t a poet. He’s athletically built, handsome, the product of a one-parent home and complete with a rags-to-riches background. Many lyrically inclined young black men who fit his description slot into the socially expected role of “rapper”. Had he done so, he would have spared himself considerable grief from detractors who say he is wasting his time trying to revive the art of performance poetry. To hear Okwonga tell it, he had no choice; being a poet is to him as involuntary as skin colour, or homosexuality.
It began after he read Othello while at Eton. “I woke up one morning and wrote the first 25 pages of a rhyming-couplet novel in the space of three or four hours,” he recalls. Soon it was 100,000 words. “I didn’t realise it but I was teaching myself to write. I was teaching myself technique.”
It’s difficult to introduce Musa Okwonga; to define him. To a degree, it’s intentional on his part – he has trouble defining himself. To his mother, he is a lawyer. To his literary agent, he is a football expert. At 27, his debut authorial effort is not poetry, but a book on football, A Cultured Left Foot, to be published next month. But, by his own description, he is foremost a poet, performing spoken-word poetry solo and with a collective – Poem in between People (PiP) – that includes the fellow poets Joshua Idehen and Inua Ellams at packed gigs and festivals across the UK.
Okwonga, a self-described “black kid with a posh accent”, could never be “street”. At the same time his ethnicity barred full membership of the ranks of Etonian old boys. “You are in so many boxes at once,” he says, “the only way to live is to step out of them.” He was born near Hammersmith, the son of a Ugandan surgeon who came to the UK to study medicine. In 1983 his father returned alone to his homeland to fight for his ancestral Acholi tribe against Idi Amin. The helicopter he was travelling in crashed under suspicious circumstances and, at three years old, Okwonga became fatherless.
Old Boy
“When your dad dies, you realise you have to grow up very quickly,” he says. “Especially in African households, there is an expectation of masculinity and fatherhood. You have to fulfil those roles from a very early age.” He became preternaturally mature. After watching a television programme on Eton College at the age of 11, Okwonga asked his mother to get an application form and then persuaded the school to take him.
“As a young black guy there is the expectation that you have to go beyond, you really have to excel. I had this kind of intensity and ambition. Almost like a fever.” That fever carried him on to read law at Oxford, on to a position as a solicitor at the leading London law firm, Lovells.
He had it all, a self-made success story, perfect on paper. But he wasn’t living a lie, he was living several. Okwonga knew he wasn’t a lawyer, he was a poet, a fact harder to break to his mother than his realisation that he was gay. His deeply Christian mother hardly spoke to him for years.
His painful coming-out not only informs much of his poetry, it steeled him for another realisation – a poet has no business practising law. “With the law, you are not questioning the rules,” he says. “You are applying them.” His own career questions the view that poetry is by its nature marginal. “Poetry belongs in the mainstream. Self-loathing, complacency forced it underground,” he nearly spits. “Look at Lord Byron – these guys were the rock stars of their time.”
He is not alone. A comrade-in-arms and fan is Scroobius Pip, whose spoken-word track Thou Shalt Always Killreached No 30 on the UK pop charts last April. “The benefit of Musa’s stuff is that it’s half-biographical, half a fiction,” Pip says. “It’s something that anyone can look into and hear about; it’s quite open.”
Okwonga’s poetry, which he often writes on London buses, travelling entire routes in order to be immersed in humanity, displays astonishing subtlety of observation. After he performs Heavyweight, about Muhammad Ali and London, audience members fall on him in a near scrum to shake his hand. “A Russian, strolling through its parks, / Who with his fellow oligarchs / Has date-raped his state and escaped . . . / But this city still can’t be shaped / By those who’d see it gentrified – / Who’d love it if it gently died . . .”
That Okwonga’s new book is not a collection of poems but an exploration of football is in keeping with his refusal to be categorised. Yet his love of the sport is steeped in the poetry of the game. One footballer’s style is “as somnolent as a possum”; AC Milan’s Kaká’s play is a “45minute symphony”; Hendrix, Plutarch and an 19th-century ballet composer are all called upon. It’s a superbly nuanced examination of what makes a footballer great, yet it is devoid of pretension.
“The language has to be a vehicle for the story, the message,” Okwonga says. “Otherwise, it’s just intellectual showboating. People go to poetry gigs to hear intellectual honesty.” In his poetry, as in his life, that is exactly what they get.
A CULTURED LEFT FOOT by Musa Okwonga
Gerald Duckworth, £15.99; 224pp
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article2192421.ece
MUSA OKWONGA COULD BE forgiven for wishing that he wasn’t a poet. He’s athletically built, handsome, the product of a one-parent home and complete with a rags-to-riches background. Many lyrically inclined young black men who fit his description slot into the socially expected role of “rapper”. Had he done so, he would have spared himself considerable grief from detractors who say he is wasting his time trying to revive the art of performance poetry. To hear Okwonga tell it, he had no choice; being a poet is to him as involuntary as skin colour, or homosexuality.
It began after he read Othello while at Eton. “I woke up one morning and wrote the first 25 pages of a rhyming-couplet novel in the space of three or four hours,” he recalls. Soon it was 100,000 words. “I didn’t realise it but I was teaching myself to write. I was teaching myself technique.”
It’s difficult to introduce Musa Okwonga; to define him. To a degree, it’s intentional on his part – he has trouble defining himself. To his mother, he is a lawyer. To his literary agent, he is a football expert. At 27, his debut authorial effort is not poetry, but a book on football, A Cultured Left Foot, to be published next month. But, by his own description, he is foremost a poet, performing spoken-word poetry solo and with a collective – Poem in between People (PiP) – that includes the fellow poets Joshua Idehen and Inua Ellams at packed gigs and festivals across the UK.
Okwonga, a self-described “black kid with a posh accent”, could never be “street”. At the same time his ethnicity barred full membership of the ranks of Etonian old boys. “You are in so many boxes at once,” he says, “the only way to live is to step out of them.” He was born near Hammersmith, the son of a Ugandan surgeon who came to the UK to study medicine. In 1983 his father returned alone to his homeland to fight for his ancestral Acholi tribe against Idi Amin. The helicopter he was travelling in crashed under suspicious circumstances and, at three years old, Okwonga became fatherless.
Old Boy
“When your dad dies, you realise you have to grow up very quickly,” he says. “Especially in African households, there is an expectation of masculinity and fatherhood. You have to fulfil those roles from a very early age.” He became preternaturally mature. After watching a television programme on Eton College at the age of 11, Okwonga asked his mother to get an application form and then persuaded the school to take him.
“As a young black guy there is the expectation that you have to go beyond, you really have to excel. I had this kind of intensity and ambition. Almost like a fever.” That fever carried him on to read law at Oxford, on to a position as a solicitor at the leading London law firm, Lovells.
He had it all, a self-made success story, perfect on paper. But he wasn’t living a lie, he was living several. Okwonga knew he wasn’t a lawyer, he was a poet, a fact harder to break to his mother than his realisation that he was gay. His deeply Christian mother hardly spoke to him for years.
His painful coming-out not only informs much of his poetry, it steeled him for another realisation – a poet has no business practising law. “With the law, you are not questioning the rules,” he says. “You are applying them.” His own career questions the view that poetry is by its nature marginal. “Poetry belongs in the mainstream. Self-loathing, complacency forced it underground,” he nearly spits. “Look at Lord Byron – these guys were the rock stars of their time.”
He is not alone. A comrade-in-arms and fan is Scroobius Pip, whose spoken-word track Thou Shalt Always Killreached No 30 on the UK pop charts last April. “The benefit of Musa’s stuff is that it’s half-biographical, half a fiction,” Pip says. “It’s something that anyone can look into and hear about; it’s quite open.”
Okwonga’s poetry, which he often writes on London buses, travelling entire routes in order to be immersed in humanity, displays astonishing subtlety of observation. After he performs Heavyweight, about Muhammad Ali and London, audience members fall on him in a near scrum to shake his hand. “A Russian, strolling through its parks, / Who with his fellow oligarchs / Has date-raped his state and escaped . . . / But this city still can’t be shaped / By those who’d see it gentrified – / Who’d love it if it gently died . . .”
That Okwonga’s new book is not a collection of poems but an exploration of football is in keeping with his refusal to be categorised. Yet his love of the sport is steeped in the poetry of the game. One footballer’s style is “as somnolent as a possum”; AC Milan’s Kaká’s play is a “45minute symphony”; Hendrix, Plutarch and an 19th-century ballet composer are all called upon. It’s a superbly nuanced examination of what makes a footballer great, yet it is devoid of pretension.
“The language has to be a vehicle for the story, the message,” Okwonga says. “Otherwise, it’s just intellectual showboating. People go to poetry gigs to hear intellectual honesty.” In his poetry, as in his life, that is exactly what they get.
A CULTURED LEFT FOOT by Musa Okwonga
Gerald Duckworth, £15.99; 224pp
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article2192421.ece
