Pigeon English

"Hope," says Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul."

My first reflections take their cue from Stephen Kelman’s ‘Pigeon English’.

Exuberant, indefatiguable and swift on his feet, Harrison Okopu is a character whose voice is unforgettable.   Despite what seems to be a claustrophobic sense of street menaces and limited financial constraints of migrant family lives and a tragic ending, we never lose the sense of hope, that ‘thing with feathers that perches in the soul’.  Stephen Kelman manages to craft a unique and vivid language out of what might often be seen as a clichéd, brutal and brutalist urban idiom.  From the shouts penned on a school leaver’s shirt:

Northwell Manor Till I Die

Hair by Ton and Guy, personality by Ronald Macdonald

Get high naturally: climb a tree

to Harri’s own unique voice, a pidgin of urban London with a Ghanaian inflection:

In England there’s a hell of different words for everything. It’s for if you forget one, there’s always one left over, Harri punctuates the language of his thoughts with expressions such as  ‘brutal’ (‘cool’)and ‘hutious’ (‘scary’), blending London and Ghanaian slang respectively.  Expressions such as ‘Advise yourself!’ are directed between Harri and his older sister Lydia, creating the sort of inventive linguistic repertoire of cultures from the exclamative and authoritative forms, familiar with the discourse of African pastors, to street argot of ‘chooking’ or stabbing.

The storytelling is shot through with an exuberant sense of being alive. So Harri plays at pretending being a bird in the wind funnel effect created by the three towers encapsulating his world, Luxembourg House, Stockholm House and Copenhagen House, and cheerfully asserts to his friend Jordan, ‘It’s not gay, it’s brilliant!’, reflecting to himself ‘Asweh, it’s the best way to feel alive.’

As a piece of literature, this novel has the authenticity of someone like Bob Holman from Glasgow’s tower block tenements. This is not the literary tourism of detached sociological observation. Stephen Kelman’s early life in Luton’s high rises and his stated intention to represent the Damilolah Taylor world of tower blocks with a sense of the good life, the light that resides within those often portrayed as victims or perpetrators of a claustrophobic world of urban crime. This, along with the skilful crafting of the novel, gives the character of Harrison Okopu artistic integrity.  This is not the only British voice from this context. Voices such as that of  KateTempest, with her mythological ideas echoing those of William Blake,  also represent with integrity and authenticity the stories and charged light disguised by crime statistics and tabloid representations. The choice of urban, feral pigeon as the choric voice alongside that of Harrison Okopu’s is apt, in a similar way to that of Barry Hines’s kestrel in the  rural landscape of the Yorkshire coalfields ‘Kestrel for Knave’. It does not have the

otherness of the kestrel and of Billy Caspar himself in his own isolated and fractured family world. The pigeon possesses a greater sense of connectedness to Harrison’s fractured Ghanaian migrant family’s world and that of the tower block community he is a part of.  This is part of what lifts the novel from the world of soap opera melodrama. It is also a device which saves the novel from a Dickensian overly ideologically freighted architecture.

The story echoes the startling beginning of ‘Curious Incident’ with its focus on the stark death indicated by the pool of blood on the concrete outside ‘Chicken Joe’s’ and the poignantly piecemeal shrine composed of school photos, beer bottles, mis-spelled messages and ‘nearly new Nike’ football boots hanging on the metal railings.  Similarly, there then begins a captivatingly naïve, innocent investigation, conducted by Harri and his best friend, Dean. Cheap binoculars are used, along with sellotape to capture fingerprints in a project which consumes the two of them. References are more  CSI televisual clichés than the self-consciously literary Conan Doyle references of ‘Curious Incident’.  This is, however, manages not to mock  or offer a critique of the limited cultural reach of high rise life, but instead crafts a naive, hopeful, positive depiction of a life lived both within the limited eleven year old perspective yet also with the generous perspective that finds the cracks in apparently clichéd characters such as ‘Terry Takeaway’, the pit bull owning, all day drinker, a Bubbles-style (from tv series ‘The Wire’) opportunistic thief of all things jobsworth, whether a kettle or a tray of butcher’s chickens.

Dialogue is represented in what appears to be a naive and mechanical manner with script style designations of speaker’s name, followed by a colon and their speech. Yet this adds to the childlike innocence of Harri’s voice, as if there are none of the overlays of a skilled narrative technician. 

Some of an earlier educational generation may recall the earnest engagement of SE Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders’ (with its school literature classroom engagement with

displaced youth culture and literary aspiration with American poet Robert Frost’s poetry worked into the narrative. While this novel appears to give a British treatment of this familiar genre, it is clearly written with a lot more craft, skill and a lighter touch.

Set over a chronological 5 month period between March and July in the life of eleven year old Harrison Okopu, a Ghanaian migrant boy, whose mother has paid older gangster Julius an undisclosed sum for a better life as a midwife in London’s hospitals with her two older children, while her husband, Harri’s ‘Pappa’ continues to scrape a living with baby sister Agnes back in Ghana.

 

One of the delights of the plotting is the way it captures the butterfly mind of this eleven year old boy from classroom interactions, corridor menaces, tower block interactions, sisterly squabbles, conversations with his hard-pressed midwife Mamma and snatched monosyllabic conversations with the absent baby sister he dotes upon.

 

It is over this still bloodied concrete of the opening playground shrine that the eponymous pigeon walks before flying through the window of Harri’s flat, sending his older sister Lydia into a hysteria, before Harri accommodates the creature into his warm human heart, guiding it out onto the balcony.

Local street gang Dell Farm Crew, known only by their street monikers, X-Fire, Killa, Clipz, Dizzy,  teach the newboys like Harri how to ‘shank’ with a ‘blade’.  Harri tries to navigate the his life of casual everyday threats and abuse, with the ever-present menace of the above Crew hanging over him, as a sort of fatalistic ‘with us or against us’ sword of Damocles that can offer the hope of protection or the unreliable moral compass of the street status of  ‘fronting’.

 

The dead boy’s funeral is described in a way which convincingly captures a child’s sense of the tragic and of the absurd: ‘they should have made his coffin a football boot’, next to ‘children aren’t supposed to die, only old people. I spat out the rest of my Atomic Apple Hubba Bubba for if I swallowed it by mistake and my guts all got stuck together.’

 

Harri’s country origins within the melting pot of southern urban citiscapes is illustrated by casually unscreened interactions such as the following when the Dell Farm Crew toy with Harri’s school bag:

X-Fire: ‘What country you from anyway?’

Me: ‘Ghana.’

Clipz: ‘They make their houses out of cowshit, innit. I seen it.’

Harri’s fellow investigative double act Dean offers some insights which help Harri develop a sense of what is right.  Harri is caught between the desire for protection from the Dell Farm Crew against bullies like fellow Y7 abusive Villis and his natural instinct that they are not in his best interest. So he fails the ‘mission’ they give him to break the school’s fire alarm glass. Dean, or ‘Ginger’,  is forced to yield his school dinner pound to the gang at the cafeteria. Dean’s voice is clear in its transparent childlike clarity: ‘I don’t wanna be in their stupid gang, all they do is rob people. Don’t go with them, they’re numpties.’

 

In the following chapter, Harri finds his sister Lydia placing a mysterious bundle of dirty, stained clothes in the tower block basement launderette with a bottle of bleach, given to her by her friend Miquita.  Incidents like this illustrate the pressures on young people in these compromised friendships.

 

School ground incidents capture other painful experiences for Harri, like when he is laughed at by his peers for drawing with a marker pen ‘adidas’ style stripes on his plain white trainers. At this point he drifts back towards the Dell Farm Crew and participates in a mugging. It makes him sick to his toes when he realises the weaker person picked out is Mr Frimpong, the oldest person at the African church his family attends. Normally Harri extracts hilarity from Mr Frimpong’s overly loud and long hymn singing voice, but here Harri runs away. It is at this point that the pigeon’s voice adds its litany, echoing the threat by its own experience of magpies, urging Harri to ‘be as big as you want to be’, in counter melody to his despairing wish to be bigger.

There is a constant tenor of underlying trouble in Harri’s world. He makes a list of ‘wars going on all the time’, from ‘Arsenal vs Chelsea’, ‘Kids vs Teachers’, ‘God vs Allah’ to Chicken Joe’s vs KFC’. He then reflects: ‘I don’t even know what side I’m on. Nobody’s told me yet.’ 

 

There is a sense in which world Kelman portrays is marked by strict notions of masculinity and femininity.  So when Lydia’s friend Miquita heat treats Lydia’s hair with an iron when she suddenly switches to a more menacing tone: ‘Are you with us?...You’re either with us or against us, innit’. We later find out that Miquita’s boyfriend Killa has been applying the same ‘tests’ to her, as if branding her, marks which she appears to carry proudly.  Tellingly, Harri later, with the clarity of the untarnished, says of Poppy, his girlfriend: ‘I didn’t even have to burn Poppy to make her admire me, I only had to make her laugh.’ There is a later description of a brutal school ground fight between Miquita and her former friend Chanelle over how much of the unspoken has been talked about. This relationship between Harri and his girlfriend Poppy offers some innocent relief from the strong sense of how limited the lives of girls and young women can be in this male dominated street culture.

 

This female victim mode is explored further through Harri’s mother’s friend Auntia Sonia’s boyfriend Julius. It becomes apparent that he is some sort of gangster whose control of Sonia is total. So when she is bandaged up as if ‘she was in a war’, Sonia relates a tale of suitcases falling off a wardrobe.  This later develops with Aunt Sonia’s broken leg either from Julius’s ‘Persuader’ or from him having run her over his car. Either way the shrinking claustrophobic world of Harri’s Mamma and Auntie Sonia are illustrated by the way that Julius’ money is revealed to be what got her to the UK, while Sonia can only respond with ‘she just says it was her fault for not getting out of the way’.

 

The one point of stability is Harri’s African church going mother, who keeps him separate from school assemblies with Atlaf, a Somali boy, for reasons  which the church spire aspiring Harri never quite understands.  So when Harri is led to participate in a stone throwing incident at a bus with his school exclude friend Jordan, he is mortified when his mother gets off the very same bus to castigate him.  Yet there is no sense of falsely eulogising her, just representing her as a pressured mother trying to hold a fractured family unit together.  Movingly, he descends into self-recrimination involving what appears to be a street gangster-style vengeful God: ‘God’s going to destroy me. He’ll probably kill Agnes first just to teach me.’  Yet this intensity of guilt is rendered disarming by his imaginative conjectures on ‘air holes in my coffin’, his aeroplane-shaped coffin.

 

Similarly there are moments with his older sister Lydia which illustrate the cracks which let the light through.  The tense secrets of the launderette scene elicited by Harri are counterpointed by the urban whimsy of his birthday present to her: the creation of their footprints in fresh cement. ‘The footprints are there to tell everybody we were here.’  This sort of mark captures something of Harri’s simple joy in life and imaginative generosity. This sibling closeness becomes all the greater as the distance between Miquita and Lydia becomes more marked.  Miquita initiates Harri into the technique of kissing, which he believes will mean Poppy won’t ‘cut him’ for better kissers. However, the whole incident is conveyed with growing mixture of inappropriacy and repugnance at its physical invasiveness, until Lydia in an attempt to protect her brother from further molestation, blurts out: ‘At least my boyfriend’s not a murderer.’  Miquita responds with deadly silence and then a mouthful of insults, ‘fronts’ and put downs.  Harri’s simple childlike generosity and kindness is then illustrated by his offering of the first Oreo, ‘always the tastiest’, to his shaking sister.

 

As the narrative moves towards its climax, the pigeon voice and that of Harri blend as the pigeon is set upon by four magpies, delineated like a tower block gang rap. It is Harri who saves the day by chasing the magpies away. As he converses with his pigeon a poignantly empty page space of:  ‘    ‘is uttered in response by the pigeon to Harri’s ministrations and protective friendship.  This is followed by the high point of Harri winning the Y7 athletics crown against Brett Shawcross to Poppy’s delight.  Harri celebrates this moment of success and lack of fear: ‘Asweh, it felt like I was the king. Everybody admired me and nobody was waiting for me at the gate.’

 

Harri is then taken with the idea and persuades his friend Dean to ‘capture the spirit’ of the dead boy on the basketball court. This leads to an account of the incident leading to the motive for killing, a humiliation of Killa by the dead boy related to the dead boy’s basketball skill. This leads ominously to the Dell Farm Crew cornering Dean and Harri on the same court. Miquita’s intuitive attempt at redemption by trying to dampen the tension and distract Killa are blanked by b-boy ignorance. They take Dean’s trainers and search Harri finding the wallet and dead boy’s photo, then icily putting a lighter to it.  Just as X-Fire is putting up his hood in some ritualised urban execution, blade in hand, Lydia shouts up, having filmed the whole thing on her mobile. In the melee they manage to escape. It is then left to the pigeon to voice a foreboding epigraph:

‘You keep going out of spite or with magnificent defiance, you keep going through steely instinct or by cotton-wool consensus, you keep going because you’re made that way. You keep going, and we love you for it.

We miss you when you’re gone.’

 

This choric voice can appear at times to be forcedly opine and clichéd, overly directive of the reader’s attention. Yet the gap between it and Harri’s voice give it a Hughes-like sense of a more benign mythical bird, an urban survivor like Harri.

 

Then follows a strange, almost Ghanaian bush-like episode where Harri escapes from a school game of rounders to find  some sort of crab apple-like fruit he hopes the consuming of which will render him safe by some sort of magic or by a more simple matter of toxicity. 

 

There are echoes of the classic ritualised cleansing and hellish fire at the conclusion of ‘Lord of the Flies’ in the burning of the playground. It is at this scene that Killa is rendered human with his name Jermaine Bent finally being used for the first time, then being described gripping a smouldering woodchip ‘for donkey hours’ – ‘It was like he was as sad as me’.

 

And so to the tragic finale, the last day of school, Poppy’s number written on Harri’s arm. He and Dean have planned to see the police on Monday, still with a child-like, mish-mash of reality, tv and newsroom clichés of ‘In England you get TV in jail and the pool balls even roll straight.’ It is the pigeon who is the only witness to Harri’s stabbing and his final thoughts of his baby sister Agnes.

 

So just how does the light break through what might be read by some as an unremittingly bleak depiction of tower block realities cruelly crushing child-like innocence, in the way which captured so much public empathy in the reporting of the Damilola Taylorkilling? Harri’s delightfully innocent voice is brutally extinguished at the end.  However, it is maybe the courage and artistry to depict voices like these in contexts like these which show the cracks which let the light through. It is this light like a life giving vein, which can join writer, reader and lives lived in our cities by young people who may otherwise be written off as faceless hoodies.

                                                

To reiterate the pigeon’s words:

You keep going, and we love you for it.

We miss you when you’re gone.’

 

Finally, something of the light which breaks through the bleakness and concrete husk of this world is offered by the feral pigeon voice:

We gave you the map, it’s inside you.