Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. —Fernando Pessoa
Parties, says Femi, are essential to life. “Look at people’s reasons to dance,” he says. “When we are outside in the day, there are so many things that want to knock us off our perch, that want to kill us. We come together, we celebrate the people we love and even strangers because: we’re here.”
In a poem titled “Every shoobs is another shoobs”, that true role of the party is delivered in a gut-punch line:
“you survived the daily cull . . . again /
take joy /
spite’s sharpest weapon . . . use it”.
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Caleb Femi: ‘I just want poetry to be something I can enjoy’
His first collection was a poignant tribute to the London community in which he grew up; his second is about partying. What’s behind the Nigerian-British author’s change of tune?
Second time around, it feels a lot more fun,” beams Caleb Femi. We’ve perched on a bench outside the poet’s studio in Deptford, south-east London, in the late-August heat. Over the beeps and buzzes of delivery drivers keen to clock off for the weekend, he tells me about the impetus for The Wickedest — his second collection, which was published last week — and how he wrought it into existence.
His debut, Poor — a poignant tribute to the people of the south London social housing estate where Femi grew up — won the Forward Poetry Foundation’s Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection in 2021. Femi, now 34, had already served as the first young people’s laureate for London. His verse combined the poetry-slam swagger of spoken word with formal discipline, iambics and ballads; rappers, TS Eliot and the Bible were given equal homage.
Poor was a tough collection to write, Femi tells me — as a vital yet devastating story of a life in which violence infiltrated innocence. The North Peckham Estate was a postwar concrete labyrinth: 40 acres of “streets in the sky”, whose reputation for crime emerged within years of its construction. Among the deaths Femi experienced in his youth was that of Damilola Taylor, stabbed in a stairwell on the estate at the age of 10.
By contrast, The Wickedest represents carefree life: its name comes from a generations-old monthly house party, and narrates one of its chaotic nights. “The two of them are two halves of the same coin. I specifically wrote it as a counter-balance to Poor,” he says.
The diptych now complete, he says, “I’m not doing another poetry collection — I’m done with it. I just want poetry to be something that is for me to enjoy. I didn’t want Poor to be the legacy, I wanted to have a counterweight to the conversation.”
Maybe it’s the T-shirt weather but he seems amazingly relaxed with what feels like a big decision to stop publishing poems. Still, Femi is polymathic in his creative output — he’s a filmmaker and creative director, working across TV, theatre and commercial campaigns — and with the success of Poor came the frustration of feeling restricted to one medium, he says. “My personal relationship with poetry started to sour.” He now plans to write short stories and novels, eager to lean into experimentation.
In The Wickedest, Femi draws on his skills as a photographer as well as a poet to encapsulate the house party experience in a book that’s stylish and wittily curated — complete with floor plan, screen grabs of text messages, even a “Promotion Risk Assessment Form” from London’s Metropolitan Police, anarchically completed. It is fun, optimistic and beautiful to look at.
Like Poor, The Wickedest features a cast of friends — many of them a “direct lift” of Femi’s real friends or a mix of their characters. I tell him I’d love to meet Lala, the “custodian of good times” who keeps the revellers in check and gets her own poem. “Lala’s a real person — actually a guy. He’s very known . . . so I flipped it. In the best of ways, actually: even he likes this version of himself.”
It’s a compact collection to carry so many elements — some poems are DJ shout-outs; some present as lyrics; others experiment with form, broken lines bouncing between margins to an almost audible beat. If a party demands a more carefree look, there’s nothing careless about these lines:
The night asks me if it has been good to me —
I lie to be kind.
Tobi’s laugh brushes past my shoulders,
I lie to be kind.
Tobi’s laugh brushes past my shoulders,
I trace its path back
to a huddle of echoing bellies,
a meteor shower.
to a huddle of echoing bellies,
a meteor shower.
How did he bring it all together? The temporal framework helped. “A party starts and it ends. In this country, it starts around 10ish — give or take,” he laughs, “and ends around sunrise.”
Parties, says Femi, are essential to life. “Look at people’s reasons to dance,” he says. “When we are outside in the day, there are so many things that want to knock us off our perch, that want to kill us. We come together, we celebrate the people we love and even strangers because: we’re here.” In a poem titled “Every shoobs is another shoobs”, that true role of the party is delivered in a gut-punch line: “you survived the daily cull . . . again / take joy / spite’s sharpest weapon . . . use it”.
Femi’s concern for his peers is endemic to his work. Some of his poems verge on the metaphysical, with his expression of love for his peers defying form; others are stitched through with survivors’ guilt.
“After Poor it took me maybe 18 months to write a new poem. I felt exhausted,” says Femi. “I excavated a lot. At moments I just had to break down and cry, then continue.” He was determined to make this new collection a happier project. He shot the photographs at parties and even wrote during some of them.
His facial expression hints at fond memories. “I questioned, ‘I don’t know, this is feeling a little too playful, it doesn’t feel like this is a book that should be released into the world!’” The afterglow strikes me as the perfect contrast, and exactly what Femi was aiming for: the counter-point to his first, trauma-inflected book.
While the framework of The Wickedest is a night out,Poor is framed by the estate on which it was set. Poems contrasted how outsiders and residents saw their homes; in others, buildings become metaphor. In The Wickedest, space is subversive and ambitious — “a party is always a bungalow /with multi-storey dreams in its foundation”. One of the visual props is a floor plan that’s drawn to be dysfunctional, conveying, Femi says, “a very real place but also a very fantastical place . . . the doorways, thresholds and rooms don’t work”.
Space and its design — where people live and where they gather — is fundamental to Femi’s work, in all his fields. “It came from the nature of writing poetry,” he says. “You’re inclined to think about form, design, technique.” He collaborated with trained architect Virgil Abloh on fashion shows and cites the late designer as his greatest influence.
Today, his passion for parties and space converge in a “big conversation”. “Our third spaces are eroding by the day”, he says, with London’s nightlife culture under threat from changes to late-night licensing and “not being able to afford a night out if you’re young”. That erosion eats into literature and the arts too. I ask if he sees representation improving in the UK’s literary scene, given the rise of imprints focusing on writers of colour. He shakes his head. “It feels like the tap is closing now”, he says. When funding is cut, “The arts is always the first to take the hit, and then within the arts it’s the marginalised groups.”
He’s clearly frustrated by what this means for the next generation. “So many of us engage with our imagination in the way that we interpret a space. As a young kid, seeing things like murals on the wall, or graffiti even, gave me the licence to want to contribute. The way I did it was literature; the way my friends did it was through music.”
Indeed, Femi was an English schoolteacher in north London before publishing Poor, and he still mentors young creatives. How does he think we can achieve a national literary scene where every kid thinks “I could do that”?
“Literature needs to learn how to play with the other kids. It needs to learn how to play with the other art forms, to allow itself to be malleable, and the others have to make room for literature. We need to pull down the borders and allow a lot more mixing.”
As he expands his writing into fiction, it sounds like a challenge he’s throwing down for himself as well as the wider publishing industry.
‘The Wickedest’ is published by Fourth Estate (£14.99)
