'Will Anybody Speak of This'

: Jay Bernard's Surge as Intermedial Poetry

Abstract

In their debut poetry volume Surge (2019), non-binary Black British poet and activist Jay Bernard retraces, recounts and reimagines the New Cross (1981) and Grenfell (2017) fires, offering a scathing criticism of the historical and ongoing socio-political deprivation of Black Britons, as exemplified by the biased media coverage both events received. This article shows how Bernard’s powerful revisionist work refuses to stay silent as it combines poetry and archival material to make tangible the histories it engages with, grounding itself in these histories, talking back to and from these fraught histories in a myriad of voices, languages, and poetic forms to underscore the many perspectives official discourses failed to include. Considering Surge a sequence of narrative poems, this article shows how the separate archival material brought into the volume engages with the narrative told in the poems, adding layers of meaning to these already significant texts. My close reading of selected poems reveals how the archival intertextuality and intermediality ground the volume in lived/archived experiences alongside the literary traditions it celebrates. Additionally, the article demonstrates how Bernard’s complex and thought-provoking use of simple poetic devices underscores the counter-discursive message that runs through the volume and how Surge’s intermedial remembrance of the New Cross and Grenfell fires becomes a political act of defiance.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	KU Leuven
Supervisor	Elisabeth Bekers (Promotor)