Dzifa Benson's Monster reviewed in The Guardian & Telegraph & Books of the Year
Dzifa Benson's debut Monster reviewed in The Guardian, The Telegraph & Glamour Magazine; Poem of the Week feature in The Guardian; Poetry Books of the Year features in...
Dzifa Benson will be reading at Soho Poly Poetry in London on 5 Dec. Workshop and reading at Verve Poetry Festival on 14 Feb. Online launch event now on YouTube.
Launch reading by Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory
Dzifa Benson, Nia Davies and Helen Ivory will be launching their new books online on Monday 21 October, 7pm BST. Watch live or later on our YouTube channel
My keeper
calls me ass centaur
claims a taste of the exotic is all I’m good for.
Here’s savagery made true flesh he tells the mob.
See that unnatural scoop in her back? That is how
you know she is a monster.
Seen bear romp
and capuchin dance
upon bear’s back? Now, a rear to fool you at first glance
a well endowed proposition, real flesh no deception!
I ǂna my feet to the thin chords of my mamokhorong –
stomp jump bump plump rump.
Ogles and jeers
always free flowing
as top-hatted men brush past me, some are sweating
Have you seen anything so singularly Hottentot, m’lords?
asks my keeper. I dance the black stripe //gau of an oryx
to sweep back the years.
The soiled doves
say I’m a tout’s dream.
Scientists, avid to test the high yellow of my skin,
think I’m kin to succubus and fabled knuckle walker
When will my body have nothing more than its Khoekhoe
self to be enough?
Months ago
I rode in a barouche
sent by a duke who said my shape scrolls like a cartouche.
Now I languish in salons, fairgrounds and roadside inns
where trolls with their yeast stink jostle to see this stuffed skin
mark time in a floor-show.
Can they be human
if their eyes are empty
and, like animals, they think their reflections are the enemy?
When they fail to recognise their own mirror image in my eyes
all their dead things try to live in me and I grind in the lifelong
dirt of being a woman.
*
Miss Baartman wears her sense of self tightly at a
night suitable for ladies, she must not let it float free.
Here I am ripe and raw, stumble-root carved as woman
untethered from my shadow and living in its shade.
Pinched, poked and prodded with parasols by things
that should never have been born, pretty things, other
things of fashion accompanied by their young black pages,
caricatures in this parliament of monster makers. Tired
of being tired, I hang like a curtain skirting the stage,
my cloth pouring down endlessly as you watchers waft
right through the cloth of me, convinced by your own sneers.
Where in this affair is the true monstrosity if you can laugh
and name and point and you look but you do not see
the gluttonous black craters where your hearts should be?
Khoekhoe tamab, Sab ke – you are all so uncouth
so please remove my name from your mouths.<
*
Viheheɖego // Self Portrait as a Creature of Numbers
I shifted into this human life from the spirit world, the fusion of 1 egg and 1 sperm at 8.42 pm, where Latitude 51° 31' 0 N straddles Longitude 0° –6' 0 E. London, N19 to be exact. At 8 days my mother outdoored me, crossed the threshold back and forth 7 times, whispered a prayer over 3 glasses, dabbed my tongue, 1 drop from each – water, honey, salt. She showed my face to the 4 elements each in turn punched 2 holes in my earlobes. To bind mind, body and spirit to a destiny of life path 1, she took 3 new laid eggs cracked them open over my head.
1st daughter of a 4th son of Ghana, my soul surges 8° 00' north of the equator, 2° 00' west of the prime meridian. I march to a 4 beat over 50,000,000 knots on this ocean called forever knowing that bigger, better numbers can be reached by always adding just 1 more. Sketched from 300 moons minus 3 plus 35 valentine cards I never received, I am ruled by lustre bouncing off the Evening Star, 2nd planet in, 108,000,000 kilometres from the sun. If you encounter me in the London Underground standing 1.66 metres tall on the escalator going up or going down, know that I own 1001 options raised to the power of infinity plus 1 – dreamer, seeker interloper when I am willing. Always climbing 1 more number.
At the very least 1.
*
Raft
Sea, what if, now and forever, these subtitled women
who keep the laterite of Africa priming their bellies,
untethered themselves from their arching shadows
and stayed out too long, baking in this livid sun?
What if, this time, the open secret of stumble-root
throating their scratched out voices, their failed
deaths by cuts upon chafes and the entire syntax
of hard-grind scribed on the S-curve of their spines,
buttocks and hips, branding their skin and lips –
truly dished the dirt? Sea, what if they wished
to speak freely to your wet walls, with unfurrowed
brows and unbowed backs, the volume turned up
to lava in their too-much too-loud mouths? Sea,
what if they didn’t have to be their own life rafts?
What if, for black women, Sea, what of that?
Contents List
I. Monster
13 Lacuna, with Landscape
14 Blues for Sarah
16 Exhibition of a Real Life Wonder (Still Alive!)
17 Som-|aub // Menarche
20 Lost & Found
22 In Which Comedian Charles Matthews, Actor Charles Kemble and Dandy Beau Brummell Question Miss Sara Baartman Before Her Evening Performance
26 From The Morning Chronicle, 12 October 1810 p.3
28 The Attorney General’s Submission to the King’s Bench
30 Miss Sarah Bartmann Recalls Her Lover, a Drummer from Batavia
32 Freak Sonnets for Lusus Naturae at Bartholomew Fair: Natural-Born, Man-Made and Counterfeit
36 Tongue
40 The Prime of Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Cuvier Witnessed by the Recently Made Ghost of Mademoiselle Sarah Baartman
42 Scala Naturae // A Remix of Voltaire
43 Sestina for Six Scientists in Search of an Ology
45 A Psychological Study of Phenomena // A Remix of Ribot
46 Bottom Power
49 Mademoiselle Sarah Bartmann Performs in Duchess du Barry’s Salon of Wit and Wisdom
50 Bottom Power Redux // Augmented with Bustle (A Poem/Play)
54 How to Restore a Museum Artefact
55 1810–2002
58 Bone Fever Dream
60 Gemsbok Trance Song of the Girl Who Made the Stars Road
61 The Hottentot Venus Hails Botticelli’s on the High Seas
63 !Nau // A Bloodline of Inessential Contact with Water
II. Mɔse ƒe ye nye xɔme
78 Echolalia // A Broken Rule Ghazal
79 Ahanonko // ‘A Nameless Thing is a Vague Thing’
80 Ŋkɔfofodo // Moulding My Drinking Name
82 The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale
83 Venaviwo // Xi and Xetsa
85 Myself, When I Am Real
86 Dzonu // Fire Things: A Brief Genealogy of the XX Chromosomes
87 Futhawo // Rowing Song for Asie Me Tsia Dio ‘Young Boys’ Fishermen
89 Complaint to a Flamboyant
90 Viheheɖego // Self Portrait as a Creature of Numbers
III. After a Panoptic Ekphrasis
93 Three Colours Black
94 The Red Thread
95 In the Company of Trees
96 Foreign Matter
99 Broken Ghazal for Pink Sheen and Gravity
100 Call Me Balthazar
102 Black Dog Bone Blues
103 The $40,000 Pill
105 Coitus, Refracted
106 London Bone
IV. Addendum
111 The Yoctogram Weighs In
112 Here, This Bird
113 Little Wing
114 Truss
115 How to Wear Drama
116 Mountain Myths of the Orchid Lady’s Daughter
117 The Last Exorcist
119 How I Learned to Dance with the Octopus
120 I Told It to the Sea
125 Raft