10. The Emperor's Babe, by Bernardine Evaristo
This time, I managed to wait until the following morning to start searching frantically for other books by the same author, but that's only because I was too busy reading right through insomnia and a splitting headache for half of last night. All incoherencies in this post should therefore be excused on the grounds of sleep-deprivation and a blown mind.
This feels like my London (the one I can hear in M.I.A.'s "Galang"), and it's a shock and a joy to to find it in fiction.
In the acknowledgements, Evaristo (website at http://www.bevaristo.net) credits historian Peter Fryer's fantastic Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain for telling her that there were Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation.
The Emperor's Babe takes the historical facts and runs with them: it's set circa 211 AD and tells the story of Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants, growing up in Londinium, married off at age 11 to a rich senator, dreaming of writing poetry and plotting to seduce the Libyan-born Emperor, Septimus Severus ...
But Evaristo tells it as a novel-in-verse, and not only is it jawdroppingly-ambitious, it contains some of the freshest poetry I've read in a while: a deliberately anachronistic, anarchic blend of formal diction, Latin and contemporary slang, historical authenticity and jarringly-modern detail (the Emperor wears a "purple Armani toga", and Zuleika buys flowers from a shop I know), funny and sexy and shrewd and passionate -- and, at the end, when the constricted and brutal realities of life for women in Roman society bite home, heart-shattering.
Zuleika's not just a Londinium It Girl, bubbly chick lit with a smattering of Latin; she's also a relative of Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Shakespeare's sister, born black and Roman. And she feels utterly real.
An extract:
Who do you love? Who do you love?
When the man you married goes off
for months on end, quelling rebellions
at the frontiers, or playing hot-shot senator in Rome;
his flashy villa on the Palatine Hill, home
to another woman, I hear,
one who has borne him offspring.
My days are spent roaming this house,
its vast mosaic walls full of the scenes on Olympus,
for my husband loves melodrama.
They say his mistress is an actress,
a flaxen-fraulein type, from Germania Superior.
Oh everyone envied me, Illa Bella Negreeta!
born in the back of a shop on Gracechurch Street,
who got hitched to a Roman nobleman,
whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on a barge,
no burnished throne, no poop of beaten gold
but packed with vomiting brats,
and cows releasing warm turds
onto their bare feet. Thus perfumed,
they made it to Londinium on a donkey,
with only a thin purse and a fat dream.
Here in the drizzle of this wild west town
Dad wandered the streets looking for work,
but there was no room at the inn
so he set up shop on the kerb
and sold sweet cakes which Mum made.
(He's told me this story a mille times.)
Now he owns several shops, selling everything
from vino to shoes, veggies to tools,
and he employs all sorts to work in them,
a Syrian, Libyan, Jew, Persian,
hopefuls just off the olive barge from Gaul,
in fact anyone who'll work for pebbles.
When Felix came after me, Dad was in ecstasy,
Father-in-law to Lucius Aurelius Felix, no less.
I was spotted at the baths of Cheapside,
just budding, and my fate was sealed,
to a man thrice my age, and thrice my girth -
all at sweet eleven, even then Dad
thought I was getting past it.
Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman bitch
called Clarissa for decorum classes,
learnt how to talk, eat and fart,
how to get my amo amas amat right, and ditch
my second generation plebby creole.
Zuleika accepta est.
Zuleika delicata est.
Zuleika bloody goody-two shoes est.
But I dreamt of creating mosaics,
of remaking my town with bright stones and glass.
But no! Numquam! It's not allowed.
Sure, Felix brings me presents, when he deigns
to come west. I've had Chinese silk, a marble
figurine from Turkey, gold earrings
shaped like dolphins and I have the deepest
fondness for my husband, of course,
sort of, though he spills over me like dough
and I'm tempted to call Cook mid-coitus
to come trim his sides so that he fits me.
Then it's puff and Ciao Baby!
Solitudoh, solitudee, solitudargh!
This feels like my London (the one I can hear in M.I.A.'s "Galang"), and it's a shock and a joy to to find it in fiction.
In the acknowledgements, Evaristo (website at http://www.bevaristo.net) credits historian Peter Fryer's fantastic Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain for telling her that there were Africans living in Britain during the Roman occupation.
The Emperor's Babe takes the historical facts and runs with them: it's set circa 211 AD and tells the story of Zuleika, the daughter of Sudanese immigrants, growing up in Londinium, married off at age 11 to a rich senator, dreaming of writing poetry and plotting to seduce the Libyan-born Emperor, Septimus Severus ...
But Evaristo tells it as a novel-in-verse, and not only is it jawdroppingly-ambitious, it contains some of the freshest poetry I've read in a while: a deliberately anachronistic, anarchic blend of formal diction, Latin and contemporary slang, historical authenticity and jarringly-modern detail (the Emperor wears a "purple Armani toga", and Zuleika buys flowers from a shop I know), funny and sexy and shrewd and passionate -- and, at the end, when the constricted and brutal realities of life for women in Roman society bite home, heart-shattering.
Zuleika's not just a Londinium It Girl, bubbly chick lit with a smattering of Latin; she's also a relative of Virginia Woolf's hypothetical Shakespeare's sister, born black and Roman. And she feels utterly real.
An extract:
Who do you love? Who do you love?
When the man you married goes off
for months on end, quelling rebellions
at the frontiers, or playing hot-shot senator in Rome;
his flashy villa on the Palatine Hill, home
to another woman, I hear,
one who has borne him offspring.
My days are spent roaming this house,
its vast mosaic walls full of the scenes on Olympus,
for my husband loves melodrama.
They say his mistress is an actress,
a flaxen-fraulein type, from Germania Superior.
Oh everyone envied me, Illa Bella Negreeta!
born in the back of a shop on Gracechurch Street,
who got hitched to a Roman nobleman,
whose parents sailed out of Khartoum on a barge,
no burnished throne, no poop of beaten gold
but packed with vomiting brats,
and cows releasing warm turds
onto their bare feet. Thus perfumed,
they made it to Londinium on a donkey,
with only a thin purse and a fat dream.
Here in the drizzle of this wild west town
Dad wandered the streets looking for work,
but there was no room at the inn
so he set up shop on the kerb
and sold sweet cakes which Mum made.
(He's told me this story a mille times.)
Now he owns several shops, selling everything
from vino to shoes, veggies to tools,
and he employs all sorts to work in them,
a Syrian, Libyan, Jew, Persian,
hopefuls just off the olive barge from Gaul,
in fact anyone who'll work for pebbles.
When Felix came after me, Dad was in ecstasy,
Father-in-law to Lucius Aurelius Felix, no less.
I was spotted at the baths of Cheapside,
just budding, and my fate was sealed,
to a man thrice my age, and thrice my girth -
all at sweet eleven, even then Dad
thought I was getting past it.
Then I was sent off to a snooty Roman bitch
called Clarissa for decorum classes,
learnt how to talk, eat and fart,
how to get my amo amas amat right, and ditch
my second generation plebby creole.
Zuleika accepta est.
Zuleika delicata est.
Zuleika bloody goody-two shoes est.
But I dreamt of creating mosaics,
of remaking my town with bright stones and glass.
But no! Numquam! It's not allowed.
Sure, Felix brings me presents, when he deigns
to come west. I've had Chinese silk, a marble
figurine from Turkey, gold earrings
shaped like dolphins and I have the deepest
fondness for my husband, of course,
sort of, though he spills over me like dough
and I'm tempted to call Cook mid-coitus
to come trim his sides so that he fits me.
Then it's puff and Ciao Baby!
Solitudoh, solitudee, solitudargh!