Review on Spoiled Ink
By Sean Merrigan
‘There are miles of words between us, when we used to be so close.’
-Aoife Mannix
The Accents on Words performance could be summed up by the quote above. Its central theme is language: how it draws us together yet also marks our apartness, how words themselves always end up having to stand in – always in a rather faut de mieux way – for people and things we can no longer physically approach - ex-lovers, deceased parents, even our past.
In a simple way a spoken accent reflects this; it can both bind and divide across cultures and regions, cause misunderstandings and upset. On a more complex level, accents are also part of our individuality because the words that we use to express ourselves are inflected by our own individual surroundings and upbringing. Our accents contain our past.
All four of the poets reading this evening are highly sensitive to these issues of sameness and otherness, distance and proximity that affect our use of language. Each performance was good in itself, but this focus gave the event coherence, with diverse accents complementing each other to create a thematic harmony. (Discord was entirely the preserve of the telephone in Lewisham library foyer, which trilled repeatedly throughout the evening.)
First to read are Ebele and Baden Prince – stalwarts of the Tall Lighthouse collective. Ebele’s rich mix of South London and West African tones silence the murmuring audience instantly: ‘My Grandmother’s breasts were long and flat like pancakes,’ the opening to a wonderful elegy of her snuff-tooting grandmother, whose ‘fiery nose-orgasms’ presaged her great wisdom in ‘the snuff-zone.’ Baden Prince has also chosen a memorial piece; a prose narrative of his grandmother’s funeral in St Kitts, which he warns us ‘might be a little tasteless.’ In fact it’s a wonderfully humorous evocation of a formidable woman whose irrepressible, mischievous character survives even the grave as two Anglican bishops argue over ‘who has the right to bury her’. Accent-wise, Baden’s speaking voice veers between strict BBC for the narrative and warm West Indian vowels for the dialogue; language acting as a kind of geographic marker, an idea that links many of the poems we hear tonight.
Accents on Words is a two-woman show in which Aoife Mannix and Heather Taylor blend poetry and music to explore the ways in which language and history, memory and identity are linked together. It opens with a recording of dislocated voices – Australian, Scots, Irish – all talking about what their accent means to them, and how they feel about being away from home. In an ever more globalised world an accent becomes an identifying label that carries history and invites assumptions (bombings and hunger strikers for Mannix, silos and long stretches of highway for ‘designated prairie folk’ like Taylor); something that one might want to be proud of, but at the same time something one might want to shake off. Canadian-born Taylor, who now lives in London, speaks about the confusion her newfound argot creates at ‘home’ - ‘bin,’ ‘quid’ – whilst in London she “only brings out the twang now to get round museum attendants.” Mannix counters darkly, questioning the growing fashion for all things Gaelic: “It’s amazing what stopping bombing will do for you.”
The connection between memory and language also forms a central strand of the performance. Between bursts of plaintive guitar strumming, Heather Taylor recounts the growing pains of growing up in small-town Canada. There is a strange circularity to the story: the junior school line dance and obligatory crush give way to the high school proms, teenage angst and the desire to escape out into the world. Then the college frat parties where drunken boys puke, piss and slobber, then the far-away city, and a nightclub where a dj in a fit of irony puts on an old country tune and she finds herself nostalgic for the simplicity and naivety of home. In the land of silos, the choices were to either ‘settle down’ or ‘move on,’ but once you start moving on, you can never go back.
Mannix and Taylor’s repertoire is aurally gorgeous; their voices perfectly matched as they inter-splice their respective poetry. Visually it’s arresting too; sometimes it’s formal and dramatic, with fragments of verse spoken in syncopation and graceful, choreographed movement. Other times it’s like having your two big sisters having a comfortable conversation, maybe even winding each other up a bit. They bounce words and ideas off each other incessantly, a fabulous repartee of wisecracks that leavens the underlying pathos of memory and loss that many of the poems tonight have dealt with.
It seems very apt, here amidst the many voices and cultures of London, to be listening to this. On the bus on the way to this event I’ve heard African women telling off their kids, Japanese students talking quick-fire into mobile phones, builders from Croatia deciding where to go for a beer – all these accents are inextricably tied to histories and places, but they are also part of the aural landscape of the city I call home. As Mannix states this is the place where ‘the labels fall off,’ where we like to think of ourselves as individuals first and foremost. Where our accents mutate.
I’ll be leaving my iPod switched off for the journey home.