Dolphins and Cigarettes
when the pain and love have caught up with, mash
Vahni Capildeo
We bought tickets for ‘Sex in the Afternoon’. Do
hold your breath…
Looking out the window at pine trees, rooftops
and the foothill of a mountain range, then
looking into the spotted mirror adjacent to the
window and seeing that view as not the same
but as deeper and mercurially transfigured, was
an early childhood experiment. Its rules derived
from an extended simile in a children’s book by
a now carped-at author. It does not matter that
the looker is indoors. What matters is that the
looker is a point of revolving focus between the
reachable external refreshed by mystery, and its
mysteriously refreshing yet intangible counterpart.
This and similar experiments, or experiences, incite
scepticism in me – not about the need for a liter-
ature that reflects yet departs from its immediate
environment, but about whether it is necessarily
oppressive to read an English children’s book in a
recently independent ex-colony, or whether readers
of, say, Commonwealth poets in England must be
subject to the conscientious not-done-the-home-
work nervousness reviewers sometimes express.
The larger movement of mind between book, mirror
and window did not incite desire for the snow-
capped setting of the story. It opened, summoned,
and embraced observation and re-visioning.
We began travelling. ‘Sex in the Afternoon’ would
occur in a building edged by a river…
Primary imaginative shifts can be arrived at via
manifold recessive framing; and, as with the com-
bination of chromosomal material in the newly
fertilized egg, simplified in textbooks to an arith-
metical 23 + 23 but truly an intertwining of fusing,
breaking strands, some of the glints and colour
stick. So, forever among the emerald grass and
wild horses in an American state I still have not
visited, a gawky fictional boy, and my shadow-self
projected into the book to stand beside him in his
unimaginable, imaginary ranch, wonder about one
of the household pictures: two women, old and
young, holding to each other in a close embrace and
– already quotational – some accompanying text.
Not a flat caption saying who they are; the words
are breathable, overheard or repeatable, some-
thing the women are saying. I the storybook boy’s
channel, he the pictured women’s channel, he and
I recite the phrases, loving the lift and fall of them,
without knowing what they mean, while intuiting
that the feeling rising from them like cigarette
smoke and breath hunting each other in dragonish
winter carries a high, constrictive, diffuse pain
we would have to grow up a little more to know.
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from
following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will
go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
The anticipation of a complexity with which
we would become incorporate: this was enfolded
in the reading of the story simultaneously as
re-reading and as that-which-will-be-lived; and
the landscape of, the older reader, they arrive also
re-threaded with a childlike breath and breadth of
wonder and the sense of there being time for time.
Stop. Remember: lotos-eating, protracted
poesis, are on the menu. ‘Sex in the Afternoon’,
with Malika Booker, Warsan Shire, Kei Miller,
and Rachel Mars, proved a very English affair of
smartly dressed poet-friends sitting in the half-cir-
cle of official informality. Absent was any fearful
and erotic ‘performative element’: nowhere a
butterfly china tea set with the Joséphine cham-
pagne glasses of ‘European’ literary adulterers,
nor a musky rose screen to reveal-and-conceal a
burlesque dancer whose silhouette might add an
unattainable, perhaps untameable, body of desire
to the well-chosen words, nor writers snaking
amongst the audience for surprise intimacies.
Despite the almost academic set-up, there was
no sharp tilt to the discussion, which was mildly,
minimally multicultural and queer: no sex/pornog-
raphy, sex/procreation, afternoon/transgression,
afternoon/siesta: neither law nor leisure, break-
down or breakout. This was postprandial love
business for the ‘no triggers’ consumers, i.e. no art
or science of fireworks into the dark. The writers
delivered their work beautifully, humorously. Yet
these gorgeous and moving writers did not hear
and turn to each other with any intensity; more
individual than mutual, agreeable than hungering,
their performances did not start to have sex with
each other. It was like going to a resort that prom-
ises swimming with dolphins, only to find that the
dolphins have learnt how to use inflatable rafts and
are choosing to stay out of the water and sun them-
selves. We checked social media, and found that in a
parallel chamber a parallel audience was all steamed
up and tweeting; perhaps we had just slipped…
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from
following after thee: for whither thou goest, I
will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy
people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be
buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if
ought but death part thee and me.
Attachment and anguish cry out from these verses,
known to me from that childhood reading, and
threaded into my first book, No Traveller Returns.
That afternoon, unexpected, compelling, Malika
Booker purred them from the well-conducted
stage, in a poem giving voice to the older woman
of the two, inventing or uncovering a desirous
lesbian connexion between kinswomen. Who were
these two, anyway? Where did they come from?
Young Ruth, in the Tanakh or Old Testament,
fiercely refuses to be driven away by her mother-in-
law Naomi. A foreigner and now a widow, Naomi
wants her also widowed daughters-in-law Ruth and
Orpah to find men, stay in their homeland, and
build a life they can enjoy. Naomi herself, however,
intends to quit the homestead she and her husband
ran, and return to her people. Ruth so loves the
woman who married into and managed a life in a
land of strangers that she follows her. Naomi’s
bereavement, leavetaking and homecoming
 become Ruth’s exile, assimilation and ultimate
welcome.
It is curious that the sexiest part of the South-
bank afternoon left me feeling less ‘woman’ and
more ‘postcolonial’; or perhaps more feminist
and less postfeminist? I couch this paragraph
subjectively, for it is not a criticism of Booker’s
poem so much as an examination of what hap-
pens when a text too close to some reader finds
itself reworked. I sorrowed the loss in trans-
lation: dependable, care-taking love between
women across generations: agape, caritas, the
steady and material glow, is rare and worth
celebrating – romance, passionate and revision-
ist, hogs so much attention. Iseult getting naked
with her nephew-in-law Tristan was enough of
Letter from Wales
Sam Adams
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
[ …]
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks, arguably the finest of the Second World War. Only
Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox
And mentioned it in a note I scribbled home; –
And we talked of girls, and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees ...
Early in my first university year at Aberystwyth I
heard someone read the poem of which these are
the opening lines and soon after made my way to
the upper gallery second-hand section of Galloway’s
bookshop in Pier Street and found Raiders’ Dawn,
the first of two books of poems by Alun Lewis, the
second, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, published
posthumously. It is easy to understand why ‘All day
it has rained’ caught my attention. In 1952 there
were fellow students who had served in the war.
One, David Pritchard, later professor of Education
at Swansea, who had been promoted major at the
crossing of the Rhine, became a good friend and
led a quartet of us on an adventure in France and
Spain in the summer of 1954. But it wasn’t just that
the poem was about the war that won my attention,
it was the register, somewhere between the familiar
nineteenth-century poetics of school English and
twentieth-century journalism, and the closeness of
the language and ideas to those of my everyday life,
and again the mood – ennui, surely, but poised on
the edge, as it were, of chaos or epiphany. Raiders’
Dawn was published in March 1942; eighteen
months later, October 1943, it had reached a fourth
an incest-lite pressure-cooker; am I wrong to 10–11
be totally creeped out by the use of a nurturing Reports
power relation as the occasion for a come-on? Capildeo
What would it mean to look at how the daily Adams
life of someone as situationally disempowered as
Naomi (extinct spouse, alien tribe) could convert –
not attract – Ruth to its long-term ordinariness? Is
there any excitement in an adventure of changed
loyalties and landscapes, without skin-to-skin
payoffs? My student and I left the event. Without
fancying each other, we stepped on to a boat that
went along the Thames. Disembarking at the Tower
of London, we shared a restful moment in time set
aside from shared work, ruminating on fields of
grain and the rolling heads of replaceable queens.
impression, as the copy I bought in Galloway’s
shows. It was the same with The Last Inspection and
other stories, also published in 1942, which had
run to a third impression by 1947, for Alun Lewis
won a considerable following in his short lifetime.
However you look at him, he was a writer of sub-
stantial achievement and huge promise. The war
may have forced him, impelled creativity with its
threat of life foreshortened, filled him with long-
ings and fed him impressions, particularly of India,
but it was sheer talent that made him a writer,
Keith Douglas and Sidney Keyes come near him.
Lewis was born in Cwmaman, a former mining
village near Aberdare, on 1 July 1915, and was
educated at Cowbridge Grammar School, UCW
Aberystwyth, and Manchester University. His
formative years coincided with the prolonged
industrial strife and depression of the 1920s–30s
and from family and community he imbibed
nonconformist, socialist and pacifist convictions.
The six weeks he spent in the summer of 1937 at
an International Peace Conference in Pontigny,
northern France, he described as among the
happiest of his life. It needed a particular kind
of courage to deny these principles and enlist
at the beginning of the war. In 1941 he married
Gweno (Ellis) a teacher, and was commissioned
second lieutenant in the South Wales Borderers,
and by 1942 he was serving in India. There are
indications that his was a conflicted personality:
a pacifist who enlisted; an officer who disliked the
officer class and preferred being with the men of
his platoon. His experience of the landscape and
peoples of India was shocking and profoundly
moving and, though he never lost his sense of
loving responsibility for Gweno, he found there
another love, one that bowled him over. At their
fine house in the Nilgiri Hills, Wallace and Freda
Aykroyd hosted army officers on leave. The moment
he saw Freda, he was lost. In February 1944, now
an intelligence officer with the Borderers, Lewis
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