Literature, Remixed

LITERATURE,

REMIXED

Acclaimed playwright and poet Inua Ellams joined the Library two years ago – and realised it was the ideal place for a hip-hop party, finds Kadish Morris

Photography by Ameena Rojee

When Inua Ellams was 12, and newly arrived in England from Nigeria, he tested the boundaries with his parents by bringing home books from the library that he thought they wouldn’t approve of. “I discovered Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. The cover was this figure dressed as a ninja assassin, riding a camel with a half-naked woman dangling off his arm – but my mother didn’t care because of how thick the book was.”

Now a renowned playwright and poet, his rebellious edge, easy humour and his family’s love of books have served Ellams well. “We’d even read the Argos catalogue,” he says. He was born in 1984 in Jos, a city in the North Central of Nigeria, to a Christian mother and a Muslim father. The rise of militant Islamist group Boko Haram in the mid-1990s put the family in jeopardy, and so they moved to the UK. Libraries were a revelation. “It baffled me that I could go into this building and, because of a laminated card, they would trust me to take home as many books as I wanted. It was ridiculous.”

This helped to kickstart his career. As a young man he was unable to legally work due to his immigration status. “I began reading my way through everything, from French philosophy to graphic design, then I started designing flyers for poetry events and they invited me to come on stage.”

“One of my mentors told me that you have to write about yourself, you have to risk something”

The rest is history. Since his first poetry pamphlet, Thirteen Fairy Negro Tales, was published in 2005 Ellams has become a major literary presence as a writer and performer. His one-man show drawing on his own experience of immigration, The 14th Tale, won a Fringe First at Edinburgh in 2009; he combined poetry and graphic art in the 2012 show Black T-shirt Collection, since optioned for a TV series. His debut collection, The Actual, was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Its 55 poems, written on his phone, explore everything from the British Empire to the rapper Tupac Shakur.

Ellams' reimagining of Three Sisters by Chekhov is set in Nigeria during its 1967-70 Civil War. Sarah Niles, Rachel Ofari and Natalie Simpson perform at the National Theatre.

Photo: The Other Richard/ArenaPAL

Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, Ellams might be best known for his work in theatre. His 2017 hit play, Barber Shop Chronicles, inspired by audio recordings made in Africa and described by The New York Times as “a group portrait of black men”, sold out the National Theatre twice and went on a world tour. In his adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 2019, also for the National, its protagonists were relocated from Russia to Nigeria during the Civil War of 1967-70.

But Ellams says he’s not interested in trailblazing. “In the West there’s a need for the poet to always be new and to be groundbreaking. That is a riff on capitalist ideals – a pyramidic structure.” As a proud communist and hiphop fanatic, his work is all about community and union. “When I write, I’m not trying to be new. I remix poems. I acknowledge what comes before and figure out what I have to say and join this chorus of writers, which started from the caveman right up to the Shakespeares, the Toni Morrisons and the Maya Angelous of the world.”

Ellams's RAP Party events combine music with poetry that is 'affiliated with or in step with aspects of hip-hop culture'.

Photo: Dale Weeks

“When I write, I’m not trying to be new. I acknowledge what comes before”

Ellams first came to the Library to do a live reading for an event with Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, the writers’ collective founded in Brixton by poets Malika Booker and Roger Robinson and which supports voices outside the mainstream. He was struck by the potential of the Reading Room as a place to hold one of his R.A.P Party events. Standing for Rhythm and Poetry, they have been combining live poetry and music since 2010, everywhere from the Southbank Centre to literature festivals in the UK, Ireland and Lagos, and are, he says, “like a house party, but with awkward speeches”. Their popularity suggests something more inviting. Ten poets read works that are “affiliated with or in step with aspects of hip-hop culture. The readings might be about songs directly, or reference a lyric. After that, we play two tracks attached to the poems.” He admits people often say they’ve never been to an event like it. “They talk about simplicity, which is one of its strengths; the equation works. It has this innate rebellious energy.”

In addition to enjoying “the taboo of holding a hiphop night in a library,” Ellams says, he values the space as somewhere “to meet people to discuss literature” and to write and study. Contemporaries such as Jay Bernard, Terrance Hayes, Caroline Bird, Rebecca Perry, Jack Underwood and Caleb Femi inspire him. Though whenever he’s really stuck, he goes to the American poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns, whose works are characterised by a cool realism. “He wrote the strangest of poems. But the most moving as well.”

A scene from Barber Shop Chronicles at the National Theatre

Photo: Tristam Kenton/The Guardian

Ellams admits his own approach to writing has shifted, and is now not as intensely political. “I used to think I wasn’t interesting, and that the world was spiralling so out of control I could throw a pen and hit something that’s wrong with it, so I’ll just write about that. But one of my first poetry mentors, Roger Robinson, told me that you have to write about yourself. You have to risk something.”

Yet ideas about injustice, culture and histories that have affected him still underpin his work. He’s working on a new play for the National, set in pre-colonial Nigeria, about the last days of British rule. Research has included

interviews with academics from across Africa and revealed that “[colonisers] demanded books be rewritten in Boko [a Latin-script alphabet]. Those that weren’t translated were destroyed – they burned them and said ‘history begins here henceforth’.” In the Library’s archives of The Times from 1865 to 1902 he found “some of the things that were happening in Nigeria had been debated about in parliament”. Though it’s too early to reveal precisely how, these records have fed into the plot of the play. Ellams is also working on an adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, written around 441 BC, which is partly about faith. In the aftermath of civil war, two brothers have died, and their sister Antigone, aligning herself with the wishes of the gods, refuses to accept an edict from her uncle King Creon that one be denied funeral rites. She is entombed in a cave, and hangs herself before Creon decides to free her.

At first, Ellams was unsure about taking on the commission, but he started to see it as a story about a woman versus the patriarchy. “I thought, Antigone is asked to stand up to the wastemen around her, politically and socially. When I saw it through that lens I thought the only way I could feel close to it would be if I removed the Greek gods and replaced them with a faith that I felt was under scrutiny: Islam.”

Part of Ellams’s research involves simply reading the news. When we speak he has just read an article about the government’s plans to deport refugees to Rwanda. “My version of Antigone is about the immigrants and Muslims who aren’t wanted in this country, who have to change so much of their culture. They almost feel like they are baggage around this country’s neck.” The play, he says, feels like it’s writing itself. •

Ellams’s retelling of Antigone is at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, 3-24 September. Kadish Morris is a poet and critic