14 January 2022 The Guardian Weekly59
chastisements of the British establishment for
promoting a false version of history. Harding is
almost apologetic in his entreaties to consider
reparations, which he believes are due both in
fi nancial terms, and in the formal acknowledg-
ment of the injustices of slavery.
But the book is nonetheless infuriating for its
wealth of information that should be common
knowledge yet is not, buried under the celebra-
tory propaganda of Britain’s abolishing of the
trans atlantic slave trade. The uprising happened
after that abolition because, despite the fact that
the British parliament passed a law in 1807 pro-
hibiting the Atlantic slave trade, the selling of
enslaved people between British colonies was
still permitted. Demerara became a thriving
market for the enslaved.
Harding argues that the Demerara uprising
played a larger role than it is given in the his-
tory books in changing British attitudes towards
slavery. But more broadly, the whitewashing of
the violent suppression of the uprising at the
time, in the British press and parliament , feels
sickeningly contemporary. White Debt is full of
details that will send a chill down your spine.
Michael M’Turk , one of the most brutal slave
“owners” in Demerara, who executed one of the
abolitionists during the uprisings and strung up
his body as a warning to others, cleverly anti-
cipated when the tide against slavery would turn.
He presented fake testimonials of his care for
the enslaved to Queen Victoria and managed
to secure a knighthood. In his actions, there is
no more fi tting metaphor for the country as a
whole. Britain not only expunged its own record
of brutality towards the enslaved, it cast itself
as their saviour.
NESRINE MALIK IS A GUARDIAN COLUMNIST AND
AUTHOR
led Bergling to name himself after a Buddhist
hell. He ended up in something like it.
M osesson had access to Bergling’s rehab
journal and almost everyone who had been part
of his life – ex-girlfriends, childhood pals, fellow
superstar DJs, psychotherapists. The author was
also privy to Bergling’s digital life – texts, emails
and messageboard posts.
As the book draws to its harrowing ending,
Mosesson off ers up a series of factors at play in
- Although he had kicked virtually every-
thing else, Bergling still smoked a lot of weed.
The book discusses how insidiously – or suddenly
- psychosis can aff ect users.
In the aftermath of Bergling’s death, many of
his closest associates sought help for their own
issues and dependencies. The DJ’s father is espe-
cially keen that the word “suicide” be used in
relation to his son; to speak plainly about what
the mental health charity ( Tim Bergling Founda-
tion ) set up in the DJ’s memory calls “a global
health emergency”. Observer
KITTY EMPIRE IS THE OBSERVER’S POP CRITIC
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
A round-up of the best recent poetryRefractive Africa
by Will Alexander
This visionary act of
“transpersonal witness”
to a continent is an
Afromodernist epic.
It is fi rst of all an act of
repossession, as in the
opening section’s dialogue
with Nigerian novelist
Amos Tutuola and closing
homage to the Malagasy
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo ,
often considered Africa’s
fi rst modern poet. At
the heart of the book is
a 50-page poem, The
Congo, on that country
as a site of colonial
pillage, “vertiginous
with derangement”.
An incantation
against “Eurocentric
stultifi cation”, Refractive
Africa embraces an
aesthetic of sprawl and
overreach, summoning
free-fl owing visions of
grandeur and desolation.The Vulture
b y G e r a r d W o o d w a r d
We begin with the
discovery of a dead
vulture at the foot of
a cliff ; slicing open its belly
reveals “nothing in there /
but the usual unspeakable
things”. Any expectationsbeliefs, while fi nding
the language of belief
rather harder to discard.
Theistic fatalism is
a source of anguish: “if
she lives / they’ll praise
God’s mercy ”, we read in
Litany of the Shoreline ,
a poem on a child’s illness;
but “if she dies / they’ll
praise God for his mercy ”.
The sensory ecstasies of
Questions of Faith provide
a daring counterpoint
(“love was all I believed
in ask me one more time
about my faith”). Sabah
has something of Thomas
Hardy’s bittersweet
dialogue with the divine,
in what are poems of huge
emotional courage.Pilgrim Bell
by Kaveh Akbar
“When I saw God /
I trembled like a man
I used the wrong
pronouns.” Where
Sabah’s poems proceed
from the sacred towards
the secular, Akbar’s
move from a default
secularism back towards
the language of the sacred.
The epigraph reads “Any
text that is not a holy text
is an apostasy”, a line
suggestive of Blakean
ecstasies but also the force
of a more exclusivist faith.
Akbar processes this with
studied vulnerability. “Art
is where what we survive
survives”; these are
poems on the grand scale,
staging dramas of cosmic
light and dark.
DAVID WHEATLEY IS AN
IRISH POET AND CRITICof dark secrets laid bare in
the poems are tempered
by a mood of ubiquitous
quirkiness. Woodward
prefers his imagery
poised and metaphysical:
“scholarly, they held /
seminars, conferences”,
he says of some frogs.
More memorable are the
narratives of buildings
and family histories in
the book’s second half.
These poems are at their
best when they “come up
against something solid”.Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Vita and
Edward Sackville-West
What sank th is
translation of Rilke by
the Sackville-Wests
was their insistence on
parcelling him into blank
verse, smoothing out so
much that should have
been spiky. Chumminess
is also a factor: “Every
angel is redoubtable,”
begins the second elegy
here, as though we are
dealing with a doughty old
dinner guest rather than
a supernatural emanation.
A fascinating slice of
Georgianism in a world
that, even in 1931, had
dramatically moved on.Litanies
by Naush Sabah
This is a book of faith
and doubt, roots and
rejections. “Slay the
messengers, the oracles,
the gods and diviners,”
Sabah declares, in poems
that shake off outgrownBy David Wheatley