Improvised Explosive Device E-Book

Arji Manuelpillai

• Herausgeber: Penned in the Margins
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Improvised Explosive Device is a startlingly innovative exploration of extremism, hate crime and violence by poet Arji Manuelpillai. In this powerful and unsettling first collection, Manuelpillai presents a vision of the contemporary haunted by Melville's image of the whale – the terror beneath the surface of the sea. His uncompromising focus on violence is laced with gallows humour and the surreal, framed against the mundane detritus of modern life: two boys playing Mortal Kombat; a field of old trainers; the lonely glare of laptop light; a suspicious looking package in the back seat of a van. The poems in Improvised Explosive Device emerged through research and interviews with academics, sociologists, and former members of extremist groups and their families – from the English Defence League and the National Front to ISIS and the Tamil Tigers. These complex, unnerving texts ask a series of important questions. What drives a person to commit a radical act of violence? How is that violence mediated through screens and social media? And how does the British government police marginalised groups? Improvised Explosive Device is a brave, surprising and risk-taking book; it will change the way you look at the world. "Refusing glib analysis and easy answers, Improvised Explosive Device is a work of radical empathy, fuelled by honesty and compassion, both for those stirred to violence against minorities, and those who suffer from it." Rishi Dastidar "The project of Arji Manuelpillai's Improvised Explosive Device leans into the mighty disciplines of poetry, sociology, and reportage to formulate an arresting debut which contests the ways we're conditioned to internalise notions of terrorism, nationalism and belonging...a bold and startling new work." Anthony Anaxagorou

Leseprobe

IMPROVISEDEXPLOSIVEDEVICE

Arji Manuelpillai is a poet, performer and creative facilitator based in London. His poetry has appeared in magazines including Poetry Wales, The Rialto and bath magg, and his debut pamphlet, Mutton Rolls, was published with Out-Spoken Press. Arji was shortlisted for the Oxford Prize, the Live Canon Prize, the National Poetry Prize and the Winchester Prize, and was runner-up in the Robert Graves Prize. He is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and London Stanza, received an Arts Council England award to develop his creative practice, and worked with Hannah Lowe as part of the Jerwood/Arvon Mentoring Programme.

ALSOBYARJIMANUELPILLAI

Mutton Rolls (Out-Spoken Press, 2020)

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Arji Manuelpillai, 2022

The right of Arji Manuelpillai to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2022

ePub ISBN

978-1-913850-16-6

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

Portrait of a Man Fitting into a Fake Suicide Vest

Rapid Eye Movement

The Mother

Tusk

After the Prime Minister’s Statement

Mistaken Identity

188 to Greenwich

Let’s Just Call Them Butterflies

Methods of Fitting In

You Must Have Misheard Him

The Cameraman

Her Love is a Red Rose

Mouse

Minutes After the Attack

Way Back

Ways of Being Heard

I was just LIVE-fed two young men knife-fighting in Greenwich

Thaipusam

Tank

The Expendables

Don’t take this the wrong way but

If You Don’t Like It, Leave

I Love You Man

Youtube.com/watch?v=MkqLs6ZX_TQ (Please do not watch this)

While Trying the Crème Brûlée

Nothing British

The Man Who Played Records to Aliens

The Calling

This Is Not an IED

Hate

Mortal Kombat

PREVENT

Einstein said

Suspicious-looking Individual

44 Ways to Make and Kill a Terrorist

House, Bus Stop, Bus, Driver

True Lies

Salad

A Decent Pair of Nikes

A Cigarette Tastes Better When the House is Full

Days Before

Magic Eye

A Year On

Objects Increase Their Distance at Ever-increasing Speeds

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Improvised Explosive

Device

‘Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?’

Herman Melville, MOBY-DICK; OR, THEWHALE (1851)

watch it swim

down into the

marrow of us

down so we

raise our heads

our chins kiss

the ceiling

gasping like

blood bags

the city’s full

of broken doors

routine searches

putting a

proverbial

hand around

our proverbial

neck and telling

ourselves to

speak our truth

there is nothing

anyone can do

but watch

a teen roughed-

up walking

from school

when they ask

you where it

all began you

will say you

have no idea

Portrait of a Man Fitting into a Fake Suicide Vest

This story is a star shooting dead across the sky —

a cliché, I know, but by the time you see a man

slide polystyrene into the pockets of a vest

he is already dead. By the time the journalist

sees maniac trending, a jaw’s swiped left.

It should feel snug, almost impossible to remove

the political from a message of condolence,

from the two seats lying empty beside me.

A Tesco bag is shaken across the bedroom floor:

a route marked black, a maggot-pit of wires,

Sellotape, clips, a pair of red-handled scissors.

It wants to be below the arms, flush, like a carrier.

A reporter’s up all night collating material to stitch

this story: a displaced family, high school dropout,

prison stint, Mujahideen, on tag, the packaging

spits pebbledash across the carpet, a snow globe

cracked in a tight fist. It has to seem realistic,

like he grew round the back of an army barracks,

listening to boots chug, the slow ease of velcro straps.

It should feel like an other’s skin until this story’s in bits

spread across a bedroom floor. In this light it could

be an office suit, an armoured vest, a life jacket.

Rapid Eye Movement

Slapping a newsfeed from a daydream, a hundred pointing fingers, pushed from cars, hung from balconies, shouting bloody hell look at that fucking guy and I am trying to write a text, hey babes how was the — but it snatches an iris, the phone lit by a man made lunatic, a blade like a toothpick in the stomach of a spider, a can of scarpering legs, the figure swinging his chest like his heart is trying to speak, we interrupt this broadcast — pixels lather hot from a van, officers pouring into the road, passers-by covering their eyes with holy hands, nails in teeth, phones up, trending: ATTACK, trending: Prayers For —