Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

"The Broken Word" by Adam Foulds
Cape £9.00

Set in 1950s Kenya, in the midst of the Mau Mau uprising, this novella in verse approaches the period that marked the end of British colonial rule, from the perspective of Tom. Returning from school to his family farmstead for the summer before leaving for university in Britain we follow this unsympathetic yet fascinating character as he plays his part in the atrocities. We are led through his time serving as a prison guard, in what has been described as ‘Britain’s Gulag’ into which the majority of the Kikuyu population were driven. The journey ends in Oxford where, although thousands of miles away from Kenya, Foulds demonstrates that the legacy of such activity and experience is almost viral and certainly timeless.

We begin travelling on a train that takes us to Tom’s home. There in ‘3: Dinner (2)’ Foulds lays out the environment of servitude that was established in the period with succinctness.

A senior houseboy served the soup.
They skimmed their spoons Correctly,
without noise, not touching china.

The dinner conversation develops an ominous tone:

…I hazarded a hundred,
plus household staff.

I don’t think we need to worry about them.

Jenkins laughed, dabbing up soup.
I would start with them.

Foulds’ choice of layout represents conversation effectively and the clear space between lines along with the uncomplicated brevity of their meaning gave me the feeling I was eavesdropping, achieving a sense of dramatic tension that is increased here with the heightened yet sparse.

And I hope you all know how to shoot.

The speed with which the ‘action’ unfolds from herein is swift, both in terms of the colonial response to the uprising and in relation to the adult world into which our protagonist is thrust. After a brief introduction to the men who make up the Home Guard, Tom is dispatched into the world by his father.

But you should go,Tom.
You’ll be useful. And it’s time,
I’m afraid, you know,
to be a man and all that.

Having already witnessed the slain corpses of loyalist elders Tom takes part in a hunt of retribution, first reluctantly as a bystander and eventually, instinctively.

…Tom shot him.
Just like in a Western…
Only the fall backwards was different,
looser and ugly, spastic, almost embarrassing.

The stark way in which Foulds ‘reports’ what Tom witnesses is both consistent and heightened by the banal. We continue to follow Tom as he works in a prison camp.

Sores growing on the prisoners like coral.
Buckets. Drills. Beatings. Boredom.

Foulds never describes anything like regret or ethical dilemma within Tom, and indeed, it seems he is not mature enough to encounter such. Instead, we observe the physical, the tangible.

The flies landed on you
…to eat the dead skin, dirt, lay their eggs
in the nutritious wetness of wounds.

As his admiration for the guards around him increases,Tom is inevitably drawn to emulate their violence, and the final section at the camp ends with Tom shooting a prisoner in a mixture of whim and hysteria.

His return home is swift and his communication with his parents is limited to the socially correct. In an atmosphere where talking openly about the reality of events is impossible Tom is faced with his parents’ disappointment.

Tom, I don’t want you living
with the shame of crying off
of something difficult for the rest of your life.

At university Tom is unable to wash-along with the rest of the student flotsam and appears to struggle with carrying the weight of his experiences silently. However, his recently established brutality seeps out in the company of a love interest, first, in the proximity of a bar brawl, and then sexually in what the reader expects will be the end of his romance.

Foulds leaves the reader with a definite point of departure when Tom is told:

young men start looking,
you know, do I have to
spell it out? In jewellers’ windows.

This positioning of the future is both sobering and eerie. Again, Foulds incorporates the mundane, this time middle class expectation, with the inference of the lifelong impact that Tom’s experience will have on those he shares his future with.

This was a collection that was both hard and easy to read. In terms of pace and structure it felt a breeze but in terms of the subject matter it made me feel terribly alone with knowledge. This, I think, is the collection’s strength and it doesn’t surprise me that Foulds was recently named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.