The Sum of Us tells how together in this crisis we add up to so much more
The best thing to come out of any Mancunian’s mouth, ever
LIAM GALLAGHER
TONY Walsh’s new poem The Sum of Us has Britain in tears. In these unrelenting days, the poet trusted to speak for Manchester in the hours after the Arena bomb attack, once again has given us a place to pause.
Three years ago, the writer Jeanette Winterson said Walsh had found “words where there are no words” through his poem This Is the Place, which he read in Albert Square the day after the bombing. Liam Gallagher said it was “the best thing to come out of any Mancunian’s mouth, ever”.
Now, in the time of coronavirus, we are lost for words once more, shattered and struggling to make sense of where we are. And Walsh does it again, finding the common thread of humanity in all our vastly differing experiences.
“Some of us are sewing scrubs and some are sowing seeds / Some are stitching fragments into plans / Some are holding Zoom meetings with babies on our knees / Some are holding only lonely hands.”
Being Tony Walsh, this isn’t a sentimental place to rest. “So some of us are wealthy, healthy; some of us are poor,” he writes. “Some of us will… buy a magic pill / But some of us know ‘some of us’ won’t cut it anymore/ If some of us are sick, we all are ill.”
Speaking to him on the phone at home in Manchester, where he is locked down with his wife and mother-in-law, who has Alzheimer’s, Walsh is full of the same passion with which he told Manchester “Choose Love”. “We’ve pressed pause on the world,” he says, “we don’t just have to press play again.”
Later, the former council officer and factory worker says: “We can’t carry on how we were. Austerity, inequality, this is part of how we’ve got where we are. UK, Brazil, USA – what’s the common thread between the worst affected countries?
“Could it be the right-wing nature of those governments? Yet it’s the opposite ideas – community, socialism, working together, internationalism – that have got us through.”
The third anniversary of the Arena bombing on May 22 has recently passed, taking away none of the pain for bereaved or survivors, or the conflicted sense Walsh feels of forever being associated with that horrific moment. ‘Tony Walsh’ was trending across the globe on social media, as his city was still clearing up the broken glass and surgeons were operating.
“Three years on, there’s not one day that goes by that it isn’t in front of me,” he says. “I get letters, emails every day about it. I took that responsibility very seriously. It weighed heavily on me. But I know what an absolute privilege it was to be there on the square that day. As a writer you are in the business of conveying truths and creating connections.”
His latest poem was a commission from New Writing North, which supports writing in the north of England. “It started from wordplay – some of us are doing this, some are doing that, that became the Sum of Us, collectively,” Walsh says.
“It started from thank
you, but it needed to be more. The understanding that as long as the virus exists in the world, we’ve all got it.”
As the father of a 21 and a 23 year old, Walsh worries particularly about the future for young people.
“It’s like when I was 21, working at the sausage factory after 18 months on the dole, and we used to greet each other with ‘are you working?’,” he says. “No one was working then. I fear we are heading back to those days.”
As Walsh says: “Everything I work in – theatre, events, conferences, education, all are closed down. All I’ve got left is the scribbling business.”
The last few weeks have seen some extraordinary responses from poets. A video of Hollow by Vanessa Kisuule, the Bristol City Poet for 2018-20, about the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol as part of #BlackLivesMatter, has been shared over half a million times.
When we have no words, it’s poetry that can speak for us – yet arts organisations are now the drowning ones, without enough life support systems to go around. Walsh has written movingly about this in his poem, Arts and Minds, which will shortly be released as a video. The terrorist attack on Manchester Arena, as Winterson wrote back then, was a public event “as well as a heartbreaking series of private losses”. So too are these times when, as our Britain Connects project has shown, we have no way of knowing what is happening inside the life of the person walking past us in the park.
Have they just finished a shift on a Covid-19 ward or a supermarket aisle, or a series on Netflix? Have they lost their job or are they working all the hours God sends? Are they bereaved or here to sunbathe, or both?
The Sum of Us is not about how we were all in this together – because we blatantly weren’t and aren’t – but about something more hopeful. How this experience has shown what can happen when we understand what we can achieve together. Today, Tony and I would both have been at Glastonbury, where he has been a former poet in residence, and had a set to deliver to the Poetry and Words Stage. Instead, his words are on posters in Manchester, funded by Jack Arts. Artist Craig Oldham has turned the idea of The Sum of Us into maths. “= > ÷” reads one of them. Or... equality is greater than division.
Watch Tony Walsh read The Sum of Us at mirror.co.uk and at newwritingnorth.com/tony-walshthe-sum-of-us/