“To unite and speak up is the only choice we have now. If hate is rising, then love must rise higher”
If we want a better world, we need to fight for it – and poetry can help – says poet, performer and now novelist Salena Godden. As she tells Lydia Wilkins, we just need to arm ourselves with a bit of positive thinking
Like most of us, Salena Godden misses people. Unlike most of us, she also misses putting on her trademark costume of a kimono and silver boots and the thrill of performance: “I can be such a show-off.” So what do performing poets do when they can’t perform? Like many, Salena has turned to the likes of cooking, gardening and listening to audio books (favourites include Nikita Gill, James Baldwin, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer). This past year is the first time she’s not regularly performed live in decades – she’s known for captivating audiences with her rant poetry, sketches and outlandish jokes, that make the audience experience the full gamut of emotions from laughter to anger. But her desire to connect with people remains, so she’s found some new outlets for her creativity, for example enthusiastically embracing the hashtag #FlowerReport to share photos of nature on Twitter, a small but effective way of spreading positivity.
FIGHT LIKE HELL
Therefore, penning a novel about death might not seem the most positive of actions but in fact it’s a celebration of life, a heartfelt reminder to love those around us
– as the book’s foreword states: ‘Mourn the dead, and fight like hell for the living.’ Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate) is her first novel and was written at a time of loss for her; icons such as Prince (a formative moment in her life was ‘stealing’ the 1999 album from her brother) and David Bowie, but also friends and family. In the book, she portrays Death as Black, working class and a woman, one tired of being herself. Death decides to impart her story to a young and idealistic writer, Wolf. Both characters, she says, contain a bit of herself: “If I was gonna be really cheesy, I’d probably say Wolf is me when I was a struggling poet in my early twenties, and then Mrs Death is me approaching 50. I’ve written about death and loss a lot.”
Mrs Death brings together her own experiences of death, including the suicide of her father when she was only nine – a turning point and a realisation that, “life is not fair, that our parents are not always who we think
them to be” – while weaving in the true stories of others who have suffered similar fates, victims of unsolved murders, for example, alongside legends of our times, such as Bowie. “I feel like I’ve been writing this book all my life,” she says. The novel speaks of the ghosts
– the ones we are haunted by, the ones that watch over us, those that we leave behind, in a society that has not worked out how to deal with death, yet.
PESSIMISM IS FOR LIGHTWEIGHTS
Her own determination to “fight like hell” is perhaps why she’s also frequently labeled as an activist. Avowedly feminist, Salena has taken to the stage for the likes of Extinction Rebellion, and at 2018’s March 4 Women march. “I think I am an activist,” Salena says. “To unite, and speak up is the only choice we have now. If hate is rising, then love must rise higher. But where do we start to heal the world? That is the big question,” she asks.
Her answer is, “always to try – that there’s always hope.” This is portrayed in her best-known work, the poem Pessimism is for Lightweights. Displayed outside Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery (and now permanently on show at »
Manchester’s People’s History Museum), she notes it was the background to slave trader Edward Colston’s statue being toppled. No surprise then that Salena sees “our art” as a way to begin to make a difference.
Her idea of art is a living, breathing thing – she’s not someone to shut herself away in an ivory tower. Growing up in the East Sussex town of Hastings, her father was a musician, and she’s named after the jazz singer, Salena Jones. Mrs Death merges prose and poetry, but began life with an accompanying album, a collaboration with the composer Peter Coyte. It demonstrates Salena’s desire to tell the story, no matter the format. Even her first attempts at poetry were written with clear intentions (although perhaps slightly less altruistic): gaining cigarettes by exchanging them for poems penned on request for fellow schoolgirls to give to their boyfriends.
SCROLLING FOR HOPE
Salena’s key to embracing optimism is by surrounding herself with positivity. “Go where the love is – my Mum used to always say that to me,” she recalls. “I think it makes a lot of sense. You cannot please everyone all of the time.” And time is wasted, she believes, by trying to find love in the wrong places. That includes online. Although Salena is an avid Tweeter, she deliberately avoids some of its trappings, blocking hateful content, refusing to engage with ‘pile ons’, offering ideas for ‘hope-scrolling’, instead of the dreaded ‘doom-scrolling’. She prefers good news from Marcus Rashford’s free school meals to Dolly Parton’s vaccine donation and the beauty of Steve McQueen’s recent TV film Lovers Rock.
But Salena’s positivity doesn’t make her a Pollyanna. She’s not afraid to ruffle a few feathers along the way – she describes the role of the poet as reflecting what people of the time are thinking, compared to the emotionless reporting of the news. Last April she wrote the poem I Saw Goody Proctor Jogging Without A Face Mask, a reflection of what she feels is some of lockdown’s worst paranoia. She realises that it’s beneficial to confront our fears. The final stint of writing Mrs Death saw Salena facing a few of her own – darkness, ghosts, loneliness – in an actual tower in Ireland. She gives herself the advice that she wishes her younger self had heeded. “More than anything, just keep going.
Don’t listen to the doubt, don’t listen to the fear.”
In trying times sometimes that hardest thing is maintaining a sense that things can change, and that change can be for the better. “How do I stay hopeful?” Salena thinks a moment. “I can’t say that I’m always hopeful – because that would be ridiculous. I’d be like a cheerleader with pom poms! But I really believe in a better tomorrow, I really believe that we’re gonna get out of this dark patch… I think it’s our job as artists and writers to imagine a better tomorrow, to write a better tomorrow. I have hope for humanity.”
“I can’t say that I’m always hopeful – I’d be like a cheerleader with pom poms! But I do believe in a better tomorrow”