Title: Irki
Author: Kadija Sesay
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
ISBN: 9781845232085
Length: 87 pages
Price: £8.99

‘Irki’, the title of Kadija Sesay’s début poetry collection, translates as ‘homeland’ in the Nubian language. But this collection of verses is not really about any one specific homeland; it asks what homeland is, and where it can be found, from the perspective of a second-generation Sierra Leonean growing up in the UK’s private fostering sector.

Despite this being a first collection, the experiments in form and style suggest that this is a poet who has the confidence to innovate. ‘Uncivilised’, for example, is arranged into three columns, each one a short monologue of prejudiced opinions directed from one ethnic group (white British, West Africans and West Indians) to another. By arranging voices side by side on a page, the myopia of their respective positions is demonstrated more effectively than it could be through words. The technique is repeated in ‘Skipping’, which compares two isolated incidents from childhood and adulthood to demonstrate the sort of subtle, unspoken racism that can so easily go unnoticed or unchallenged.

The collection tells a story on many levels. It is an autobiographical account of a black child growing up within the private fostering system. But it is not just about Kadija Sesay herself; she extends the story back to the lives of her African grandparents and outwards to the experiences of other immigrants who travelled to the UK. The poet’s biggest skill is perhaps her ability to step back and let the characters she introduces do the talking; to contextualise her own experiences as the tip of an iceberg of untold stories.

The poems speak of the complexity of identity and black experience in the UK: memories of the bitter banality of casual racism and exclusion are tempered with images of childhood happiness in ‘Sunday School, Sunday Roast’ and ‘Nanna’, where the words run together in joyful tirades (‘slicesofwell-donebeefwithYorkshirepud’). Other poems, particularly the later ones, have a much darker tone, but the overall narrative preserves something of that optimism and uses it to reject restrictive conceptions of cultural identity. A bittersweet, immediate and brilliant set of poems.