Two London fires and a critique of grievability: Mournful protest, the Black elegy, and Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019)

Abstract

While, as a response to the New Cross and Grenfell Tower fires, Jay Bernard's collection Surge (2019) engages with the themes of loss and mourning, no critical attempt has been made to approach this complex sequence of poems from the perspective of the poetic elegy. This paper argues that a reading of Surge as elegy sheds light on Bernard's intervention in the current discourse over the grievability of black lives in order to carry out their work of mournful protest (Butler). In particular, I intend to show the ways in which Surge endorses and enhances the ethico-political purpose and innovative expansiveness-regarding time, voice and place-that characterize the contemporary black elegy to address the past and ongoing struggles of the Black-British community. Even if rooted in British postcolonial history, Bernard's project in Surge resonates with the concerns of the Black Lives Matter global movement for racial justice and the body of black elegiac poetry developing around it.