#this quote just has this certain sense of warmth and simplicity around it?

[foolofafook]

"There's a deep feeling that the picture is not beautiful."

Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

[belizedeservesbetter]

The Inheritance Isn’t As Good or Important or Meaningful or Deep As It Thinks It Is

the disappointment of the year!

To play off of a quote from the play, one might as well begin with the reviews of the women sitting behind me during Part 1. 

“It thinks it’s Angels in America but has nowhere near the amount of depth Angels has.” 

When talking about The Inheritance, it’s inevitable that Angels in America comes up as well. Both are very very long plays in two parts that are about gay men in New York. Both deal with the AIDS crisis, but while Angels in America takes place in the 80s, The Inheritance takes place in 2016. Angels in America is a modern classic and expertly tackles a multitude of themes in ideas, hence the subtitle of “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” The Inheritance, well, it wants to tackle some issues. 

The Inheritance really really wants to be a big important play. It wants to be the Angels of this generation. You can literally feel how bad playwright Matthew Lopez wants this play to be Meaningful and Deep and Important. However, this play is as deep as the shallow end of a pool. Throughout the play, I kept coming back to a moment in Angels in America where Louis is telling Prior how much he is hurting and how much he loves him and Prior says “he loves, but his love is worth nothing.” Belize has a similar moment with Louis where he tells Louis that he is talking quite a bit but not actually saying anything. 

The Inheritance talks enough to fill six hours but ultimately says absolutely nothing. 

I had read The Inheritance a while back and wasn’t a fan of it but thought that seeing it would be like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which I ended up loving despite not liking it very much when I just read it. 

Alas. 

I think I need to tackle this play in two parts because both plays could easily stand alone and my thoughts on each were a bit different. 

**some spoilers throughout**

Part 1

I actually enjoyed Part One. I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy Gossip Girl. It’s a bit of a mess but I had a good time. At least Part 1 is coherent. To be honest, Part 1 could’ve been a stand alone play and while it would not have been a great play, it would have been good. Part 2 ruined it BUT we’re not there yet.

It’s hard to explain what The Inheritance is about without getting too spoilery and getting into a long winded ramble but it’s kind of an adaption of Howard’s End in the sense that E.M. Forrester (who other characters call Morgan) is a narrator who narrates sometimes (this is inconsistent) and it kinda follows the plot of the book but the important part is the main characters are Toby Darling and Eric Glass. They’ve been together for 8 years and live in Eric’s awesome rent controlled apartment. They’re kinda sorta close with this gay couple that lives in their building named Henry Wilcox and Walter Poole. They have a close friend group. Toby turns his novel (called Loved Boy) into a play, which stars Toby and Eric’s protege who is a rich kid named Adam. However, as Toby and Adam grow closer, so does Eric and Walter. There aren’t many stakes in this play but I guess drama ensues. 

The play is very oddly hypocritical. The characters are CONSTANTLY talking about wanting to be truthful and authentic and how they hate what is fake. However, this play feels very fake and very inauthentic. Characters go on long diatribes about things that do not matter. There is a very very long scene where a group of characters talk about what it means to be gay in America today and they say nothing new or important, even though they think they are. They talk about things that ultimately mean nothing. They often say “we need to talk about *insert something actually important*” but never actually talk about it. They don’t even argue with each other. Everyone generally agrees with each other and they are mostly speaking to have their voice heard. 

This play does a lot of telling instead of showing. I liked the use of characters talking about things in the third person/narrating themselves (and I liked it a lot less when Morgan did it because I had no idea why he was there but loved when Eric and Toby did it) but they would often tell us things instead of showing us things. For example, we are told like 10 times through Part 1 that Eric is so special and so important and so remarkable. However, I have no idea why. He’s a very nice guy but there is nothing that warrants this level of praise. Likewise, instead of characters actually growing and learning, it’s explained away with narration. Characters even get out of tricky situations simply through Morgan saying that they did. 

Toby Darling writes a play and the reviews for his play are that the acting is amazing but the play itself leaves much to be desired. Crazy how Matthew Lopez reviewed his own play already! 

To put the writing aside for a bit, I thought a lot of the acting was really wonderful. 

The three standouts were Sam Lilja (understudy for Eric Glass), Andrew Burnap (Toby Darling) and Tony Goldwyn (Henry Wilcox).

I thought Sam Lilja was absolutely amazing as Eric and I loved every moment he was onstage. He brought this warmth and care to the role that I really enjoyed. He has an amazing stage presence and even though I have problems with how Eric Glass is written, I loved his performance and thought he was the highlight of the play. His Eric Glass gave love to whoever would have it and you could see his heart absolutely break in two when he (SPOILER) has his big break up with Toby. I’m sad he’s the understudy because he absolutely deserves a Tony nomination for this performance. The way he ends Part 1 was truly beautiful and will stay with me for a while. 

Andrew Burnap was 85% wonderful and 15% Prior Walter impression. I’ll go more into my thoughts on Toby Darling as a character later but for the most part I really loved Burnap’s performance. He has this certain kind of energy that makes the theatre filled with electricity whenever he was onstage. I missed him when he wasn’t there. Toby Darling can very easily be played as a one note kind of person but Burnap gives him layers upon layers. I loved watching him onstage. However, there were also some moments where I could very clearly tell he’s watched the National Theatre Live’s recording of Angels in America too many times and was emulating Andrew Garfield as best as he could. He even does the same voice a couple times. However, overall I thought Burnap was great. 

I had forgotten Tony Goldwyn was in The Inheritance for a while because Henry Wilcox doesn’t show up until the end of Part 1 in a very intense scene so when he did finally appear I was a little shocked to see him and was briefly taken right out of the scene cause in my head I was like “Oh look it’s Tony Goldwyn!” And my brain has a very good reason to have that reaction because he’s great! Henry Wilcox is a tough character because he’s awful but you must root for him. He stands for all that is bad but at the same time you have to like him because (BIG SPOILER) Eric loves him and you trust Eric because Sam Lilja is so good. Somehow Goldwyn balances all of this. His scenes with Lilja and Paul Hilton (Walter Poole/Morgan) were especially good. 

Speaking of Walter, there are two very great parts in Part 1 that are probably the parts you keep hearing about if you’ve looked into this play in any capacity. There’s a moment about halfway through Part 1 and then at the end of Part 1 that are very truly beautiful moments that have to do with Eric and, to an extent, Walter Poole. At the top of the play, Walter is Henry’s partner who becomes good friends with Eric and teaches him about what it was like to be gay in the 80s and how he owns this big house upstate where he (SPOILER) housed people dying of AIDS and took care of them and essentially ruined his relationship with Henry because of it. There’s a moment where Eric makes a comment about how he has no idea what living through the AIDS crisis must have been like and the following moment that ensues is one of the highlights of the play. I’m not going to say anything else about that because it’s heartbreaking and really takes you by surprise. The other great moment ends Part One and again, this is the moment you’ve probably already heard of because it’s the moment people seem to be talking about the most. I will say, Beautiful Theatrical Thing That Occurs At The End aside, this scene is sold on Eric’s reaction to it. And again, because I feel like this review is turning into me talking about how great Sam Lilja was, his acting in this moment was super lovely. 

Stephen Daldry’s directing was... interesting, I guess. I liked its simplicity and all but there were times that it felt kind of haphazard. I don’t really understand why no one wore shoes. I’m sure there’s a great explanation for it but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. Henry Wilcox wore shoes. Walter Poole/Morgan wore shoes. In Part 2, Lois Smith’s character wears shoes. Even Eric wears shoes for a bit in Part 2 before taking them off again at the end. When Eric did it  I knew they were ~ symbolic ~ of something but i just couldn’t get it. I did like how simple the staging was. There’s a lot of plot going on so I appreciated a very straightforward approach to the staging. There were some neat stage pictures too. The monologues in this play are very long but they were staged in a way that I was with them through it. 

There is only one directing bit that I took real issue with (and I’m putting this on the writing too) but there’s a part towards the beginning of the play where Eric wants to have sex with Toby to avoid bringing up an issue with his apartment and Morgan will not let the audience see the explicit details, resulting in a really weird dance that is played entirely for laughs. For example, they do squats and twirls around each other and fake moan and whatnot. In a play that wants to be groundbreaking and important, why not let your characters actually be intimate with each other? Plays with straight characters do it all the time! Take Linda Vista for example! And it doesn’t even have to be as wildly explicit as Linda Vista’s sex scenes were! The weird sex dance was honestly really offputting and I heard many “what?” and “what is happening?” complaints from the audience. A lot of moments that had any emotional weight were quickly played off for a laugh, but this was the one that made me cringe. 

So in all, I liked Part 1. I really like Toby and Eric and for the most part their scenes were the best parts of the play. Part 1 ends in a very nice and emotional way that’s a bit emotionally manipulative but ultimately felt like a true ending and I was emotionally satisfied. There’s some truly beautiful moments in Part 1 and a semi-clear focus that kept me engaged and liking the characters for the full three hours and fifteen minutes. Again, as I’ve said before time and time again, I really loved Sam Lilja and thought his performance was marvelous. He also looks strikingly like Rhea Butcher. Take that as you will. 

To go briefly into the ticket logistics: I got to the box office at around 12 on a Friday and there was no line and they had plenty of rush tickets available. I had a wonderful front row side seat with a lot of leg room. The theatre wasn’t terribly full. I didn’t stage door but someone I was talking to after the show said most everyone comes out and signs. 

Part 2

Oh boy.

I really didn’t like Part 2. 

Like I didn’t like Part 2 so much that it almost ruined the entire play for me. 

This is going to be a lot of spoilers because I have no other way to process the mess that was Part 2 of The Inheritance.

I was talking to the guy at the box office and he was telling me how Part 2 sells a lot better than Part 1 because they do Part 1 five times a week while they only do Part 2 three times a week. They do Part 1 Wednesdays - Sundays, but Part 2 only on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Thursdays and Fridays are both Part 1. I wondered why they didn’t have a system in place like Angels in America had, until I saw Part 2 of The Inheritance and understood why the producers want to do Part 2 as little as possible.

Guys, Part 2 of The Inheritance is really really bad. 

All the heavy handed writing in Part 1 that I was willing to forgive just becomes even more heavy handed and even more cliche. The whole play feels completely different, partly because they mostly give up on the E.M. Forrester as a character bit until one random scene towards the end where he returns. Even the characters have given up on Howard’s End! Where in Part 1 the characters constantly talk about Howard’s End, which I guess makes sense because the entire play is an adaptation on it, in Part 2 they strictly talk about Maurice. And that is the least of my problems with Part 2! 

Part 2′s fatal flaw is that the play suddenly becomes about a boy named Leo. Who is Leo? Well, to talk about Leo we first need to backtrack to Part 1 to a boy named Adam. 

As I briefly touched on before, Adam is an actor (with a very privileged background) who Toby meets and puts in his play. SPOILERS but Toby falls in love with Adam. Adam has these monologues about how he was adopted when he was two weeks old by billionaire parents so he knows what real struggle is. This bit of character info is often repeated and it becomes more and more laughable but the play took this very seriously, which was strange. Adam has this other monologue about hooking up with a lot of men in a bathhouse in Prague and almost getting HIV. Bigger Spoiler but this monologue has a moment where the actor playing Adam (Samuel H. Levine) reaches into his underwear and when he pulls out his hand, it’s covered in blood and he tells Toby about how he had sex with so many men that his ass was bleeding. 

Leo has a very similar monologue, bloody hand and all. He’s even HIV positive. Check out Louis Peitzman’s article which I have linked at the end with more on that. 

Anyways, Adam won’t sleep with Toby so Toby self-destructs and ruins the one good thing he has aka his relationship with Eric and hires a prostitute named Leo who looks EXACTLY like Adam. He looks so much like Adam that Samuel H. Levine also plays Leo. Leo is in exactly one scene in Part 1 and it works because it ends Toby’s arc in how he can’t what is real (he thinks it’s Adam but it’s actually Eric) so he chooses to live in what is fake (drugs, alcohol and Adam’s prostitute doppleganger). This is messy and not handled that well but at least I see where the dots connect. 

However, in Part 2, Adam basically disappears and the play very suddenly becomes all about Leo.

And it is so horribly handled.

Adam is very rich and stands very tall and talks very confidently. Leo, on the other hand, is very poor and stands hunched over and talks like he’s constantly crying. There’s a very strange amount of poverty porn going on in Part 2. We are constantly hearing about how poor Leo is and all the things he’s had to do for food, shelter and drugs. There’s a moment where he’d huddled on the ground and eating peanut butter out of a jar while the ensemble tells you for like the tenth time how destitute he is. 

Oh yeah and there’s a scene between Adam and Leo that is staged so oddly I have no idea how it made it past previews. It’s as horribly handled as you think it is - with Levine going from standing up straight to hunched over repeatedly for like five minutes. 

The worst part of the play is the weird scene where Leo meets Morgan in a dream and tells him to become a writer and then at the end Leo reveals that the play you’ve been watching is a book he wrote called, you guessed it, The Inheritance. 

Yikes.

Also, for some reason Leo talks like he’s ten years old. There’s actually this strange recurring theme in Part 2 where Matthew Lopez thinks the next generation doesn’t know what AIDS is. There’s a whole moment where a doctor has to explain to Leo what HIV is. Eric also explains it again to Leo for good measure. Likewise, there is a scene where Eric has all of his friends over and his friend/boss Jasper brings his young artist boyfriend and the topic of the AIDS crisis comes up and Jasper’s boyfriend talks about how he doesn’t know what that is and how he doesn’t know what T cells are. Tristan, who is literally The Inheritance’s version of Belize (same mannerisms and one-liners, basically the only person of color in the play and a doctor to boot), then explains it to him. However, Jasper’s boyfriend not knowing literally anything is purely there so Lopez can make a long winded analogy about America being a body, democracy being T cells and Donald Trump being an embodiment of AIDS. Does Matthew Lopez think this next generation doesn’t know what AIDS is? It’s so condescendingly explained and it seems that any character under thirty doesn’t know what it is, when, in an age of smart phones with limitless information, it seems like more people would know what it is now than ever.

But I digress.

Somewhere in all this Eric’s plot line goes down the drain because he decides to marry Henry Wilcox. This could have worked if Henry wasn’t a billionaire republican who is friends with Trump and if the play didn’t so heavily establish that Eric works for a social justice nonprofit and is a passionate activist. There is no chance in hell someone like Eric would so willingly marry someone who is literal friends with a literal demon. He marries Henry because the play tells him he has to. And again, much like in Part 1, we hear so often from various narration about how wonderful and important and remarkable Eric is, without giving us any reason why.

Much like Part 1, there aren’t any real stakes in this play and no sense of any ticking clock or whatnot. Things just kinda happen at the pace they do because the various narrators (and Morgan in Part 1) say they do. 

There’s one good scene in Part 2 when Toby shows up at Eric’s wedding and tries to save him from Henry and Eric has a breakdown and yells and yells at Toby about all the terrible things Toby has done and put him through and it’s a really delicious moment that I wish the play had more of. 

From there to the end, the play horribly mishandles each of its characters. However, Part 2 of The Inheritance could have been very good. The solutions to all the bad things in the play could very easily have been implemented, but, instead, the play just spirals. So I want to go into that for a bit, because the rest of the play is a shit storm. 

For starters, Leo needs to go because his plot just doesn’t work. At all. The play was originally about Eric and Toby, and, to a lesser extent, Walter and Henry. With Walter (spoilers) dead, the play does shift more of its focus to Henry, who I’ll start with first. 

Henry Wilcox’s big problem is that he refuses to let go of his past. He pushed Walter away because he couldn’t deal with the AIDS crisis. He shut down and focused on his work, which made him bitter and jaded and warped his sense of love. The past haunts him so much that he refuses to sleep with his HUSBAND Eric because of it. That’s not a good reason and the fact that he expects Eric to deal with a sexless marriage is one of the more wildly unrealistic parts of the play. But you know what, this is a play so I’ll roll with it for a bit. Henry’s problem is the most clearly defined and has the clearest solution. He needs to move on from his past. This play talks constantly about needing to move on from the past. What happens is Eric and Henry get divorced and the ghost of Walter tells Henry to live before they walk off into a ghostly sunrise. That isn’t a solution. A ghost cannot tell you to be better and then you suddenly become better. Eric needs to help him through this, as well as Walter’s big house upstate. The best physical representation of Henry finally being able to move on from his past would be him sleeping with Eric. If Stephen Daldry wants to continue with this weird dance combo being the equivalent of sex, then they can do this beautiful waltz. You can even have Toby narrate it, especially because the Henry/Eric relationship hurts him the most. Henry and Eric don’t even need to ultimately stay together - and they shouldn’t - but Henry cannot finally move on from his past in the literal last minute of the play because a ghost magically cured him. The easiest solution was literally sitting right there. Literally. Eric sits next to him a lot. 

This play has a big Toby Darling problem that it loses its grip on and lets flop on the floor like a fish. Toby has a big personality and a nasty self-destructive streak. The foundations for Toby are fantastic. He’s flawed yet funny and breaks Eric heart while simultaneously breaking his own. Toby, like just about every other character in this play, needs to move on from his past. Toby’s past is one he keeps close to his chest and is so unrealistically traumatic that it doesn’t even make sense. But again, this is a play and not the real world so let’s just accept this for a moment. Toby is constantly talking about how he wants to be loved. He is, by both Eric and Leo, but of course he doesn’t see that. He thinks Adam is the answer to all of his problems. Toby knows how “fake” he is and thinks he can bury that feeling with Adam and fame and fortune and all the drugs in the world. 

However, and this is the biggest SPOILER of them all, when he is finally forced to confront his past, he decides he cannot do it and kills himself by driving into a concrete wall. This is shown onstage with Toby standing in a spotlight while the little kid version of himself jumps into his arms. The beautiful way this is staged gives off the idea that Toby made the right decision when this is not only the most unsatisfying way to end Toby’s arc but also the laziest. And, of course, a really disturbing message to send to your audience. You cannot have a six hour play with a static main character! You cannot have a six hour play where said character kills himself and have the scene immediately after be Walter telling Henry he must live. Toby’s death is also super jarring because it very much feels like he died because the playwright wanted him to die. Going back to Toby’s desire to be loved and how that’s connected to his past, I think he needed to realize that the way to move on from his past is be better than his past. He wants to be loved, and he is loved, but he needs to give love as well. Eric very clearly loved Toby, but he didn’t often feel like Toby loved him as much as he did. We know from Toby’s narration how that isn’t the case and Eric meant so much to him. The Inheritance as a whole has a scene towards the beginning where Eric proposes to Toby and Toby says yes but it isn’t all that romantic, with Toby later telling Eric that he was purposely trying to trap him. In my opinion, I think The Inheritance needs to end with Toby making a grand romantic gesture towards Eric. We don’t even need to see if Eric accepts it or not. It’s better if we don’t. We just need to see that Toby has changed, or at least is trying to. It’d be better than the terrible ending we got anyways. 

Toby can’t just die without any change or even an attempt at change (writing a sequel to his play doesn’t count) because it’s a six and a half hour long play. If it was a simple 90 minutes, I could accept that more but if you’re writing a two part epic, you need to give the audience a reason to be there. 

Interestingly enough, Andrew Burnap keeps playing Toby like Prior when he’s really a Louis. 

On to Eric, who, as we are told in every other scene, is just so remarkable and special and important. Why? I guess because he’s a nice person. I still don’t know why this information is so often repeated to us. Something else that was strange was that we found out the intimate details of everyone’s past, except for Eric. We know that he’s on good terms with his parents and he lives in his grandmother’s rent controlled apartment and that’s about it. Eric isn’t really given any flaws. On paper, he’s perfect. Luckily, in performance, Sam Lilja gives him more layers than that. 

Eric is given the worst ending of all, and by that I mean in an extended narration sequence/epilogue, he is quickly married off to a nameless/faceless character we have not seen and is told he lives happily ever after. The fact that Eric is married off to someone we’ve never even heard of doesn’t fly with me. This is a long play and for Eric’s entire life to be wrapped up into a neat little bow in the epilogue was the most unsatisfying way for this play to end. Leo had a similar ending - becoming a writer and marrying a nameless/faceless character we’ve never seen. For this six hour long play to end with a quick and easy narrated monologue wrapping up literally every plot point was one of the most disappointing endings to a play I have ever seen. Everything was resolved with a quick wave of a hand because the characters say so. 

Ultimately, this play says absolutely nothing new or important. It briefly starts conversations on a lot of interesting themes and ideas but never explores them in any meaningful way. There are tear-jerker moments for the sake of wanting the audience to cry because there isn’t a single organic thing about this play that otherwise would. Likewise, for a play that keeps talking about putting the past behind you, it is utterly obsessed with the past and not moving forward from it. The cognitive dissonance in this play was astounding. 

The most compelling story in The Inheritance is between Eric and Toby and yet Matthew Lopez suddenly turns it into a play about Leo. These characters are constantly circling each other, both metaphorically and physically. The dynamic between the two of them is where the play feels its most honest. How they both grow and change in each other’s orbit is where the play has the strongest legs. If only Matthew Lopez let it walk. 

But the real problem is, The Inheritance really believes it’s saying important and meaningful things and there is no moving past that. 

I made a separate post about this but I’ll bring it up here too but every main character is played by a straight person. The actors who play Eric Glass, Toby Darling, Adam/Leo, Walter Poole/Morgan and Henry Wilcox are all straight. I get it, you cannot ask someone if they’re gay during the audition because that can easily lead into a Lee Pace situation where someone is forcibly outed when they don’t want to be. I get that.

However, this is a play about gay men in NYC with a cast of actors who are not particularly famous. This is also New York City. It’s not like there’s a lack of talented gay actors out there. I know that Andrew Burnap is friends with Matthew Lopez and you often cast the actors you work with a lot in your work, but really not a single gay actor amongst your primary characters? As much as I loved Tony Goldwyn, he was certainly cast with the hopes of bringing in a bigger audience and they could have easily cast a well known older gay actor. The Boys in the Band did it, so why not The Inheritance? 

Anyways that was a review almost as long as the play itself (if anyone actually reads this whole thing I will be shocked) and I still feel like I haven’t sorted out all my feelings on the play. So I guess the thought I’ll end on is I was really disappointed in this play as a whole. I wanted to see something very profound and important. I so badly wanted this play filled with gay characters and huge hype from London to be really outstanding. 

I like these reviews too so I’ll link them below is you want to check them out: 

Kyle Turner

Louis Peitzman

Isaac Butler (who thinks the play is about Eric but honestly after Part 2 I don’t think so)

**part of me wants to go see Part 1 again (with that ridiculously easy rush) just to see Kyle Soller, who is the main guy who plays Eric Glass because if Sam Lilja was so good, imagine how good Kyle Soller is! But there’s no way I’ll sit through Part 2 again.

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) A Context in Flux: Azad Ashim Sharma’s ‘Against the Frame’

In this review, Maria Sledmere explores the representation of global conflicts and everyday politics of hybridity, identity, xenophobia and experimental poetics within Azad Ashim Sharma’s debut publication, Against the Frame (Barque Press, 2017).

That brings us back to what the ambition of theory may be -- what theory desires. That's difficult to answer, but I think a theory should go beyond illuminating the deep structure of an event, object, or text, should do more than establish or embellish the framing discourse within which this object of analysis is placed. What the theory does first of all is respond to a problem. You look at what you can't use -- you look at the explanations you have for something and you feel that they aren't translatable, that they don't adequately illuminate something about another form of thought, or the event of a thought. So you are moved to begin to rethink.

— Homi Bhabha

> Azad Ashim Sharma’s collection Against the Frame (Barque Press, 2017) is dedicated in memory of his grandparents, A. B. Kazi and Zainab Ebrahim Asvat. This is a book that speaks to the lineages of the personal as much as the political; to imply some sort of separation between each would be to deny the woven threads of oppression, racism and prejudice as they play out in lived experience. Against the Frame is a book of contemporary Britain in the context of racialised phobias, charged disasters on a global scale, intergenerational traumas and media distortions. Comprising 42 pages of untitled lyric poems, it’s a restrained, brooding navigation of love, solidarity, terror and belonging in all its loaded forms. It lashes when it must, devastates with softer images then cuts to the chase like a certain look exchanged across the platform of a tube station. It works by sequence, contrast, accumulation. Its tone is monochrome, London fog with splashes of scarlet.

> When Homi Bhabha talks of a move towards beginning ‘to rethink’, he means with theory, but that’s not to exclude poetry. For Sharma’s poetry does nothing if not engage with theory, within the fraught realm of a present defined by problematic frameworks of racialised identity, hierarchy and myth. A South London poet of mixed Islamic-Hindu heritage, Sharma is well-poised to unpack these conflicts, as they play out not just in the news, but also in the embodied discourse of the street. Against the Frame engages with ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, portraying the feedback loops of media representation and everyday interaction. The deceptively ‘simple’ form of the short lyric becomes the ideal stage for intervening within our culture of soundbites and throwaway social media posts. Sharma will show up the terrible collage of our hyper-mediated present with an Imagist’s precision:

More white foreskins must preen like satire with human rights to vote offence and make Arab grave for occidental cenotaph spectaculars.

The often deadpan tone serves to heighten the intensity of the subjects presented. It wouldn’t be quite right to simply say Against the Frame is a ‘polemic’; its lyrics are subtler than the term implies; Sharma uses dramatic or explicit images with simultaneous conviction and restraint. Images of body parts detached from bodies highlights an absurdism around questions of definition, the arbitrary ornamentation of all that identifies our heritage, our skins, our moralised standing. Sharma constantly shows up Western hypocrisies through the lens of specific events as they ricochet between the scene of occurrence and their media and political reception back in Britain and/or Europe.

> In a way, what Sharma offers us is shortcuts to these fraught and complicated issues. I mean shortcuts not to sound reductive, but in fact an expansion, a kind of portal to accessing almost unthinkable knowledges, narratives and trauma. I mean shortcuts in relation to the elliptical tension of two lines that offer so much, that speak so much to what we can or cannot know, that gesture towards the deceptively neat tragedies that our sociopolitical systems propagate: ‘Everything has slipped away / into the algebra of the ballot box’. I mean also shortcuts that hold complexity within the torque of discursive ironies:

Precarity has become the buzzword for whiteness. A whiteness so world interior that it mistakes itself for the critique of itself & forces that critique upon us.

There’s the understatement of the ampersand, the sense that Sharma so adeptly shows up the hypocrisies of white logic, the workings of white universalism, via the cutting restraint of what resembles a philosophical argument. Sharma reveals how one accepted, mainstream proposition or assumption can be so easily undermined by its own logic, the way it plays out. Hearing Sharma read, however, these lyrics acquire by their very reasoning, their surprising warmth, a force that touches the compasses of both emotion and ‘common sense’. Live, Sharma reads in a way that is powerful and ‘held’, as well as conversational (his frankly incredible two-and-a-half hour SOAS Radio interview attests to this). There is a voice in these poems: for all their sweep and politics, their ability to comment on a general occurrence, their restrained ‘I’, the voice is there like a current, a charge, a bringing together of specificities. A threading, rather than congealing of experience. The voice responds to a problem, the poems stage the coming towards the event of a thought. Sharma’s ‘We’ is a statement of solidarity, a drawing together of histories of oppression. His ‘us’ is generous, empathetic, vulnerable, potential with united strength. Writing in Threads (2018), Nisha Ramayya argues:

I think of the weaving frame as a context in flux, that may be moved and expanded across spaces and times, that may transgress national borders and rational systems, a potentially unlimited context. I think of threads as parts that frame, as repetitions that enable memory, destruction and recreation, as continuities that loop and accrue meaning.

Being Against the Frame is to be against the frame: the representation that holds in singular, that imposes one narrative upon a plural experience of difference and identity in space and time. Ramayya’s revised sense of the frame is one that catches hybridity in its many woven strands. The way Sharma draws in the dialogue tags of familiar platitudes and wrenches them astray with control and poise feels a bit like weaving, or at least reworking in the sense of a craft, a generative movement towards production, expression, improvisation or inhabited pattern. I can’t help but think also of the work of pace and echo, the soulfulness of honesty, the pass between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, the double consciousness of the seeing and seen, the collective and singular held within a hybrid identity:

When we look in the mirror we are made to fear ourselves. When you look in the mirror you see the victim, the innocent. And you say these images are easy, simple, don’t experiment with your language enough!

Here, Sharma challenges common Anglo-American critical receptions of BAME poetry, which tend to read work solely by way of the poet’s racial identity, ignoring vital innovations in form within their work. To write of that familiar trope, the glance in the mirror, is apparently to lack ‘experiment’, to write with ‘easy, simple’ images. I can’t think what it is, but those last two lines compellingly echo for me. Almost like a Basho haiku, a spellbinding line from Ariana Reines or a familiar Imagist lyric I can’t quite place. The direct ‘you say’, which speaks beyond the event of the reader encountering this particular poem, and gazes hard at entire histories. In the way that H.D.’s rich and mythical lyrics challenged perceptions and receptions of gender and sexuality in women’s poetry, Against the Frame unravels the myths of racialised experience by forging a space for concrete realities of daily struggle. Sharma defies you to shut down or dismiss that powerful image of the mirror, the duality of terrorist and innocent, inside and outside, held in the self contained by mainstream representation.

> His work is experimental in its suffusion of image, the clarity of sentiment delivered in complex affects which cut across genres, discourses and times. To say this is ‘contemporary’ is to acknowledge the historical context of its occurrence, but also to emphasise the ongoingness of its tensions in the public and private spheres of the mind and the street, the self and the city, the comment section and the television. Some of Sharma’s lines are beautiful and striking in their simplicity, lines that demand to be read again and again like crashing waves, whose interruptions are the fissures we cleave by policy and political gesture:

My drowning nourishes your eyes and in your passivity overflowing all passivity before the stimulation you ban my existence without an apology.

Of course the word ‘ban’ would link me to Bhanu Kapil’s stunning Ban en Banlieue (2015), a strange kind of lyric, prayerful novel which follows its young brown (black) female protagonist home from school in the insurgent moments of a riot. A novel which quotes from Giorgio Agamben, ‘To ban someone is to say that no-one may harm him’. Ban herself ‘is a dessicated form on the sidewalk’. To dessicate is to remove the juices, the moisture of something, often for preservation. The banning of someone’s existence is, Sharma’s poem suggests, an act of self-preservation. What dessicated bodies must we keep on the streets to hold our nation? Sharma asks such questions in the braided turns of an intimate poetics of the body, of the polis, of the everyday. What is staged goes beyond the term ‘micro-aggression’ and accumulates throughout these short lyrics as a scarlet thread of pain, a woven history that binds its heritage to the unfolding contemporary. As with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), subjectivity in all its tensions is essayed through scenes of daily encounter, through weighted shifts between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ and the ‘we’. Whose clothes do we wear, whose skin do we share, how does this matter, what language becomes us now?

> ‘This montage is a garb for unfreedom’, Sharma writes. I think of poetic form, and something Lisa Robertson says about how garments are ‘lyric structures’. These poems envelop you, they are a distinctive ‘garb’; they make fraught visibility of their subject in the world. Sharma’s montage of detail is a clustering, held quick in the space of short lyric. You can read all these poems at once, as I did walking through the park on an incongruously bright May day; their sequence demands a sort of anxious thirst from the reader. Yet this imperative is also held on a single page, that space of clearing and tension and dwelling. The way the poet might juxtapose within a line two fraught images: ‘like bullets in a kidney | like mud on an eyelid’, the staged virgule highlighting what can be done in the 'special now’ of lyric poetry (Jonathan Culler), what comparisons made. One simple trace of mud to weigh up against a bullet shot through an organ. We think about violence, the marks we leave. We think about writing.

> With fresh and commanding expression, Sharma recalls myriad acts of violence, social exclusion, economic oppression and cognitive dislocation within the racialised, xenophobic space we call this nation. He probes ‘ways of knowing’ in the pointed, short-circuited era of ‘gunpoint’ and ‘discount’, the ‘known chaos’ of mass media and its vortex of paranoia and accusation. If the frame is that which stages one event, often anachronistically, in the context of another, then to be ‘against’ the frame is to offer alternative shortcuts to diversity within representation. The work of lyric as the work of the chorus or commons, but also as the work of empathy, a coming towards understanding, a making space for thought. What Bhabha says of theory rings true for Sharma’s poetics: this is a rejection of existing frames for thinking racialised experience, a woven, experimental movement that finds space in its formal poise for translating racialised conflicts, contradictions and the ‘climate of fear’ kept aflame by the hostile temperatures of mass media discourse.

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Endnotes

I recently heard Sharma read for the first time at an 87 Press event held at Typewronger Books in Edinburgh, alongside Dom Hale, Callie Gardner and Gloria Dawson. The way he delivered poems from this collection, as well as several new ones, interlacing personal anecdotes, shout outs and apologies for (I’m possibly glossing here) being ‘a South London poet in Scotland, complaining about South London’, marked a warmth and openness that went beyond the space of that bookshop, that Saturday eve. A maturity and sobriety that challenged my own sense of what poetry can do, the conversations and intimacies it might spark, the space and care and attention it holds. Sharma’s SOAS Radio interview is such a trove of musings on personal histories, higher education, politics, philosophies of hybridity and the contemporary poetry scene, not to mention an excellent playlist of UK dubstep, jazz, blues, rap and more. It’s rare that poets get so much radio time, let’s face it, so do have a listen :)

Against the Frame is out now via Barque Press and can be purchased here. 

Text: Maria Sledmere