Connecting the Archive to the Repertoire: Re-materializing the Archive in Jay Bernard’s "Surge"

An award-winning poetry collection, "Surge" (2019), by the non-binary British poet and writer of Caribbean ancestry Jay Bernard, is based on their forays into the community-led records of the George Padmore Institute in London, a research centre devoted to radical Black history. In many ways, Bernard’s collection breathes new life into silenced or forgotten aspects of Black British history, specifically the New Cross Fire of 1981. Written at the time of the Brexit vote, the 2017 Grenfell tower fires and the 2018 Windrush scandal, Surge also suggests an unsettling carryover between the neglect of Black British voices in the 1980s and the contemporary moment.
While being rooted in the London-based records of the Padmore Institute, the collection simultaneously “unhouses” (Steven Blevins 2016) these materials through intertextual references to a host of Caribbean artists, activists and critics based in Britain and in the Caribbean diaspora, which anchors "Surge" in a transnational and multilingual canon of Caribbean literature and scholarship. Equally importantly, Bernard’s re-purposing of the Padmore materials evidences a determination to re-embody and reactivate memory through orality and performance, with a view to “re-materialising” (Bernard 2020) the archival record. Relying on Diana Taylor’s "The Archive and the Repertoire" (2003), my paper sets out to discuss how Surge creates new “choreographies of meaning” (Taylor) by carving a liminal space between “the archive” and “the repertoire” – between “items supposedly resistant to change” and “embodied practices” (Taylor) gesturing towards non-discursive modes of knowledge and meaning-making.