Voice and Forensic Form 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. By repurposing the Padmore materials, Surge breathes new life into silenced or forgotten aspects of Black British history, such as the New Cross Fire of 1981.

My talk sets out to discuss the ways in which Surge re-embodies and reactivates memory through orality and performance, specifically by recapturing the voice, mood, and inflections of some of the New Cross Fire’s first-hand witnesses. Based on my own experience at the GPI, where I accessed the New Cross Fire testimonials, but also viewed and listened to video footages and audio recordings, I will discuss the ways in which Bernard uses voice and sound to create a form of forensic poetry “re-materialising” (Bernard 2020) the archival record.