Poor

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In Poor , Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. A book of poetry and photography detailing life in Peckham – a council estate in London – as a poor Black boy, Poor is one of the more evocative and haunting (-ly beautiful) reads of 2020.

While Coel was brought up in a predominantly working-class housing estate in Aldgate, Femi arrived in the UK from Nigeria at age seven, to live with his parents on London’s North Peckham Estate. By 12 he had been identified as a high achiever capable of boosting his school’s league table ratings by taking GCSEs early. A few decades ago, this would have seemed unimaginable; and Femi unreservedly reminds the reader of the brutality of poverty that has shaped the endz. He showed me that there were ways in which you can love yourself and have a good time, and test yourself as well. In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham.But there is no shortage of ways to use distinct poems within the collection with classes ranging from BGE to Senior Phase. The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the structural disadvantages of being poor and urban, he points out. His point, he says, is “that often these boys are just as delicate as we can ever imagine them to be. Every Monday when Caleb Femi was a young boy in the 1990s, the walkways in the housing estate where he lived with his parents and four siblings were swabbed down with a detergent that smelled of bubblegum.

The book is more than a poetry collection: containing a selection of Femi’s striking original photography, it is an impeccably curated and often beautiful snapshot of lives lived on the North Peckham Estate.It’s a female cat, he volunteers, because he had originally intended to adopt a male but took pity on the runt of the litter and couldn’t be bothered to think up a new name. Meanwhile, the BBC London news portrays these young people only through tales of knife crime and gangs, without thinking about what it might be, to be black and British and a boy, walking to school or home, through the inner city, with no-one to protect you apart from your own self. Not exceptional brilliance, he insists – “there was nothing special about me” – but having teachers who inspired him early on with a love of poetry. That’s something I wanted to investigate: the impact of urban landscapes in impoverished public housing areas; how it shapes the way that people who live in these spaces see themselves and how the world sees them. The problem was not that the kids were unreachable, he stresses, but that he had blundered into the straitjacket of the “Gove curriculum”, in which the then education minister Michael Gove had imposed strict limits on what could be taught.

The bespectacled 28-year-old, who sits across a table from me in the deserted cafe of a theatre near his south London home, is astonished when I remark on how dark I found the collection. A few months later the mural was demolished, along with the tower block where the Femi family lived, and they were moved to a four-bedroom terrace house down the road.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The conditions of the estate – poor public housing, poor design – did have the knock-on effect of being quite dark.