Author: Jay Bernard
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Paperback
So says:
"A harrowing comparison of past and present, Bernard’s book ‘Surge’ looks at the New Cross Massacre of 1981 and how little has changed since alongside the writer's own personal dilemmas. “How many times will she die once more?/As long as things are worth dying for”
To quote Victoria Adukwei Bulley, “In Surge, the dead are here and now. They are hungry and eager to be heard.” Bernard’s multimedia performance memorial invocation for the fourteen young black Londoners who died in the 1981 New Cross Fire finds equally commanding form on the page, with criss-crossing rhythms invoking house music and playground chants disrupting the brutal “neutrality” of judicial and media languages towards an absolute lyrical urgency."