The Grassling

"If I were a publisher, I would have no idea how to label this book. When I read it, I was left in awe of her bravery as a writer. It asks a lot of the reader, in that you really don’t know what it’s going to be. I’m going to struggle to explain it to you right now. It’s sort of a memoir. It’s a sort of a book of poetry . It’s sort of a book of history , and an interrogation of place. Even stylistically, chapter to chapter, the form changes multiple times, so there are sections of straight prose, sections of poetry, and sections that are quite experimental. I think that’s what I love about it. I wish I was that brave. I wish I even knew how to pull something like that off. It’s a book that you can genuinely get lost in, because I wouldn’t say there’s a single thread to follow. It’s a book that you would want to read linearly, but once you’re in it, you feel like you’re in a dream space. She builds this world that is completely hers. It follows the period of time when her father is ill and dying, and the journeys that she takes. She goes back to where she grew up, in Devon, and it follows these returns she takes to the place where she grew up, where her father lives and where, I guess, his family and his ancestors had lived. He was a historian, and wrote a history of this place. So it’s got these questions of ancestry and heritage and belonging, but she comes to them as a poet. She’s incredibly sensory in her writing. It’s almost cinematic, because her descriptions are incredibly colourful, vivid, and immediate. She does not make the claims to a great nature writing convention the way she approaches it. There’s a moment really early on in the book when she talks about Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape : this quote he has about Ordnance Survey maps and how you could look at them forever. She says he has never seen Google Maps, and spends ages talking about being the little yellow man that you drop on the street in Google Maps, of walking the place where she grew up when she’s far away. It’s about shifting this notion of expertise but also, I guess, just finding the beauty in the different layers that we bring to it now. So there’s this technological layer, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s allows us to illuminate something very different. There’s a section where she rides the train home and lists everything that’s yellow along the way, as a gift for her father. The things she lists are flowers and street signs. I think there’s this real sense of finding that very peculiar beauty across the natural world—and that includes us, so the signs in the landscape are as much a part of the place as daffodils. There’s something really nice in that. She’s of mixed heritage. Her mother’s from Kenya; her dad’s British. And this is a book that stands out to me, because for writers from different backgrounds—if you’re a writer of colour, if you’re a BAME writer—there’s this enormous pressure, I think, to write your story . You can write a book, but you can only write about migration, or you can only write about race. You can only write about these particular things. I think the reason I really like The Grassling is that she chooses to write about her father’s home, and her father’s side was the white, British half of her family. She doesn’t question her right to belong in the place where he was from and where she grows up. Instead, she takes that as a starting point to ask questions and to delve deeper into the ground. That is what I really like about it, because as much as other people want to demand that of her, she sort of pushes it away, and it’s a nice flipping of the narrative. “We want so often to characterise the writer of a migrant or mixed-race background as untethered, as divided” I wrote down another quote that I really love. She says: “There are invisible strings tethering me to the floor.” We want so often to characterise a writer of a migrant or mixed-race background as untethered, as divided, as not belonging. She very fiercely makes the argument for belonging and for a sense of place that, I think, a lot of us might long for. It’s quite inspiring. It’s incredibly brave, but it’s also hard to pin down. I would carry it in my bag for weeks, open it and get completely lost in it, and then miss my bus stop. It’s one of those books. It’s not that people cannot find recovery, but I think it’s about how we frame and interrogate the question. In my work, even in my own books, there’s a lot of me feeling sad and going out into nature—but one of the things I always try to write into that is the idea that I will never get a satisfactory answer, and that if I go seeking a satisfactory answer, I’m actually missing the point. The natural world is far more rich and far more diverse than we give it credit for in moments when we’re just looking for a bit of green to make us feel better, to release some endorphins, or some cold water to jump into. I do all of that, but it’s also very important to remember that it’s not there for us. As much as we might find a cure in it, we might find solace, that is not its intention. It might be our intention, but it’s not the intention of the natural world. We need to be able to step back and actually see something much bigger than us going on. It’s the decentering of the human that I’m asking for, right? It’s important to be able to step outside of our own suffering, sometimes, and see that the world is a lot bigger than us. It’s not always going to be cosy. It’s not always going to be satisfying. There are days when I go hiking, and it’s dreadful. It’s revealed to me how little I know, and I have a terrible time, and that that’s okay, too, because the mountains don’t exist for me to climb them. Shift it a little bit, and we can approach the natural world from a posture of gratitude and from a posture of care. I think Isabel Galleymore points to this often, in asking how we can love other species and other forms of life—not just life, but other forms—without needing to take for ourselves from them."