It wasn’t difficult to release her from the page. Chaucer’s did that six hundred years before. The challenge was to inhabit the character’s voice. How would I get a live audience to believe that the diminutive well-spoken woman on stage was in fact a larger-than-lit woman of the world? I performed it to a couple of friends. One was frank: ‘Your Nigerian accent is shit’. I decided to focus on a few key words e.g. ‘nes’ rather than ‘next’ and to punctuate the punch lines. It was more about attitude than accent.

Two performance experiences: one, at the Africa Centre to a tiny audience including my dad. The poem was new. I was totally intimidated by the presence of family plus Nigerian Nigerians who didn’t appreciate my textual intervention or the humour. In contrast at the ICA, the younger, predominantly British Nigerian crowd screamed with recognition. They weren’t laughing at her; they were laughing with her. The ultimate test would be to perform it to a younger Nigerian Nigerian crowd. In Nigeria.

But for the time being, we’re back on the London-Canterbury route. The recording you’re about to hear isn’t live from the Canterbury Festival; it’s live from my through-lounge. No introductions, no background coughs or guffaws. No applause. This is a rehearsal, the closest you’ll get to the voice in my head. If you listen closely, you might even hear the splashing of the Thames.

As a regular act on the performance poetry scene, I found myself naturally creating pieces that could work dramatically but never set out to do so. By the late 90’s, my poetical manifesto was, and still is, to break down the wall between literature and live act. As a poet, I place myself somewhere between page and stage. And what has always attracted me to Chaucer’s Tales is their celebration of both. The Tales are themselves masters of intertextuality – Chaucer was often rewriting existing texts – but there was always a dramatic imperative: they must entertain. In the Prologue to The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and elsewhere in Chaucer, he presents friction between the authority of the written text (auctoritee) and the truths we acquire from life (experience). My character is born of literature and life. Wherever she goes she’s preceded by both her literary original and her doppelgangers, market women with gap-toothed smiles and a string of ex-lovers.

The Wife of Bafa comes from Nigeria, she speaks Nigerian English, she references Ibadon University and the exclusive Lagos district, Victoria Island; but the poem takes place in ‘This London’. As I lived in London for sixteen years it tends to feature regularly in my work. I didn’t have a particular London setting in mind (in contrast to Jean Binta Breeze’s dynamic The Wife of Bath speaks in Brixton Market).

London is the implied setting but in reality, the poem would be set wherever I got a gig! Alice Ebi Bafa has sold lace, linen and Dutch wax on several continents…

At this stage, I’d love to share an early draft of a new Canterbury tale with innovative use of setting; be as brave as Jay Bernard sharing a raw longhand manuscript embroidered with colourful notes and corrections. But I’m still at the thinking stage and still plucking up the courage to share a first draft with the world when it eventually arrives. So here’s one I prepared earlier, The Wife of Bafa.

The poem was a long time coming. It was conceived in an A’level classroom in Colwyn Bay 28 years ago. I lived five minutes from the sea and firmly believe that winter walks along the prom, with waves crashing on the sea road, helped channel my teenage angst into gritty poetry. (I regularly brainstorm in the shower – water clearly inspires me). I first encountered Chaucer’s General Prologue and fell for his irony and the flamboyant, three-dimensional Wife of Bath. My English teacher set us homework to write a character sketch in the style of Chaucer. I got my only ‘A’ and subsequently wrote a General Prologue to the Colwyn Bay Tales. It’s a sequence of portraits of mods, rockers, New Romantics and scooter boys. So here’s one I prepared even earlier:

The Prologue whetted my appetite. I vowed that one day I’d do justice to the Wife of Bath’s character. I finally wrote the piece ten years ago, my first attempt at a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is first-person poem that reveals the character’s own psychology and the dramatic situation. Once I decided to make her Nigerian, I let her character take over and paid little attention to the dramatic situation. I never set out to make her sell something to her audience. Yet there she was, stepping out of the page trying to sell cloth by line 6! It’s later been suggested I was inspired by the end of The Pardoner’s Tale when he tries to sell fake pardons to his fellow pilgrims. As this was another A’level text it must have influenced me subliminally. I’ve written an analysis of The Wife Of Bafa, but at the end of the day, readers and listeners will always find more meanings than I ever imagined…

I’m Canterbury Laureate till the end of this year and have just received Arts Council funding to rework Chaucer’s Tales (working title Roving Mic). The original text uses setting on several levels. First you have the gathering of pilgrims at the Tabard Inn on Southwark High Street. They’re setting off for Canterbury on horseback – the word ‘canter’ is short for Canterbury trot, the supposed pace at which pilgrims rode to Canterbury. Each pilgrim must tell two tales on the way there and two on the way back; and whoever tells the best tale will get a free meal paid for by all the other pilgrims. It’s the first UK poetry slam. The dramatic tension is strong and between tales we get a clear sense of time and place e.g.

Sey forth they tale, and tarie nat the tyme;
Lo Depeford! And it is half-wey pryme.
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne.

Then, there’s the settings within the tales themselves e.g. The Miller’s Tale is set in Oxford, and the Reeve’s, a retaliation, is set just outside Cambridge. The BBC filmed six tales in six different locations on the London-Canterbury route. I’m all set to follow in their footsteps.

So how will location impact on my work? As a reader, I detest long descriptions of places. I claim to have read Hardy’s Return of the Native but in fact, skimmed the entire first chapter, the description of Egdon Heath. Sacrilege! Egdon Heath’s one of the main protagonists of the novel. The Victorians needed those descriptions in the absence of the BBC to do all the hard work for them.  But I’m a lazy, good-for-nothing poet who finds it difficult to make that imaginative leap from long physical description to visual image. One strong metaphor will do quite nicely, thank you. And that’s what I hope to achieve with my adaptations, a strong sense of place through one strong metaphor…

Between London and Canterbury, before the Thames becomes the North Sea, sits the literary capital of the universe: Gravesend. It’s where Pip, Herbert and Magwitch rowed in Great Expectations; where the ship was moored at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; where the BBC filmed their adaptation of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. This town’s gritty, not pretty. It’s where I live and, more importantly, where I write. It will be the setting for one of my own Canterbury tales.

But where will I create this masterpiece of intertextuality? Unlike famous novelists whose studies get photographed in the Guardian’s ‘Writers’ Rooms’, I don’t scrawl longhand in the converted loft space of my Victorian villa, sitting on a distressed brown leather chair that used to belong to Jean Paul Sartre; I write in my through-lounge that looks out onto our garden with its unpruned apple tree, trampoline and sandpit. Not the river view I originally envisaged but strangely inspiring and five minutes from the Thames. Today it’s snowing on damp ground so let’s rewind to three months ago when I took this photo. This is my place:

Here’s some of the lines I’ve been dishing out to punters at Shunt this week, to varying effects.

The brief was to perform poetry “When no-one is listening” and to also be inspired by Shunt’s unusual setting, history and other art installations.

So I’ve been wearing a wireless head-mic and approaching customers in the bar, asking them, “Do you want a line?” and then offering up some of the following:

Style 7 Content 6

Style 5 Content 3

Before I set off for London I pack my stuff into boxes. I’m behind on my rent, so there’s always the chance I could be thrown out before I get back, so I figure it will be easier on the landlord if it’s all ready to go. I chuck some clothes into a bag and I’m ready. I also pack my chaos-magnet. It’s like my MacGuffin in the sense that it doesn’t have any real existence or meaning beyond its function to drive the plot forward. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

I’m at Hull Station and the magnet kicks into life and the train to Doncaster is late, which means I miss my connection. Eventually, after waiting around for an hour, I get the London train.

I’m sat next to a little old lady with a beard comparable to my own. She’s approximately 158 years old. We get chatting and our conversation covers everything from the career of Ken Dodd, what makes a good nun, the merits of getting drunk on red wine vs. the merits of gettting drunk on white wine and weather conditions in Uganda. By the end of the journey I feel like we’ve bonded, so I feel an obligation to carry her luggage onto the tube and wave her off. She gives me a pack of biscuits as a token of her appreciation.

After a sweaty jaunt across London I manage to reach Shunt Vault. Amazingly I’m only five minutes late. I meet Byron, Joshua, Helen and Molly and we go for our first discussion/workshop. The Shunt Vault is a unique place. I like the way you can hear the drips of water and the muffled screams floating across from the London Dungeon, but unfortunately these noises cause the chaos-magnet to malfunction and we are set upon by hundreds of flies.

The Shunt experience can be a little jolting to people who aren’t used to it, but the whole process is supposed to be about getting spoken word performers out of their comfort zone. On the first night of performance the chaos-magnet picks up on the other performers nerves and misgivings, so I suggest de-camping to the nearest pub so we can have a chat, and if necessary get blind drunk. I’ve performed at the Shunt before as part of the Incubate process, so I do my best to put the others at ease.

We’re a funny bunch, us spoken word lot. And when you remove the confines and boundaries of the traditonal set, the flapping begins. I try to calm everyone down a bit; it is after all, just an experiment, and if all goes tits up… so what? We’ve tried something new…

As it goes, we all have a laugh with it. My biggest fear for spoken word and performance poetry is that it will become too stale and formulaic, and processes like this, while not always successful, at least try something new with the format. I feel the need to push the boundaries of my performances, both in content and location, whenever I can.  Personally, I like standing on a platform fifteen-foot above a bar shouting abuse thinly disguised as a poem at a bunch of unsuspecting punters. Makes the chaos-magnet go into a frenzy.

I also got see the amazing Oopise Mamushka sting quartet and TdC.

And by far the best thing about these residencies is that you start off with collaborators and leave with friends. And not even the chaos-magnet can disrupt that…

Writer busted for dishing out lines. Readallaboutit!