the flap pack, volume two: She Can Still Sing by Louisa Adjoa Parker
‘the flap pack’ is a brand new newsletter by flipped eye publishing, where we take a deep dive into pamphlets from our ongoing ‘flap’ series
BY LANA HUGHES - 2ND NOV 2022
‘I stare skyward, / as though I’ll find you / tucked behind grey clouds / in a patch of gold.’ – She Can Still Sing, p.11
Published in 2021, She Can Still Sing is an intricate and honest exploration of friendship and grief; a dispatch from Louisa Adjoa Parker to her late friend, Natasha Rajaratnam, who took her life in 2019 after a struggle with mental illness. In twenty poems, Parker strives to reconstruct the memories and events that built a friendship. In doing so, she reflects on the ramifications of its loss – or perhaps, she considers, its transformation into something else: a relationship in which one friend can no longer age, ‘will no longer be changed / by time now’, but who hasn’t become something so simple as an absence.
Instead, Natasha – Parker’s late friend and the centre around whose gravity She Can Still Sing orbits – becomes a shapeshifter, present both in routine and remarkable moments. ‘Are you the blackbird / with a custard-yellow beak [...]?’, Parker asks in Birds. ‘Are you one of the starlings / taking flight in formation […]?’ Images of birds, flight and sky are cast and recast, as in Wings: ‘She soars into a dark sky, / flies over trams, rooftops’. In Light: ‘I stare skyward, / as though I’ll find you / tucked behind grey clouds / in a patch of gold.’
References to nature ground these poems and are woven throughout. She Can Still Sing works to remind us of the continuity of the repeating seasons, the ubiquity of trees, flowers and water. Parker also alludes to nature's resilience: ‘the snowdrops in my garden, pushing / up through the earth – heads bent’, or the bird which ‘with broken wings / still has a voice’.
Human traits serve as reminders of the enduring and bittersweet significance, even in death, of those we love. ‘You’re [...] / in your brother’s lips, / your nephew’s black hair’, Parker writes in You’re. In You loved that boy, she notes, ‘you even / looked alike – tall, long-limbed’ / dark-haired.’ In Laugh, she remembers ‘the day we realised you / had given your laugh to your daughter [...] / The sound of you / two laughing the same laugh / was the funniest thing we’d ever heard.’
In many moments like these, She Can Still Sing examines time and memory. There are moments I forget considers that an imperfectly rendered human memory, created by an imperfect and fallible human brain, will omit things that were nonetheless present when the memory was created. ‘The dark canopy of trees / lining the road from Uplyme, / the grey pebbles on the beach, / the hills we climbed’: some of these sights and sounds are forgotten. But as the poem reminds us, they were there, even so. Maybe, She Can Still Sing seems to suggest, the people we lose and grieve become imprinted on the landscapes we share. Housewarming describes an August evening when ‘your daughter / has returned to the patch of land / she came from.’ ‘[…] the children grown now,’ Parker writes, ‘but it’s as though time / has stood still and I’ll turn and see you / next to me.’ These words echo an earlier line from She Can Still Sing, and perhaps its foremost declaration: ‘You are at the root of me.’
An interview with the author of She Can Still Sing
What does this pamphlet mean to you? It means an awful lot. I wrote [She Can Still Sing] about a friend I had lost. It was written during a time when I was grieving. It feels important to be having these conversations; talking about the impact on family, friends and community when someone takes their life: it’s huge. I think people go through a type of double-grief – grieving the person who has passed away but also feeling incredibly guilty and constantly wondering if you could or should have done more. Wondering if there was anything you or anyone else could have done. It’s tough, and in general, we don't talk about death or grief enough in British society. It feels as though we only really think about death when we're faced with it: with the loss of somebody in the public eye, as we're seeing at the moment1; or when we’ve lost somebody close to us. As such, it means a lot to have [She Can Still Sing] out there, and to be able to turn a difficult experience into something that I hope may give readers some hope or pleasure.
What is your writing process like? How did these poems come about? I didn't know [She Can Still Sing] was going to be a book when I started writing. I'm not the sort of person who plans things particularly well – I'm often spontaneous when it comes to writing poetry. It began very early on, when I was grieving for Tasha. I remember sitting in my bed and scribbling on paper. Later on I shaped the pamphlet a little more. Pascale Petit mentored me and I went down to her place in Cornwall; Nii [Ayikwei Parkes], as editor of the book, also helped me develop it. The poems came from a place of wanting to celebrate [Natasha’s] life. I'd written about death before, and that writing had been dark and quite negative. I wanted to make this much more light and beautiful, to focus on the beauty of [Natasha] as a person and the pleasure that she brought to so many people around her, including myself. She was an amazing person and I'm blessed to have known her.
In She Can Still Sing, you include references to Natasha’s creativity: her painting and the music she would play for you (and with you, as explored in the poem Jembe). Did the two of you often collaborate? How did your world-views and creative processes differ, and where did they meet? We didn't collaborate in the sense that we didn't see ourselves as artists – Tasha sang but she didn’t perform; she'd go busking instead. She'd play a guitar, sing, and play the drum. She was very into music and painting, and sometimes we'd do things together. I had a council house in Lyme Regis, and once we spent the afternoon painting a pole outside the house with tribal patterns. She was interested in visual patterns: looking to other cultures and their designs and taking those on board. At school I was into art – I studied art at GCSE and started doing an A Level in Art before I left school. After I was kicked out of sixth form I lost confidence in my art, so I didn't do very much painting, whereas Tasha did. For her it was very much about the process. She loved colour, which she had a great sense for. She didn't write, apart from her songs. The most exciting thing is that her daughter – Leonie Prater – is now a brilliant, talented singer-songwriter. Leonie is building a career in singer-songwriting, which feels like a legacy of Tasha.
How does your relationship to the natural world influence your writing? During incredibly hard experiences, like when Tasha passed away or when the country went into lockdown, I notice an impact on my mental health. In these moments, when I need support, I will often find myself in nature. Being outside, pottering around my garden or going for walks, calms me and helps me feel connected to myself and the world around me. In that sense, nature influences my writing: I take pleasure, comfort and joy from it and it subsequently ends up in my poetry when I write about my experiences. So although I wouldn't say that the natural world directly influences my writing, it helps me to make sense of myself, which in turn supports me in writing about being in those spaces.
Who are your biggest influences – literary or otherwise? That's a tricky one. As a mixed race woman I haven't had many role models, but I'm excited by the recent surge in success for Black female artists, such as Bernadine Evaristo and Ingrid Pollard. It’s amazing and inspires me to be increasingly ambitious about where I can get to with my writing career. Additionally, musical influences – while they haven't shaped my work – have helped me make sense of my identity. I listened to Tracy Chapman’s music when I was a teenager and it was as though she was speaking to me, because I didn't have any Black role models. I didn't have anyone who was talking, in music or otherwise, about experiences of domestic violence, racism or poverty – all of which I'd experienced and would go on to experience throughout my life. So this influence was key, not necessarily for becoming an artist myself, but in getting to know myself: feeling that I had a voice; that I had my own journey, and there were other people who understood my experiences.
What are you reading at the moment? I've just finished reading How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie, which is brilliant. It's a debut novel and a real dark comedy – it’s very funny. I read novels every night before going to sleep, and in those moments I enjoy books that are fairly easy to read: just good escapism.
Louisa Adjoa Parker reads 'pure'
Where to buy She Can Still Sing
Click here to buy a copy of She Can Still Sing by Louisa Adjoa Parker directly from our website, or here to purchase a copy via Amazon. flipped eye publishing hopes to soon initiate a long-term, rolling internship programme. Each pamphlet purchased is greatly appreciated, and helps us to realise this goal!
Parker was interviewed in the week after the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II.