Slammin’ with Mohsin Hamid
Book Slam, Clapham Grand, 19 May 2011
By Thomas Storey
The Clapham Grand’s beguiling mixture of old worldly pretension and tawdry tat, including gold leaf gargoyles with luminous eyes, was a strangely appropriate venue for June instalment of Book Slam, London’s self proclaimed “best and only” literary nightclub.
The gaudy but charming Grand suited Book Slam’s uniquely intimate showcase of literature and music which ventured as far as possible from the stuffiness of a conventional literary event and was watched by a (mostly) rapt and reverent crowd of hip young literary types.
Book Slam’s set featured Misty Miller, a precocious teen singer brandishing a ukulele, Shane Solanki, a livewire poet, performance artist and failed rapper, and most significantly the brilliant Moshin Hamid, who treated us to extracts from his first novel Moth Smoke.
Co-founder of Book Slam Patrick Neate got the night started with a marvellously shambolic ramble decrying the length of the readings as a sign of the death of culture. He was an amiably scruffy and entertaining MC throughout and dealt well with a drunken heckler (at a literary reading!) who took personal offence to a joke about Michael McIntyre being rubbish.
Shane Solanki, who also travels under the moniker ‘Last Mango in Paris’ and is currently artist in residence at East London’s Rich Mix, opened his set with a superbly incisive monologue which catalogued his failures as a person and an artist, including his sudden realisation, at 40 years of age, that he would never be commercially successful as a rapper.
Solanki’s two sets showed off his abilities as a poet and performer capable of both hilarious comedy and profound pathos. His knack of suddenly and dramatically changing tone from the hysterical to the melancholy was one of the most intriguing things about his act and something he pulled off seamlessly. He also did a staggeringly good rap about mobile phones, proving that commercial success is no barometer of talent.
There was an air of muffled apprehension as 16 year-old Misty Miller took the stage. As her set began it did feel slightly as if we had been transported to a student union open mic night. However, her undoubted talent and beautiful voice soon won the crowd over and she left the stage to full throated applause.
Finally, Moshin Hamid, who choose to simply read from his first novel Moth Smoke. Without much preamble, he simply asserted that this novel was somehow different from most South Asian fiction. As the reading began, the density of the prose, the myriad allusions and dramatic jumps from mythical allegory to present day realism threatened to overwhelm the audience, especially those who were unfamiliar with Hamid’s work. However his clear and patient reading style and his enunciation of some of the more pronounced stylistic and tonal shifts in the novel made the complexities less bewildering.
Moth Smoke eventually lent itself well to the spoken word form as the dry humour, evident throughout the novel, shone through and Hamid’s methodical reading illuminated the characters and themes of the novel. Although it would have been interesting to hear some of the background to the novel, Hamid stuck to the dictum that the work should speak for itself. The reading thus offered anyone unfamiliar with Hamid’s work an opaque but tantalising insight, and for those who had already read his work, it shone a new light on a familiar and much loved text and capped off a brilliantly indulgent literary feast.
Moth Smoke, Hamid’s first novel, was reissued by Penguin Paperback earlier this month.
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