The setting of South Kilburn in my autobiographical novel Who They Was, is not a typical literary setting. It is a large housing project in northwest London, made notorious by gangs and crime. I moved there in my teens and lived in an apartment in one of the blocks until my early thirties. Those years were formative, and my experiences there are an integral part of my identity.
Unlike some representations I have seen of public housing, my portrayal isn’t of a fetishized location, limited to a criminal battleground, nor is it a politicized zone that cries out about social neglect and institutional marginalization. Of course, by truthfully depicting the things I saw, those aspects of gang culture and economic deprivation are unquestionably evident. However, there is much more to such a neighborhood than those facets of life.
Struggle and optimism are two of the most identifiable features of human existence. Within modern cities, nothing encapsulates these characteristics more than the housing project. Because these neighborhoods are not just congested with human lives, but with human stories. Who They Was is just one of those stories.
Nothing had a greater impact on making me want to write about my area, than legendary New York rapper Nas. When I listened to his album It Was Written at the age of thirteen, his lyrics immersed me in the smells, sights and sounds of project life in the Queensbridge Houses. They are pure street poetry; a verbal documentation as opposed to glorification, bluntly recounting the hopelessness of young men who fall prey to the negative influences of street life: ‘Overnight thugs bug ‘cause they ain’t promised shit/ Hungry-ass hooligans stay on that piranha shit’.
But it wasn’t just about the portrayal of a grimy reality. His evocation of a world through a kaleidoscope of vivid imagery had a major impact on how I wanted to write, as in his track Take it in Blood: ‘City lights spark a New York night/ Rossi and Martini sippin’/ Sergio Tacchini flippin’ […] .45 by my scrotum/ Manifest a do or die slogan’. Five years after I heard those lyrics they came back to me as I stood on the balconies of South Kilburn, watching gang members dressed in Nike and Gucci with guns in their waistbands as they waited to serve crack fiends.
This distinct depiction of a neighborhood and its struggles is equally evident in Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. Babel sets these stories in the Moldavanka, a run-down neighborhood in the port city of Odessa where he lived for some time in southern Ukraine. It is an area inhabited by hustlers, whores, and holy men. No character is more memorable than Benya Krik, a Jewish gangster who’s trajectory, ‘his lightning-quick beginning and his terrible end’, is just like those of New York street legends Pappy Mason and Pistol Pete who Nas immortalizes in his music.
Babel’s stories from the 1930s might seem worlds away from Nas’s accounts of NY project life in the 1990s, but their portrayal of rough neighborhoods and gangsterism have much in common. From shootouts and hustling, to hatred of the police, Babel even portrays the materialistic flamboyance of his gangsters. Just as Benya Krik wears ‘an orange suit and underneath his cuff a diamond bracelet’, so Nas raps about suede Timberland boots, Sergio Tacchini and diamond pendants. Equally, in Who They Was I write about our own iconic street fashions of diamond grillz, Nike sneakers and Rolexes. They are key aspects of life in deprived areas where the importance of what one wears is tied up with status and identity.
The Moldavanka of Babel’s novel is undeniably a tough area, but it is also a place of family and friendship, of love, hope and dreams—a place of profound humanity. At the same time it is a ghettoized community. A world within a world, just like Nas’s Queensbridge and my own South Kilburn. Just like the notorious Cabrini-Green Homes in Chicago, the grim, crime-plagued housing project in which the horror film Candyman is set.
In the movie, Cabrini-Green is haunted by the eponymous Candyman, a supernatural killer who inspires fear in both residents and outsiders. Yet the real horror in the film is that of life in a housing project that has been abandoned by America, the horror of inner city marginalization, of gang violence and deplorable living conditions. Helen, a reporter who visits Cabrini to investigate the urban legend, provides a powerful metaphor for how residents of public housing are often othered by the fear of outsiders. She allows the viewer to see the reality and compels them to consider how governments neglect their more disadvantaged populations and how living in such environments can influence the trajectory of a person’s life. People often don’t care about places like Cabrini-Green or South Kilburn, as long as they don’t live in them. But to me, these locations are just as important to know about as Fifth Avenue and Notting Hill. And the stories from those places are just as relevant as any others.
An inevitable by-product of such marginalization is that inhabitants develop a hostility towards outsiders. Journalists only ever come to report bad news. It’s like a scene in La Haine, a masterly French film about social disadvantages and police brutality in a Parisian housing project. In the wake of a riot following the hospitalization of a young man by the police, a journalist drives into the project with her camera crew, looking for young men to interview about the unrest. The three friends who she comes across are enraged, eventually chasing her off as one of them shouts, ‘You’re not in Thoiry.’ His friend asks him what Thoiry is and he replies, ‘It’s a drive-thru zoo.’
Who They Was focuses on my experience and the experiences of my friends in a world where life is brutal and reputations are earned through violence. But ultimately, we were proud to say we lived in South Kilburn. In fact we wore the notoriety of the place as a badge of honor. There is no work of art that displays this universally identifiable pride in a dangerous neighborhood more than Mobb Deep’s iconic track Shook Ones Pt. II.
Like Nas, the rap duo originated in the Queensbridge Houses. Their lyrics are full of the violent swagger of young men hardened by project life, where survival of the fittest is paramount: ‘You all alone in these streets cousin/ Every man for theyself in this land we be gunning’. The track embodies the hostility of residents towards outsiders, where the danger and toughness it takes to exist in such a place becomes a source of pride: ‘I can see it inside your face, you’re in the wrong place/ Cowards like you just get their whole body laced up/ With bullet holes and such’. Despite the violence, Queensbridge is an intrinsic part of their identity, a place they will never abandon: ‘Back in Queens the realness and foundation/ If I die I couldn’t choose a better location’.
Human history is overwhelmed with stories of kings and empires. But the more recent histories that lurk within the concrete towers of places like South Kilburn or Queensbridge, are just as full of human tragedy, triumph and tribulation.
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