#bear press

REDRIFF-AMERICAN MIMIH

erkembode

In 2014 the artist erkembode and myself began a project to twin Ngũ Hành Sơn, Đà Nẵng (erkembode was living there at the time) with St Mary’s Church in the diocese of Rotherhithe, London. I’d become interested in St Mary’s because its basement shares a problem with the basement of one of the buildings in the novel I’m currently working on (for which this blog is a kind of scrap book) - the problem they share is the amount of dead bodies covered in quicklime buried within.

Of course, you get involved in stuff and then stuff takes you on a journey. Erkembode works with mimih, a type of ancestral spirit, and I realised pretty quickly that I had to let the mimih into my writing and take whatever path ensued. This was hard - I had never worked in this fashion before i.e. I’m a cynical old bastard or, at least, I’ve grown used to acting in the world as if I am. But I knew that if the collaboration was to work then I needed to open my writing to the unseen and unpredictable mimihzone.

Now you only have to visit Rotherhithe to know it’s an extraordinary place. At one point it was a heaving maritime neighbourhood, the place where The Mayflower began its journey. Prince Lee Boo of (what is now) The Republic of Pelau, a Pacific Island country, is buried in the churchyard. Brunel’s Thames Tunnel starts from here. The pillars which hold up St Mary’s are salvaged ship masts covered in plaster, and some of the church furniture is also carved from salvaged timbers. Yet there is also a feeling of community, of current lives being lived, of London in 2016 alive with history and journeys, past and present, complex and flowing and unfolding.

I wanted to capture all of this in the writing - a tall order most definitely (tall as the massive eucalyptus tree which dominates the churchyard) - and the truth is the twinning of Ngũ Hành Sơn, Đà Nẵng with St Mary’s Church became something else as we began to work.

Never having been to Vietnam, I felt that I needed to acknowledge my helplessness in even attempting the task - so, for me, the work quickly became about the impossibility of the work. Erkembode maybe came from that perspective anyway (he might disagree with this👹).

Ultimately I guess I’m saying that REDRIFFS is a beautiful failure, one that will go on forever, and somewhere in its failure lies its success. The twinning of Ngũ Hành Sơn, Đà Nẵng with St Mary’s Church in Rotherhithe has begun and it will never end. It’s with the mimih. Wherever that is.