The Banana
Screened 15-20 September 2020
A quirky, quintessential Arena film, The Banana looks at musa sapientum, the fruit of the wise, through a variety of lenses. Among the talking heads considering the impact of this wonder food, The Velvet Underground's John Cale tells the story behind Andy Warhol's famous LP cover, Auberon Waugh and John Walters recall their first encounters with the fruit after the war and activist Darcus Howe considers the colonial history central to this story. For five days only, Bristol Libraries brought you this entertaining 1997 Arena documentary, directed by Kate Meynell, which also tackles serious issues such as colonialism and capitalism. For a city built on the fruits of the colonies, this film gets to the heart of current debates about its history, as reflected in the new response film featuring most recent Bristol Poet Laureate Vanessa Kisuule, writer and activist Edson Burton, YA author Polly Ho Yen and historian Dr Saima Nasar. You can still enjoy exclusive new poems inspired by the film from local poets Miles Chambers and Solomon OB and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with a masterclass from award-winning author Monique Roffey.
This evocative Arena film from the BBC archives, directed by Tim May, screened as part of Mancheter International Literature Festival. Exploring the relationship between culture and class politics which MacColl epitomised then and now, you can still watch responses to the film from performer Jennifer Reid, presenter and journalist Stuart Maconie and spoken word poet Tony Walsh, as well as an exclusive appearance by Peggy Seeger. Enjoy new poems inspired by the film from local poets Cheryl Martin and Ella Otomewo and learn how to start your own personal writing journey with a masterclass from acclaimed poet, playwright and lyricist Louise Wallwein.
ARENA: THE BANANA
‘All things have their song. The sun, the moon, the birds, the sea — I thought the banana should have a song as well,’ so said the leader of Saumak Raya, a musical band of Contra rebels I filmed in the heat of the war in Nicaragua in the 1980s. He sang,
All the nations like banana, all the nations like banana –
Cubans like it, Banana!
Africans like it, Banana!
Americans like it, Banana!
English like it, Banana!
When we made The Banana in 1997, we included that sequence.
In the hands of Contra terrorists, rehabilitated in detention by the Sandinista government, the humble banana carries a message of global empathy and commonality. So, if the banana can have a song, why not a film too? A film that would celebrate the banana, but might also explore its darker side.
Arena: The Banana is in a tradition that Arena pretty much originated, taking a subject that might not be thought obvious or appropriate for an arts documentary. An everyday item that could have the potential to tell us something about ourselves and our world, which we might not have considered or anticipated: a soupy song (My Way); an ordinary car (The Private Life of the Ford Cortina); a radio programme (Desert Island Discs); a hotel (The Chelsea Hotel in New York).
They’re subjects that reveal an unlikely coincidence of interests among an ostensibly disparate collection of characters. The classic Radio Times billing for an Arena film of this kind would begin with the words ‘What do the following have in common?’ In the case of The Banana, the film features Spike Milligan, the Duchess of Devonshire, Darcus Howe, Nicaraguan Contras, Harry Hill, Evelyn Waugh and Carmen Miranda.
These subjects seemed to us to have just as much value as the studies we might make of artists acknowledged to be great – Derek Walcott, Louise Bourgeois, T S Eliot – or great institutions and movements such as surrealism or The National Theatre. The likes of the humble banana might reveal less expected, more surprising insights.
It could be fun, frivolous or satirical, Spike Milligan states that ‘Somewhere way back in time, someone said, “Of all the fruits, the banana is the comedian”.’ Yet the centrality of the banana in the comedy of Harry Hill is in stark contrast to its centrality in European colonial adventure and, subsequently, the economic imperialism of the United Sates in Central America. Such a dialectic is a basis for the film.
The banana found a role in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unavailable in the Eastern bloc, it became a symbol of the imagined prosperity and freedom of the West. Meanwhile, yes, we have no bananas, Charlie Chaplin slips on a banana skin, we laugh, we might even go bananas.
The challenge in making such a film is to find a way of properly realising all of its different aspects within a framework that melds them together while highlighting their particularities. That would be down to the flair and imagination of the director. Kate Meynell filmed far and wide, from Chatsworth to Honduras, searching for the stories that would build up a multi-faceted portrait of the mighty banana.
Then there is the banana itself, innocent of all this attention. Its abundance in markets, supermarkets, shops, restaurants, cafés all over the world offers no clue to its own very special organic characteristics. It’s a true botanical original and it enchants us all. As the song says, all the nations like the banana.
As Benjamin Disraeli observed in 1831, ‘Of all the fruits in the world there is none so delicious as the banana.’
Anthony Wall
16 August 2020
YOUR LOCAL ARENA: RESPONDING TO The Banana
Watch acclaimed poet Vanessa Kisuule, community activist and author Edson Burton, Polly Ho Yen, award-winning writer for young adults, and Dr Saima Nasar, Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Bristol, respond to the Arena film.
Responding to the film
Credit: Jon Aitken
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Blue Peter, Don't Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of festivals and was Glastonbury Festival's Resident Poet in 2019.She has been invited to perform all over the world, from Belgium to Brazil to Bangladesh. Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston's statue 'Hollow' gained over 600,000 views on Twitter in three days. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She has written for publications including The Guardian, NME and Lonely Planet and toured her one-woman theatre show SEXY in 2017. She is currently the Bristol City Poet for 2018–2020.
Dr Edson Burton is a writer, historian, programme curator and performer based in Bristol. Writing across mediums, his work includes poetry (Seasoned, 2008) theatre (Anansi & the Grand Prize, 2019) and radio dramas, including BBC R4 listening highlights: Armour of Immanuel (2007), the Chosen One (2009) and Deacon (2017) among others. A long-standing associate of Bristol's Watershed Cinema, Edson has curated the highly regarded Afrofuturist season (2014). Since then he has become an active member of the collective Come the Revolution, whose remit includes programming (supported by Watershed Cinema). Edson’s academic interests include: Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Black History in the USA, and Cultural Continuities between Africa & the New World. He has been a consultant and coordinator for a range of history projects in Bristol including, most recently, a study of Bristol's Old Market ward as represented in Vice & Virtue (2014) and Black South West Network's Race Through the Generations (2017)
Polly Ho-Yen is a writer based in Bristol. Her debut novel Boy in the Tower was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award, Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Federation of Children’s Book Groups Book Award. All three of her middle-grade novels published by Penguin Random House have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. She aims to create stories firmly rooted in a world that young people will know and recognise, even when a science fiction or fantastical element creeps in. Polly is an Arvon tutor and regularly runs writing workshops in primary and secondary schools across the country.
Dr Saima Nasar is Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Bristol. She is a historian of race, empire and migration. She has worked on transnational histories of migration in India, East Africa and Britain, and is currently working on a project about Black British activism and welfare citizenship.
INSPIRED BY ARENA’S The Banana:
New Poetry by Miles Chambers and Solomon O.B.
Listen to and read specially commissioned poems from two well-known poets from the region, inspired by the The Banana film.
Miles Chambers
‘Yellow Caribbean Joy’
Commissioned Poets
Miles Chambers was Bristol’s first Poet Laureate and is one of the city’s poetic cultural commentators. He’s a slam champion and an international performance poet. He was commissioned to write and perform a poem about the inauguration of President Barack Obama, which he attended, for the Politics Show, BBC South West. He has a video performance exhibit of his poem, ‘I Wanna Be Treated Normal’, in the slavery section at the M-Shed Museum in Bristol. Miles presents the radio show ‘Lyrical Minded’ on Ujima 98fm, with guest artists, poets, writers and musicians. He co-wrote a play, Looking for Obama, co-wrote and performed in a spoken word show called Curry Goat and Fish fingers and has co-written an opera for the Welsh National Opera. Miles is currently working on a book of poems entitled The Orchard Road. Through his poetry The Bristol Post voted him one of ‘Bristol’s 50 coolest people’ and one of ‘Bristol’s 50 Funniest people’.
Rapper and poet Solomon O.B. is a well-known face on the Bristol scene who has performed nationally and internationally and whose poetry has been translated into Finnish. His work has featured on BBC Radio 1Xtra and 5Live and in the Guardian online, as well as being used on television on BBC 1. Solomon is a conceptual storyteller and ideas-driven creator whose influences range from the early works of Plan B to grime pioneers, like Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, to hip-hop heavyweight Kendrick Lamar. His first solo album – currently in production – showcases his skill as a lyricist, vocalist and producer and demonstrates his idiosyncratic blend of poetry, hip-hop and jazz. Now he’s emerged through his poetry, he’s keen to show the world the full scope of what he can do through other creative mediums. And push the boundaries of his art as far as they’ll go to represent the full spectrum of his talents.
WRITING YOUR MEMOIR: A Masterclass from Monique Roffey
Taking Arena’s The Banana as a starting point, explore how you can begin to craft your own memoir or life writing with expert author Monique Roffey, who has published several award-winning novels and a memoir about her mother.
Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidadian-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Her novels have been translated into five languages and shortlisted for several major awards, (the Orange, Encore, Orion and COSTA Fiction Award) and, in 2013, Archipelago won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature. With the Kisses of His Mouth and The Tryst are works which examine female sexuality and desire. Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Boundless magazine, The Independent, Wasafiri and Caribbean Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Interviews
An Interview with Anthony Wall
An Interview with Katharine Seymour
Katharine Seymour is the Reader Development Librarian for Bristol Libraries and works across Bristol's 27 libraries, organising events, developing partnerships and promoting the library service. After graduating, she took on placements at publishers Hachette and with the books unit at BBC Broadcasting House. She worked for several years as a bookshop manager at Waterstones and has worked at literature festivals around the UK. She now lives in Bristol.
