Gaylene Gould interviews Paul Mendez

Birmingham Lit Fest Presents….

In this week’s episode, artist and cultural critic Gaylene Gould interviews debut author Paul Mendez about his novel Rainbow Milk. Join Paul and Gaylene for a fascinating discussion about the rich history of black British writing, representing

the Black Country accent on the page and the intersections of identity, alongside a wonderful reading from the novel.

The Birmingham Lit Fest Presents... podcast brings writers and readers together to discuss some of 2020’s best books. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions
about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. Join us each week for exciting and inspiring conversations with new, and familiar, writers from the Midlands and beyond.

Take a look at the rest of this year's digital programme on our website: https://www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/.
For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

Credits

Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Guest Curator: Kit de Waal
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands

TRANSCRIPT

Kit de Waal

Welcome to the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast series. I’m Kit de Waal and I’ve worked with the Festival Director, Shantel Edwards, as Guest Curator of this year’s podcast series. Each Thursday across the next few months we’ll be releasing new episodes of the podcast, including wonderful discussions about writing, poetry, big ideas and social issues. In this week’s episode, artist and cultural critic Gaylene Gould interviews debut author Paul Mendez about his novel Rainbow Milk, a coming of age story that starts in the Midlands, via Jamaica, and follows ex-communicated Jehovah’s Witness Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with racism, the legacies of the Windrush and his sexuality. Join Paul and Gaylene for a fascinating discussion about the rich history of Black British writing, representing the Black Country accent on the page and the intersections of identity, alongside a wonderful reading from the novel.

Gaylene Gould

Welcome to Birmingham Literature Festival. I'm reviewer Gaylene Gould here with debut novelist Paul Mendez to talk about his book, Rainbow Milk, which made this year's Observer top 10 debut list. Hi, Paul.

Paul Mendez

Hello Gaylene, how are you?

Gaylene Gould

Good, thank you. Good, good. Yeah, great to actually kind of meet you virtually. I reviewed this book for Front Row, and I was saying how like, that can be quite onerous, you know, because you have to read a whole book and then hopefully like it and I really loved it. So, it's really wonderful to get to meet you. So, Rainbow Milk, it's a semi-autobiographical novel, following the journey of a character called Jesse McCarthy, who's a 19-year-old, de-fellowshipped Jehovah's Witness from West Bromwich. And we follow him as he moves to London and explores his sexuality through prostitution, amongst other things and through to becoming a burgeoning writer. So, there's real shades of James Baldwin here, and Giovanni's Room is indeed referenced in the novel. So, tell us a bit how this story grew in you.

Paul Mendez

Well I have a different answer now to what I would have said in answer or in response a couple of weeks ago, even because I've just re-read Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, which was Baldwin's fourth novel, published in 1968, just after the start of his political downturn, his unjust critical downturn as far as I'm concerned, because I think his later novels are pretty much his best work. But I read Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone when I was 20 years old. My trajectory was very different from Jesse, Jesse was disfellowshipped at 19 and then move straight to London, whereas I was disfellowshipped at 17. And when I was 19, moved to Kent to study an engineering degree at West Kent College, a partner College of Greenwich University. I didn't stay on the degree course for very long, I think I quit after about nine months. But in the summer of 2002, I was living with some fellow students or photography students, actually not engineering students. And it was sort of my first time living away from home, it was the first time living with creative people and one of them pushed Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone into my hand and it was the first time I've ever read a book by a black author. It was the first time I'd ever read a book by a black queer author, focalising a black queer protagonist. And it had a huge impact on me, but one, which I sort of put down, put to the side and forgot about, but it's only when reading it back now, 18 years later, that I realized just how much of an impact that book had on me in terms of my life choices, in terms of you know, I studied acting very much like the protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, he studied acting with a method school and becomes a successful Off Broadway actor in New York. I became a waiter and sort of, you know, expanded my sort of social kind of contacts, I suppose, and social environment through working in restaurants, and samplings and cuisines and just meeting you know, a whole cast of different people, and of course, explored my sexuality. So, Leo Proudhammer, the protagonist of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is bisexual, or identifies as bisexual and I came out as bisexual I think a year after reading, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. And so even just in terms of the subject’s dealt with, but also in terms of the way the book is written, the way Rainbow Milk is written, the different sort of devices I use in telling the story, so much of it reflects back to that book. So I think, it just goes to prove how important books are, and reading is, to a formative mind. As I said, I put that book down, forgot about it and some 5 - 10 years later started reading other Baldwin novels, such as Giovanni's Room and Another Country, which I've referenced briefly in Rainbow Milk, but I think the most important of his books to me was Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.

Gaylene Gould

So that's a great answer. And also, like you're saying, it really shows how novels and books work, that they have a slow, transformative process on you, you know, and you really kind of get a sense of that in this novel, that there is something that is kind of, there is a journey, there's a journey that's taken not just through the character, but that you take us on, getting us to sample our own journeys, I guess. So, the book spans miles and time so it's predominantly set this century, in the 2000s, but it begins in the last, particularly the 1950s with the arrival of Jesse's ancestor, Norman Alonzo and his wife Claudette from Jamaica, arriving in Bilston, in the West Midlands. So why was it important for you for the book to start there?

Paul Mendez

So what we think of as the Windrush generation now they're dying off, sadly, you know, the Windrush itself, that ...