Monster

Dzifa Benson was born in London to Ghanaian parents and grew up in Ghana, Nigeria and Togo. She is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist whose work intersects science, art, technology, the body and ritual which she explores through poetry, prose, theatre, libretto, performance, curation, visual arts, immersive technologies, essays and criticism. She has read and performed her work in many contexts such as Tate Britain, the Dissenters Chapel of Kensal Green Cemetery, BBC Contains Strong Language, the Royal Festival Hall, King’s Place, and in Italy, South Africa, France and Norway. Her poetry has been most recently anthologised in Staying Human (Bloodaxe), More Fiya! (Canongate) and Part of a Story That Started Before Me (Penguin), and has been recognised with fellowships from Jerwood Compton Poetry and Hedgebrook. She was shortlisted for the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021. She publishes essays and criticism covering poetry, theatre, music, fiction and nonfiction in The Financial Times, The Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry London and The Poetry Review. Her first collection, Monster, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2024. Dzifa has had poetry, curatorial and editorial residences at Whitstable Biennale, Pallant House Gallery, Estuary Festival, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Orleans House Gallery, Wakehurst (Kew Gardens), the Royal Geographical Society and Granta. She has also guest lectured at Chelsea College of Art & Design, University of East London, University of West London, Brunel University, and studied dramaturgy at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. She is a poetry editor with Curtis Brown Creative. Her abridgement and adaption of the National Youth Theatre REP Company’s 2021 production of Othello, in collaboration with Olivier award-winning director Miranda Cromwell, toured the UK and she is currently in the pre-production, dramaturgical stage of her first full length play Black Mozart // White Chevalier. Dzifa has toured South Africa and the UK with the British Council, is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and holds a Masters degree in Text & Performance from RADA and Birkbeck.

I. Monster

   13   Lacuna, with Landscape

   14   Blues for Sarah

   16   Exhibition of a Real Life Wonder (Still Alive!)

   17   Som-|aub // Menarche

   20   Lost & Found

   22   In Which Comedian Charles Matthews, Actor Charles Kemble and Dandy Beau Brummell Question Miss Sara Baartman Before Her Evening Performance

   26   From The Morning Chronicle, 12 October 1810 p.3

   28   The Attorney General’s Submission to the King’s Bench

   30   Miss Sarah Bartmann Recalls Her Lover, a Drummer from Batavia

   32   Freak Sonnets for Lusus Naturae at Bartholomew Fair: Natural-Born, Man-Made and Counterfeit

   36   Tongue

   40   The Prime of Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Cuvier Witnessed by the Recently Made Ghost of Mademoiselle Sarah Baartman

   42   Scala Naturae // A Remix of Voltaire

   43   Sestina for Six Scientists in Search of an Ology

   45   A Psychological Study of Phenomena // A Remix of Ribot

   46   Bottom Power

   49   Mademoiselle Sarah Bartmann Performs in Duchess du Barry’s Salon of Wit and Wisdom

   50   Bottom Power Redux // Augmented with Bustle (A Poem/Play)

   54   How to Restore a Museum Artefact

   55   1810–2002

   58   Bone Fever Dream

   60   Gemsbok Trance Song of the Girl Who Made the Stars Road

   61   The Hottentot Venus Hails Botticelli’s on the High Seas

   63   !Nau // A Bloodline of Inessential Contact with Water 

      

II. Mɔse ƒe ye nye xɔme

   78   Echolalia // A Broken Rule Ghazal

   79   Ahanonko // ‘A Nameless Thing is a Vague Thing’

   80   Ŋkɔfofodo // Moulding My Drinking Name

   82   The Counterplayer Gazes In and Lives to Play the Tale

   83   Venaviwo // Xi and Xetsa

   85   Myself, When I Am Real

   86   Dzonu // Fire Things: A Brief Genealogy of the XX Chromosomes

   87   Futhawo // Rowing Song for Asie Me Tsia Dio ‘Young Boys’ Fishermen

   89   Complaint to a Flamboyant

   90   Viheheɖego // Self Portrait as a Creature of Numbers



III. After a Panoptic Ekphrasis

   93   Three Colours Black

   94   The Red Thread

   95   In the Company of Trees

   96   Foreign Matter

   99   Broken Ghazal for Pink Sheen and Gravity

   100   Call Me Balthazar

   102   Black Dog Bone Blues

   103   The $40,000 Pill

   105   Coitus, Refracted

   106   London Bone



IV. Addendum

   111   The Yoctogram Weighs In

   112   Here, This Bird

   113   Little Wing

   114   Truss

   115   How to Wear Drama

   116   Mountain Myths of the Orchid Lady’s Daughter

   117   The Last Exorcist

   119   How I Learned to Dance with the Octopus

   120   I Told It to the Sea

   125   Raft



   127   Notes

   132   Acknowledgements