Karen Downs-Barton is an award-winning neurodiverse Anglo-Romani, poet, essayist, and prose writer. After a peripatetic childhood including times in the state childcare system, she now lives in Wiltshire. Karen is the winner of the 2022 International Book & Pamphlet Competition, Cosmo Davenport-Hines prize (2021) and Creative Future silver medallist (2022). She is a PhD candidate at King’s College London, exploring identity and diaspora through minority languages and multilingualism in entertainment industries. Her poetry is widely anthologised, most recently in Wagtail: The Romani Women’s Anthology, and has appeared in translation in Spanish, Farsi, and Russian. Karen’s poems have appeared in The North, Rattle, Tears in the Fence, The High Window, Wild Court, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Riggwelter, amongst others. Her website is here.
About Didicoy, by Karen Downs-Barton
Didicoy started life as an MA project that had originally been destined to be a collection about the Silk Route. However, during the induction day a lecturer was talking about her recent book about female writers of the 1970s and was asked why one of the writers gave up writing for secretarial work. The response was ‘To put bread on the table.’ I’ve never experienced a room shrinking before but that’s exactly what it felt like. The room shrank to that one statement but not about the writer in question. It shrank to the face of my mother who did what she did to put bread on the table, and the rest is history.
Didicoy means a half Gypsy living outside the norms of Romani life, and Didicoy is the exploration of my early didicoy life living with my mother in a colourful, if precarious multiracial family. The poems focus on characters at the margins of society bringing their difference into contemporary themes of poverty, diaspora, and chosen identity. My work blends confessional poetics with lyricism and formal experimentation to find new ways to bring in people outside these experiences. The poems harness the sounds, tastes, and sensory delights of eating stolen dog biscuits from paper doilies or watching the ‘professional’ rituals of a mother and the night world she existed within and exploring what it is to belong.
From Didicoy
Of the Men who Came as Shadows in the Night
that knocked at night, whispered negotiations,
the metal rasp as the chain slid, the door opened. Or when they
slipped that other world to shadow our days?
They worked in shops Mum scurried past,
leered from corners, or spilt
like stale beer from pub doorways. Some spat
remarks, she’d do her best to explain away.
And always, at that stage,
we’d move on
to some fresh place, new start, that was the start
of the same knocks, same remarks, just recycled.
There’d be a new home, better or worse than the last,
a new school, friends to make, and a new name
to grow into, memorised to get it right
on textbooks. Mum would wait at new school gates
never quite fitting in
but trying. Once, a policeman picking up children,
laughed, said he almost didn’t recognise her
with her clothes on.
And when she said, ‘Not in front of my girls,’ I knew
we’d be moving again. We were always
running away from
something.
Dear Faye,
ask me
about the day we were caught stealing
in auntie Barbara’s dining room
her posh flat on Streatham Hill
ask me
about our guilt
as horrified faces peered under
the lace edged tablecloth
and saw an open box
of dog biscuits
between us
ask me
about the bone shapes
that smelt of Farley’s Rusks
arranged in coloured rows
on paper doilies
the pinks were a disappointment
like blown rose
petals
the blacks etched our teeth and tastebuds
with the grit of fire grate
ash
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