Tom Fasano

Caleb Femi’s family lived in a housing estate where the walkways were swabbed down every Monday. His imagination transformed the space into a wonderland. In his debut poetry collection Poor, Femi explores the North Peckham Estate, described as a “paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under / A blanket, shielded from the world.” The poem contrasts the lofty ideals of its architects and the reality of a boy found stabbed to death in a stairwell in November 2000.

The bespectacled 28-year-old from South London is astonished that readers have found the collection dark, and says it’s a celebration of fantasy. The estate he grew up on fed his imagination in unexpected ways; the mural that appeared on the wall was the catalyst for many of the things that happened on the estate. Taylor, the young boy who was stabbed, was a close friend of his, and his death was a source of guilt.

Caleb Femi — poet, filmmaker, and photographer — became London’s first young people’s laureate in 2016. His pictures provide a different perspective of urban youth and challenge the discourse about them shaped by news photography. His poems use street language and imagery to amplify how urban boys are just as delicate as raindrops. In many ways, Femi is still that little boy who found a wonderland in the smell of detergent.

After moving schools for sixth-form, his teachers taught him a love of poetry, sparing him from the fate of many of his peers. Femi studied English literature and teaching at a Tottenham comprehensive school but quit after two years due to the strict “Gove curriculum.” For someone who loved Yeats and Pope, a rigid curriculum in a government school was a bitter disappointment. In 2015, his poetry career took off, and he made film-poems to order. In 2017, he was included on the Dazed 100 list.

A young people’s laureate’s tenure coincided with the Grenfell Tower fire. “In the future,” he wrote in his diary extract from the time, “every time I write grief on my phone its autocorrect asks if I mean Grenfell: have I written Grenfell so many times that it has registered it as a familiar word, or is this how collective mourning works?”

The Covid-19 crisis has yet again drawn attention to the disadvantages of being poor and urban. He lives in a Deptford flat with a cat called Dennis Adeyemi and dreams of making films and writing poetry. Femi, a guy obsessed with laughter, leaves the shop and walks through the rain towards an underpass, with the word “FANTASTIC” printed on the back of his coat.