Paul Mendez, RAINBOW MILK

[0:54]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Welcome to Pub Day Tuesday where I'm featuring a few episodes of authors who have books coming out today. I hope you enjoy this one. Paul Mendez is the author of Rainbow Milk, a novel. Paul was born and raised in the black country. He now lives in London and is studying for an MA in black British writing at Goldsmiths University of London. He has been a performing member of two theater companies and worked as a voice actor appearing on audiobooks by Andrea Levy, Paul Thoreau, and Ben Okri, most recently recording Ian Wright's A Life in Football for Hachette Audio. As a writer, he has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and the Brixton Review of Books. Rainbow Milk is his debut novel. We're also celebrating Paul as part of June's Gay Pride Month. Welcome, Paul. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Rainbow Milk. Thank you very much for having me. I don't think I have ever read as effusive a letter from an editor as the one that is in the front of this arc from Margo Schickmanter. And I've never heard people rave. Anyway, tell me all about this book and how you came up with the idea for it, what the writing process was like, and what it's even about. I know. I mean, for people listening.

[2:46]Paul Mendez: Of course. Of course. My pleasure. And yes, thank you so much. So Rainbow Milk is the story of three generations from the same black British family. So the book starts with a 50 page first person narrative rendered in Jamaican Creole by a gentleman who's moved to The UK from Jamaica in the late 1950s as a member of what later came to be called the Windrush Generation of Caribbean immigrants. And he was fit and healthy, just got married, traveled with his young wife and now has a young family, but has immediately sort of come upon physical disability unexpectedly, sort of health problems. And also a real sort of shock at the realities of British life on British soil. You know, Britain always sort of taught, you know, citizens from its colonies, you know, a particular sort of it gave it gave it a particular sort of sense of its reputation, let's say, abroad. And then when you get here on British soil, you kind of realize that people are very, very different and that it's not, you know, as you thought it would be with the streets paved with gold and, you know, every man being like mister Darcy and every woman being like, you know, something as BJ lost them as well. So that sort of gives us the first 50 pages just to give us a bit of context into the sort of heritage

[4:06]Zibby Owens: that Jesse is not aware of himself. So Jesse is our main By the way, with the first 50 pages, by the way, the physical disability being blindness or semi blindness in a way, like, made it very tricky to take care of the kids. Was fact that he could barely even see where anybody was, and he's like, I think that's the little girl. I think that's your sister. Could you watch her? I mean, that is like it made me think about all these things related to parenting and that particular type of disability. Anyway, we can talk about that later. Sorry to cut you off. But okay, go No, I mean, if you want to sort of talk about that, I mean, it's a very interesting point. I did a bit of acting few years ago and one of the ways I was able to access Norman's character was

[4:46]Paul Mendez: I was living I'm childless myself, but I was living with a family at the time in South London. So a couple with a then two year old son and his toys were all over the place. You know, it's it's a family home. Like, everything's absolutely everywhere. And I kind of did a bit of method acting to help help access Norman's character. So I sort of did actually tie a blindfold around myself. And I'm not saying that this is an approximation of a blind person's experience, but it just gave me a real kind of insight into, okay, I've lived in this house for five years, I know where everything is, but as soon as I can't see anything, I'm absolutely petrified. I don't know where the stairs are, I don't know which I don't know what toys are where. I don't know which piece of clothing is where. And I kind of realized that Norman being this sort of six foot four former boxer, you know, this very sort of huge man with two tiny little toddlers sort of running around or crawling around him, you know, he would be scared of trampling them underfoot. You know, there's a moment where he trips over a telephone wire and drops and collapses and really scares the children. And so he's just very, very constantly aware of his peripherals and his, you know, where his limbs are at all times. So that was kind of an interesting sort of experience in terms of accessing his character. But, you know, it also sort of raises questions about the institutional racism that he faced being a big black man in his early 30s and being sort of, you know, physically imposing. Doctors didn't take his health condition seriously with absolutely disastrous consequences.

[6:26]Zibby Owens: So, again, that sort of gives us a little bit of background knowledge into Jesse's sort of inherited trauma and the legacy of being a descendant of the Windrush generation. And the other side effect of his blindness in in that section too was not knowing even who was being mean to him. Right? Who was, like, trampling on his garden or who was stealing flowers or whatever. You couldn't even Well, a lot of happen.

[6:48]Paul Mendez: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of things happen. So there's a net well, there's someone anyway who his neighbor claims is coming to I mean, Norman has planted a beautiful and fragrant rose garden in his front yard and also other vegetation at the back including jasmine because English neighbors are saying, oh, know, these West Indians with their smelly cooking, da da da. So, you know, everything that he does in England is calculated against being racially abused basically. But a neighbor has said that, you know, because his roses are the sort of the envy of the estate, people are approaching with secateurs to sort of take cuttings and everything. And also more sinisterly, there was a spate of, I guess, vandalism against the homes of people of West Indian origin in Britain in the late 1950s and '60s, where the initials KBW standing for keep Britain white were painted on their doors almost in a kind of, what was that story in Genesis of, you know, painting a cross on the doors of people with the plague? It sort of, you know, reminds you a little bit of that. And, you know, we had a brick through his window and, you know, he's again like, you know, a man with a wife and two small children whom he feels obliged obviously to protect. He's not doing anything to hurt anyone. He's not doing anything to upset anyone. He's exceptionally polite and kind person, hardworking person and yet he gets this treatment from people. So yeah, I mean it's kind of and all of this really only came to my attention. I'm the descendant myself of the Windrush generation. And so for American listeners who aren't aware of the Windrush generation, they're so named after the ship SS Empire Windrush that docked on the 06/22/1948 at Tilbury on the South Coast Of England, bringing four ninety two mostly male, mostly Jamaican people, some of whom were returning servicemen, others of whom were coming to The UK for the first time because that was when The UK changed its laws to say that all Commonwealth citizens were now British citizens and that they could come and live and work in The UK and help the post war effort. And it's since been uncovered by, particularly a British Black British historian, David Olisoga, that that invitation was only supposed to have been extended to Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand former Commonwealth members, essentially white people who could come live and work, marry English girls and be absorbed into the population. It's as soon as you bring in, I mean Britain had such a terrible sort of, well, created such a terrible problem for itself with American GIs, American black GIs coming to help the war effort, staying in towns, meeting English women and creating brand babies. That was considered to be a big problem in The UK and something that the government at the highest level were trying to eradicate. And so now they'd sort of created this, again, so called problem for themselves by not stating specifically. And this isn't, I mean, they couldn't really do what they sort of condemned Nazi Germany for doing during the war and say, you know, and be specifically racist. They couldn't do that. Know, people at Winston Churchill were sending, like, frantic memos through the Houses of Parliament saying, oh my god, like, what do we do? We've just sort of, you know, created a monster, and now this whole ship carrying four ninety two mostly black men are coming to work here and live here. And that's, you know, that that was the start of, you know, what we call the Windrush generation. My grandparents belong to that. They came here, all four of them, from Jamaica in the late nineteen fifties. And because the Windrush scandal broke in the news at the end of twenty seventeen, so descendants of the Windrush generation who had traveled here as children on their parents' passports, their landing cards had been sort of burned back in 2010, think it was, by the home office who then went back to these same people and said, Oh, could you prove that you can live here legally? And of course, nobody can prove the whole time that they've been here, know, they can't sort of produce a receipt from 1972, for instance, you know. And so these people were being deported. They were having their benefits taken away. They were having their they couldn't apply for jobs. They couldn't do anything and people died, you know? So this scandal broke towards the end of twenty seventeen and got me really thinking about my grandparents' generation, what their lives must have been like at that time, moving to this like completely racist country with absolutely no sort of structure for them to succeed in any way. You know, my grandmother came here as a single woman. She didn't meet her husband, my grandfather, who apparently is from the same parish in Jamaica but they didn't know each other. They met here. I mean, would it be like for a young black woman who's left two children from a previous relationship back home hoping to send for them? You know, they would have been this Windrush scandal. They would have been asked to prove that they've been here for such and such time, you know. So because my grandparents have always been very circumspect about their stories and I think you know reasonably so because of the trauma attached, you know, they've never really been able to speak about it and now they're all you know dying. Only have one grandparent left and she's in a care home now. So What about the children they left behind? Did they ever come or what happened to them? The children they left behind. So one so on my maternal side, the grandmother I've just been talking about, her son, her eldest son died sometime in the early 80s I believe. None of us ever met him and the other child now lives in New York and we sort of have like a sort of you know every few years kind of telephone conversation, you know, she used to call my grandmother's house and we'd all sort of take it in turns to sort of speak for two minutes. I mean, what do you say to someone who you've never really seen and, you know, you've never been to New York, she's never been to the West Midlands. So it's kind of like, you know, what do you say? And she sends a really lovely message across at my grandmother's funeral. But that's kind of it, you know, there's no real kind of engagement there. And then on the other side, my paternal grandmother also had two children. She left two sons behind in Jamaica, moved over here and started a new family. And they've both grown up and had children of their own and I think are both doing very well last I heard. But still, know, it's your mother who's leaving you to live with your grandmother or your aunts or something, you're six, seven years old. She's like, know, give it a couple of years while I settle down and I promise I'll send for you. But because, you know, so Norman who introduces the story in Rainbow Milk is based on my paternal grandfather who did go blind and who got sent back to Jamaica because my grandmother couldn't look after him and work and look after two new children, So that's a really sort of devastating situation. As I'm sure as a mother, you can absolutely appreciate leaving two children behind and then having to make a decision about whether you get to send for them or not. Or maybe that situation, maybe that decision is not in your power because you haven't got the money, haven't got the circumstances, you haven't got the infrastructure, you haven't got the people around you, support network. So yeah, very difficult. But you know I got to meet them, those two uncles. They came over to England in sort of around 1991 and I lived around the corner from my grandmother so I got to spend quite a lot of time with them and it was really funny because they were really into country and western music. And so like one of them gave me this like tape and bought me a tape player to sort of play these sort of country and western songs on. And I was just like, okay. But, like, I thought that you I thought that you'd be into reggae or something. But, like, you know Yeah. No luck. Me sort of putting my expectations on them as Jamaican men. But this, you know, this is my heritage. This is my story. And I'm not empowered, you know, black kids in Britain growing up are not really empowered to include their personal narratives and heritage in the sort of bigger picture of what British history is. We don't learn about these things in school. We don't learn about the Windrush generation. I mean, that's something that's sort of, I suppose, been introduced during Black History Month over the past ten or fifteen years, but I certainly didn't have any knowledge when I was younger. And I'm sort of, I guess, in a minority in that sense because I know other young Black people who had a supplementary school education on a Saturday, for instance, where groups of black mothers and fathers would open up their homes on a Saturday and have lots of kids around and they'd talk about their heritage, they'd sort of be a homework club. Sometimes it would be sort of connected to the church as well. But again, I was completely outside of all of that because of, you know, my parents being Jehovah's Witnesses and growing up in a very white working class community where our blackness had to sort of be buried, I think for survival reasons. And that's one of the things that I go into with Jesse's narrative which comprises the vast bulk of the book. So Jesse is speaking, well it's a third person narrative but he's sort of speaking if you like at the beginning of the twenty first century as a teenager devout Jehovah's Witness. His mother married a white man when Jesse was sort of four years old. He's never known his birth father and he's just been raised basically to sort of treat his blackness as a disability or as a chronic condition that you sort of manage. The main narrative we feel of your life should follow that of the sort of the mainstream white sort of leaning towards right wing kind of narrative. And so he's kind of been taught and he's really absorbed everything that he's taught, he's really internalized everything. But he's gay and that is something that is absolutely anathema to his religion. And it's, you know, something that he gets punished for. He gets ostracized completely from his organization. And so Rainbow Milk, the novel really is a story of overcoming indoctrination, de indoctrination yourself in the way that you feel is the only way to do that. Jesse does it through sex work and through immersing himself in the things that he's had to suppress for his whole life. And it is through the people he meets and the sort of the difficult situations that he puts himself in that sort of, I suppose, inspire love and care in others that helps him to create a new sort of chosen family and also to then have the safety and comfort to be able to look back at his heritage and find out who he is and where he's from and yeah, who his family really are. 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[20:55]Zibby Owens: Sorry. That was a very long answer. That was great. Well, our time here is up, but thank you very much. Wow. Well, that was a great answer because, gosh, this is why I love doing these types of conversations because I wish I had known how much of that came from a place of personal experience versus you know, it just infuses the characters with even more meaning. Imagining this as your grandfather versus just, you know, the man who's, you know, in the garden who, you know, feels less than for being a stay at home dad essentially at a time when that was, like, not accepted at all as a as, like, a thing and having people even give him a hard time for that. Right? Like, oh, too bad your wife has to go out and work. And yet he's like, you know, I'm trying to, like, stay live here. The fact that all of that was from I mean, I don't it's just amazing. And by the way, your history, you should be a history professor, like, in your spare time. Because the way you speak and your obvious, like, extensive knowledge, like, it's very, impressive. I I wanna let you should do, little workshops or something.

[21:56]Paul Mendez: Not that you Thank you. I mean, there's there's a lot that we're learning from, you know, we have some brilliant historians to of Kadler now. I mean, you know, it's a huge difference, think, between British, Black British culture and African American culture because Black British culture and history has only really sort of played out here in a kind of, you know, in terms of big numbers of Black British people living in this country and sort of being activists and sort of resisting and creating change. That's only really been since the Windrush generation seventy years, you know. Of course, there've been black people living in Britain for a lot longer than that, you know, since the eighteenth century in large numbers and sort of even going back to Roman times there were Africans living in The UK. But where it's different from African American history is that's four hundred years where black and white people have lived together, you know systematically and you know you had this constant sort of dialogue of race relations in The US. You know the way that civil rights kind of unfolded here, the way that Black Lives Matter unfold when I say here I mean in The US, the way that Black Lives Matter unfolded in The US. All other sort of diasporas where black people live all over the world look to America because that's where white and black people have lived together for over four hundred years. So for us, it's very different. And you know, it's been a case of, you know, who is empowered. I mean, you know, it takes and it has taken several generations to find scholars. Even now in big twenty twenty one, there are only half a dozen Black British literature professors in this country, in the whole country, you know. So it's just a case of you know who has the ability, who has the confidence to take on the history and the historiography. I'm a student of Black British literature and I chose to do that because for me it's a radical thing to be taught Black history from Black voices in this country. You know, in America it's different because you have HBUs. You know, we don't have that, you know, we don't have black middle class neighborhoods or anything. You know, we have black working class neighborhoods that have since been gentrified out of existence. So, you know, the onus is on us now to sort of try to absorb the knowledge as well. You know, it's me. Am still, the history is still alive in me and still evolving in me. I'm third generation, you know. So if it's not me, then who? And again, that's part of the reason for writing Rainbow Six certainly in terms of some of the more sort of essayistic moments, let's say, in the novel where I think I sort of lost control a little bit and sort of started ranting about certain aspects of the experience. But, no, I'm I'm really glad that you that it's struck a chord with you. For sure. Well, how did you even approach writing this? I mean, I feel like

[24:56]Zibby Owens: just tell me how this became a book. I mean, you obviously have so many big ideas and can speak so eloquently and write so eloquently about all of it. It's like how do you even choose where to begin to make the biggest impact?

[25:08]Paul Mendez: Again, thank you. So it's it's I should stress that Rainbow Milk is fiction. You know, the story of Norman may be based on my paternal grandfather, but I knew so little about him, but I had to create most of it from scratch. So I did a lot of research, did a lot of method acting, as I've said, and, you know, managed to be able to sort of, I don't know, just sort of create this environment around it. I'm from the Black Country, which is an area in the West Midlands that for two or three hundred years, basically the workshop of the world. It's sort of the seat of the industrial revolution, chain making, coal mining, glass making, etcetera, etcetera. Still 60% of the world's chains for ships are made in Cradier Heath, which is the next bar along from where I was born. So it's a place of generation after generation after generation of heavy industry where kids don't really need to go to school because, and they don't really need to invest in an education because they know that they're going to follow their forefathers into those jobs. But that sort of ended in the early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher's government that slowed well, quite quick actually, deindustrialization of the country. And so that's like a historical monument now. And that was something I really sort of threw myself into researching in order to create this environment around Norman so that his little story, individual story could really sort of stay within that sort of great big cloud, that great big black cloud of heavy industry. At the same time as the decline of heavy industry was happening, you've got the wind just generation coming in and taking jobs. And so the white working class people here started to rise up and say, from the jungle coming to you know have sex with our wives and take our jobs you know. So you know you had things like or people like Enoch Powell the conservative MP who made a speech to, I guess, a council in Birmingham where he said in ten years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man sort of whipping up racial tension. Ten years before that there'd already been riots, you know. So you sort of factor all of these things in, you sort of, you know, you create something that's part of the real history. But in terms of Jesse's story, it's much closer to mine in terms of we're both from the black country, we both grew up as Jehovah's Witnesses, we're both gay, we both were disfellowshipped from religious community and both became sex workers and both became writers. And the emotional trajectory of Jesse's story is very similar to what I've been through. But I have a black father who's always been there. I created the stepfather character in order to sort of have an easier access to the discussion on black masculinity can be, I guess, trampled on by white masculinity and by the sort of the white patriarchy and it being the sort of status quo, I suppose, of, I guess, survival and success and education and all of those other things that we judge people on. And, you know, once I'd sort of created his character, that was a real way of stepping away from myself. You know, I've been through lots of trauma, lots of difficulties in life. You know, it's interesting I was speaking to you as, you know, the moms don't have time to read podcasts because motherhood is a very kind of fascinating subject for me. And it was something that I had to sort of minimize my attention on in terms of the novel because I have a mother and I have a relationship with her. That's very difficult, but I couldn't write about that. I had to write about something else. I had to sort of create a mother character and write about her and write about Jesse through her or write about her, sorry, through Jesse. And again, the emotional trajectory might be the same but I had to do something different because my mother's alive and I don't want to offend her. She's a mother, she has her reasons for the way she raises her children. That's not for me to say or to judge, you know, but what I can do is show how a mother withdrawing her love for her child can impact that child forever, not just during childhood but deep into adult years, you know, that day where you're feeling bad, you're depressed, you're upset like that nothing's going right and you know, who's the one person you wanna call and she doesn't respond, you know, that's really hard to take. And the only way really for me to deal with something like is to write about it. You know, may have a little bit more money now, but like back then when I was writing, you know, I couldn't afford a therapist. So it all comes out in writing. So I just had a lot of material. I had a lot of sort of personal sort of trauma based stuff to sort of get through and it starts out as a memoir, a sort of fragmentary memoir but my publisher encouraged me to write fiction because A) she could see that I wasn't saying certain things for fear of upsetting people and B) I was just reopening wounds and it wasn't doing me any favors. Know certainly not, I mean it's cathartic in the first instance in terms of actually just getting it out but actually doing it for an audience is another thing altogether because then you're performing your trauma and that's not good. That doesn't help anyone. So she's like you know I'll give you a book deal but write a novel. You know, same everything but just write a novel. So I did and I kept it in first person and I was still re opening the wounds. So five months late, I said, I'm really sorry but I have to start again and rewrite this in third person. I have to try it at least. So I did and I immediately sort of felt the difference because I wasn't me anymore. And it's a really simple technique just to sort of switch from I am to they are But it just made all the difference because I wasn't actually sort of in the body of the character anymore. I was a camera on their shoulder and I was able to sort of see the same things and retell the same kind of story from that perspective. But it was, I was detached from it. I was almost playing God with my own story and it completely freed me and it became a joy. And I was able to do the same research that I did for Norman, but transferred to the late nineties and early two thousands black country post de industrialization where, you know, you just got basically loads of derelict buildings and loads of people unemployed and kids starting to try harder at school, but not all of them. And then transfer that to early twentieth century London. And you know London has changed so much you know since I've lived here. So it was a really interesting exercise to be able to sort of position us back in that time. And again it becomes like historical. So yeah, that's.

[31:59]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Well, obviously we couldn't talk for like another, you know, three hours about all this and I'm sorry that But we are gonna wow, thank you. Thank you for telling me the whole backstory. I'm telling you, you should do like a master class or something. I'd like love Well, I've been talking about this novel for a year now, so I think I'm Okay. Sorry. Well have lots of practice. Okay. No. I love it. It's great. Even still. Alright. Well, Paul, thank you so much, and thanks for bringing rainbow milk into the world. And I will just say for everybody at home, do not try to parent with a blindfold on. It will not work at all. Take your blindfold on. Rainbow bookshelves anyway. Yeah. Exactly. There we go. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Zibby. Take Take care. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.