The moment that changed Kae Tempest's life

BarcelonaDuo of literary stars at Paral·lel 62, which is becoming a new venue for major publishing events — this Wednesday even at a modest price of 6 euros—. Kae Tempest (London, 1985) presents Tota la vida buscant (Random House / L’Altra, translated by Maria-Arboç Terrades), returning to the novel almost ten years after Cuando la vida te da un martillo (Sexto Piso). And it does so with another institution of dissident literature, Virginie Despentes (Nancy, 1969). Books by both are sold at the entrance.

Barcelona has followed the unstoppable rise of this artist who has received awards as a poet, playwright, and musician. Tempest confesses "a romantic feeling" for the city, its festivals, and the audience that follows him. He also thanks a couple of times for the visit to the "isolated paradise of the world" that is the Finestres Residence in Cala Sanià, "the best gift you can give a writer". Tota la vida buscant is set precisely in an imaginary coastal town, Edgecliff, a place that combines "extreme claustrophobia, because you are on the edge of the ends of the earth and there is a sense of loneliness, loss, alcoholism, and drug problems" with "the beauty of the ocean and people who have a great time". This is where his protagonist, Rothko Taylor, returns after fifteen years locked up in prison. And this is where Kae Tempest grew up, making music in a heterosexual and male environment, without access to the queer community. "That isolated me from myself, I felt suffocated," he recalls.

Shame and creativity are two themes about which he expands because one is the answer to the other. Tempest experiences creation as a path to love and to understand, also as an escape from pain: "It's when I feel like I'm leaving my body behind and going somewhere else. Shame is very alienating, it doesn't let you live, you just want to die. Most artists I know have shame. It's a force that goes against you and you have to confront it with an equally strong force: the only thing that can face it is creativity, an act of love and life –he states–. I knew I wanted to write about the wound, a place I hadn't been before."

, repeats. "These words, so small they seem to mean nothing, are like the limestone caves under England, which became great underground cathedrals".

While writing the novel, Tempest had a motto written on the wall: "Write what you are incapable of admitting." That's why, when Despentes asks him what he would say to his young self (an exercise he does in the novel), the author tells him the same thing he tells trans adolescents and their parents when they approach him: "Keep going, please. Always forward! Keep living long enough, please, keep living because in the end things happen. Things happen. We all live inconceivable things but we've gotten this far. We are here. Keep going." Keep going, he repeats. "These words, so small they seem to mean nothing, are like the limestone caves under England, which became great underground cathedrals."