Kae Tempest sidles into a pub near his\u00a0house on a weekday afternoon and orders\u00a0a pint of mineral water. At his side is\u00a0Murphy, an enormous, 14-year-old alaskan malamute dog with startling blue eyes who settles down on the floor next to his master and goes to sleep. \u201cHe\u2019s all right,\u201d Tempest says. \u201cHe\u2019s very friendly. He won\u2019t even put his nose up.\u201d The rapper, performance poet, playwright and novelist has a ginger beard and is wearing Timberland boots, baggy jeans and a black hoodie over a blue-and-white striped collared shirt. His hair is hidden by a cap. Years ago, his dramatic russet hair was long, but he cropped it when he dropped the \u201cT\u201d from his first name and came out as nonbinary, a watershed moment in his gender transition. Now testosterone has deepened his voice and his journey has reached its final stage \u2013 from they\/them to he\/him.<\/p>\n
As Tempest has been famous since his late 20s, showered with accolades ranging from Mercury nominations for two of his albums (including his debut, Let Them Eat Chaos) to becoming the youngest poet ever to receive the Ted Hughes award for the epic performance poem Brand New Ancients, this odyssey has taken place in public. On his song I Stand on the Line, from his last album Self Titled, Tempest vividly describes the anxiety of having to deal with the hostility of some people\u2019s reactions to his \u201csecond puberty\u201d (\u201cOut in the limelight like, please, nobody look at me \/ I\u2019m looking for myself, all I\u2019m seeing is the bitterness \/ Coming my way when I\u2019m using the facilities\u201d). So is it a heavy burden to be such a visible trans person? \u201cIt\u2019s just my life,\u201d Tempest replies, his voice a soft south London growl, much quieter than the thrilling, declamatory style of his performances. \u201cI\u2019m just glad to be alive. How beautiful,\u201d he adds. \u201cBecause you felt like you might not be at some point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tempest\u2019s second novel, Having Spent Life Seeking, is full of characters who are also living precariously on the edge. It tells the story of Rothko, who has returned to Edgecliff, their seaside hometown, having spent 15 years in prison. Rothko\u2019s mother Meg (who gave them their nickname because as a child they used to go as \u201cred as a Rothko\u201d) is a chaotic alcoholic and user of hard drugs; their father, Ezra, is unable to contain the anger and pain within his household. Rothko finds some solace in a teenage love affair with schoolmate Dionne, but it\u2019s complicated by the pair\u2019s society-induced shame about their sexualities and Rothko\u2019s gender identity.<\/p>\n
Like Tempest, Rothko is on a voyage of self-discovery, and their pronouns change over the course of the story: they\/them for the bulk of the narrative; she\/her when being misgendered. \u201cWhen their pronouns switch in someone else\u2019s imagination or address of them, it\u2019s intentionally a bit of a misstep, you know?\u201d Tempest says. \u201cHopefully you get that feeling of missing a step on the stairs, which is how it feels.\u201d Rothko\u2019s pronouns give rise to grammatically unconventional sentences like: \u201cIt was their first heartbreak. And they\u2019d done it to themself.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s just how it feels to me,\u201d Tempest says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel like \u2018themselves\u2019.\u201d He is proud of a euphoric moment towards the end of the novel when Rothko says \u201cI\u2019m a man\u201d and is thereafter referred to as he\/him, which Tempest describes as \u201cthe power of a new pronoun \u2026 I would hope that people that have no experience of anything remotely like this will feel the relief and release for that character.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paradise by Kae Tempest at the National Theatre, London, in 2021. Photograph: Helen Murray\/ArenaPAL<\/p>\n
As readers of his 2020 book-length essay On\u00a0Connection<\/a> will know, Tempest is a fervent believer in the power of art and literature to make us experience the inner lives of people with whom we might think we have nothing in common \u2013 and also, he tells me, \u201cto make us see more clearly our own internal experience\u201d. His touchstones when writing Having Spent Life Seeking included Patrick Hamilton\u2019s Hangover Square<\/a> (\u201cYou don\u2019t spend much time with the characters, but they walk on and off and you know so much about them\u201d) and Leslie Feinberg\u2019s Stone Butch Blues, a classic but frustratingly hard-to-find queer bildungsroman about a gender nonconforming lesbian. \u201cWhen I first encountered that text it was probably the first step of my journey towards accepting myself as I really was.\u201d<\/p>\n Having Spent Life Seeking will surely take its place alongside it in the trans canon, but Tempest wants to reach a wider audience too. \u201cFor sure it\u2019s for us,\u201d he says, meaning the trans community, adding that the book\u2019s early trans and genderqueer readers have reacted with \u201clots of crying because of the recognition, the feeling that \u2018I\u2019ve never seen myself like that\u2019\u201d. But, he adds, \u201cI hope that there is something in Rothko that can resonate far beyond their gender in the same way that you can read For Whom the Bell Tolls and it doesn\u2019t matter that the characters are male or female.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markWhen I\u2019ve been\u00a0most lost, books have given me this electric sense of\u00a0reconnection<\/p>\n Having Spent Life Seeking comes a full decade after Tempest\u2019s first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, which sold well and got decent reviews, although Alex\u00a0Clark in the Guardian<\/a> noted an unevenness of tone, saying: \u201cWhen Tempest\u2019s angst-ridden lyricism is let off the leash, the effect is thrilling \u2026 But when that poetry is absent the dreary business of narrative comes to grief.\u201d Today, Tempest says that writing novels is tough as they are big and difficult to approach (\u201cIt took writing the first one to work out what the fuck to do\u201d). Though in all his work \u2013 which now also encompasses four plays, five albums and six volumes of poetry, all by the age of 40 \u2013 Tempest says that he usually learns on the job.<\/p>\n