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Vanessa Kisuule on fandom, fame and finding Neverland
Vanessa Kisuule is an unreliable narrator.
The good news is that in the former Bristol City poet’s debut non-fiction title, Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom, her readers are told this from the get-go.
In the author’s note at the beginning of the book, Vanessa explains that “frankly, it’s fun to make things up”.
is needed now More than ever
In Neverland, published by Canongate on Thursday, Vanessa explores her love for Michael Jackson, how the lives of celebrities often mirror our own and the complexities of parasocial relationships.
The book’s original title was Human Nature (after the famous song by Jackson) but Vanessa and her team ultimately decided on Neverland, alluding to Jackson’s infamous Neverland Ranch which from the 80s to early noughties, served as his private amusement park.
In 2005, Jackson faced a highly publicised criminal trial following accusations of child sexual abuse at Nerverland. He was found not guilty.
Vanessa Kisuule says she wants readers to feel “discombobulated” after reading Neverland – photo: Canongate
Vanessa said of the title: “There’s a real poetic nature to it. It nods to Michael, but I think it also speaks to the ultimate tension of striving for a utopia we can never reach. As soon as the publisher suggested it, my brain opened up 60 tabs.”
The book, which took four years to write (“I was supposed to write it in one”), is written in Vanessa’s characteristic poetic style.
Beautiful phrases like “not one of us can claim to firmly elide the mini-dramas of our own making” guide readers across the page.
Some fictional anecdotes are included throughout to stretch the book’s “capacity to places it couldn’t have traversed otherwise”
As Vanessa said when I caught up with her recently at a cafe on Gloucester Road, her intention is for Neverland to be a “discursive piece of work”.
As Vanessa explains in Neverland, during the height of Michael Jackson’s career “you could walk the entire surface of the earth and fail to find a person who did not know his name and his music”.
Michael Jackson wasn’t supposed to be mortal. Yet, on June 25 2009, a few days before he was due to kick off his ‘This Is It’ residency at London’s O2 Arena, he died.
It felt like the world had stopped. I remember watching BBC News footage of people crying in the streets.
For weeks, it seemed it was all any news channel or newspaper could talk about.
I remember wondering whether this was what it felt like for my parents’ generation when news of Princess Diana died in 1997.
The man behind Billie Jean, Thriller, Man in the Mirror, Remember the Time, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin and so many more hits had seemed untouchable.
It seemed improbable he would die of an inadvertent drug overdose administered by a ‘negligent’ doctor.
Vanessa Kissule says that when Michael Jackson died, “nothing felt real” – photo: Marie-Hélène Lachaud
In her book, Vanessa describes the day of Jackson’s death as a day when “nothing felt real.”
This is because, as a child, Vanessa was “obsessed” with him. His songs were inescapable. She watched all of the music videos. Read all of the biographies (official and unofficial). And rewatched the 1992 mini-series The Jacksons: An American Dream over and over again.
As she writes in Neverland: “Obsession is a hunger… like addiction, it creates giddy feedback loops of euphoria and remorse.”
While Vanessa admits it can “feel a little regressive” to write a book about something she was obsessed with as an “eight-year-old, when (she) speak(s) to other people about the things they want to write about, it tends to be things that the seed was sown for when they were a kid or teenager… those points where you’re still working out who you might be”.
The former Bristol city poet says there are no “easy conclusions to draw” from her book – photo: Ailsa Fineron
In Neverland, Vanessa talks about the highs and lows of parasocial relationships – the one-sided relationships we have with media figures where we feel we know them, even though we truly don’t.
As Vanessa explained: “One could argue that important gap between a celebrity and their audience is one that we’re always trying to bridge as fans. We want to get closer.
“We want to feel like maybe we have a more intimate relationship to that celebrity than other fans…So, it becomes competitive, right?
“And goodness knows what that’s about. I’m not a psychologist but I have attempted to dig into some theories around what sparks this kind of behaviour. And how that then becomes a mutually destructive cycle.”
On the one hand, celebrities encourage their fans to feel close to them.
As Vanessa pointed out, some don’t even call their fans ‘fans’, instead calling them “family or my community or my crew which is all just a commodification of these notions of belonging and togetherness.
“They’re exploiting the fact that a lot of people don’t feel like they belong to anything, or that there’s people they can relate to.”
On the other hand, some fans take it way too far – in the book, Vanessa writes of a fan who spent thousands of pounds on surgery to try and look like Jackson and ended up looking “more like an underslept Joan Jett”.
Still, while obsession can often become unhealthy it is a fact of our society that young people often grow obsessed with celebrities.
Over the past century, for example, it has seemed like a rite of passage for teenage girls to fall in love with members of boy bands, whether they be in the Beatles, the Backstreet Boys or One Direction.
Can having a childhood obsession with a celebrity be a good thing? Perhaps.
Vanessa pointed out, for example, that she talks “in the book about celebrities I encountered at the right time in life to really be able to own aspects of myself I felt were ugly or unruly”.
“So, I mentioned people like Grace Jones and Janelle Monae and Nina Simone, who represented notions of Blackness that deviated from the dominant MTV Base style of Black femininity.”
And perhaps broader societal obsession with celebrity can also prompt us to reflect on wider problems within our society.
As Vanessa writes in the book, while we “deify” celebrities, “they are just like us in their foibles and failures”.
Writing this book helped Vanessa reconcile with her past adoration of Michael Jackson, despite the accusations of child sexual abuse that torture his legacy.
She said: “I don’t want anyone to feel like there’s easy conclusions to draw. I really go in and talk about the repercussions of abuse, not just when it’s celebrities who are the perpetrators, but also people within our own social circles.
“I wanted to think seriously about how we address our collective responsibility and complicity in this… even if it didn’t happen and he is innocent, which I don’t think he was.
“And when I say this, know that my entire life I couldn’t bear the thought the allegations were true…the book is about what it would mean to really address that and imagine a world where things didn’t have to transpire the way they did.
“There are lots of factors to consider. You know, there was his abusive father.
“Another factor is how fame creates the perfect incubator for unhealthy money and power dynamics. And another is how the isolation and exceptionalism of fame creates ripe conditions for anti-social behaviour and attitudes.”
Even if we might be able to empathise with a celebrity accused of abusing others, should we still engage with their art?
Should we listen to Chris Brown despite the Rihanna assault? Should we delete I Believe I Can Fly from our Spotify playlists, following R Kelly’s imprisonment for sex crimes?
“It’s so personal because it really comes down to whether it makes you feel ill at ease to listen to the music,” Vanessa told me.
“This book isn’t about telling people which instances it’s acceptable to listen and which it isn’t.”
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Vanessa added: “I’m not interested in any of that because I don’t think it really gets to the heart of how we fix this. How do we make a better society?
“How do we hold each other to account rigorously but lovingly? Because I don’t think we make people better by just punishing them, condemning them, or judging them, because we all play our part.
“I think all of us have seen people do awful things and pretended we didn’t see it. It’s uncomfortable, but a good first step is for all of us to own that. It’s so much bigger than whether you should listen to this or that artist.
“It’s a book that hopefully is going to give people stuff to think about long after they’ve read the last page.”
On Friday, Vanessa is holding a book launch at The Station in partnership with Gloucester Road Books. For tickets and more information, visit www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/whats-on/the-station/fri-13-sep-vanessa-kisuule-neverland-launch
Main photo: Gloucester Road Books
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