Leonora Brito’s not yet on A Personal Anthology! But she is a major short story writer from Cardiff! Like Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) which I read during English A Level L i t e r a t u r e  &  L o v e classes (applause to legend M. Grainne O’Riordan) Dat’s Love (1995) is named after a song – ‘Dat’s Love’ – not from Ludwig van Beethoven but 20th Century Studios ffilm Carmen Jones (1954) starring Dorothy Dandridge. In a sequence of meditations on the Welsh capital’s Tiger Bay and Docks areas where she grew up, Leonora Brito provides a black feminist-y insight into migrant working-class culture there. In ‘Moonbeam Kisses’ specifically (further citing Nat King Cole’s pleasant chanson) a nine-year-old girl arrives at a nunnery / orphanage the day after the Pope dies, encountering “fat white roses” over stone-lettering entrance and a bat-like nun who asks “‘What is it they call you? What?’”. Harsh. Behind the hostile nun is a statue of Madonna stepping on a snake (I think of Rosa-Johan Uddoh’s taxonomical ‘Black Mary’ in Practice Makes Perfect (2022) a Book Works production). Roses are a complex love symbol, and the nine-year-old girl destroys the nuns’ garden full of them that she had previously served as vinyl-player-slave for, and thus must leave. When Leonora Brito studied Cultural Studies at Cardiff University in the 1980s she wrote an essay on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) what does she opine.

From Dat’s Love and Other Stories, first published by Seren in 1995 and republished by Parthian in 2017