“Suicide Heights”: Council Estates As Sites Of Entrapment And Resistance In Hello Mum

Abstract

Council estates have been contestable social spaces of contemporary urban life in metropolitan cities like London and the marginalizing spatial experience they provide for the “working class” has been a problematic topic for many disciplines like architecture, sociology, psychology and literature. Considering the significance of space for the body in literary works, this essay analyses the black British woman writer Bernardine Evaristo’s fifth work, Hello Mum, a short-fiction, which revolves primarily around a fourteen-year-old black teenager Jerome’s tragic experience in a council estate in London. In this essay, scrutinizing Bernardine Evaristo’s novella Hello Mum and inhabiting a council estate as a challenging spatial experience, I suggest the teenager victim Jerome’s narrative reveals a kind of physical and psychological entrapment and resistance to the dominant ideology of the council estates, offers an alternative perception for the black people who are obliged to live in such marginalized places.