What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
I’ve been noticing how my work/ being has been reactive. There’s been a sense of scarcity and time urgency that’s been guiding my thoughts and actions. There’s been a hopelessness. Because some incidents are out of my control but which have impacted me. There’s been feelings of not being appreciated, feeling a lack of trust and working without purpose, moving away from my core values and moral compass.
I might have been using food or drink to numb my way through the shit. Through the ‘work’, not allowing myself to feel and be present. Really present to all the feels.
Do you feel me?
I know I need to take a step back and really look at the life I’ve been living. This is the only life I have and cannot be relived. I have a deep desire to change the system. To abolish the system and live otherwise.
And yet in order to change the system, I have to change my life, how I live my life. The way / how I live has to reflect the way/ how I want the world to be.
What does this mean in reality?
How I am just as much as what I do within the system will have an effect on system change. I have to be living my life with intention and purpose. Making sure I’m living my values, that I’m not compromising my integrity. That each decision I make is coming from that place of love and trust and hope.
That I’m not shutting down but open to togetherness but also trusting my gut that when I say ‘no’ it’s not from a place of malice but from a place of capacity and boundaries.
I’m learning, I’m sharing and I’m growing. Alone and in collaboration.
And I’m feeling and shifting into the practice and recognition that this is coming from a place of love and care rather than exhaustion and pain.
Small steps. Small acts. Small makes up the large. Small scales up to large.
I’ve got to be practicing the world I want to see now in my own life. Daily. Practice.
Love not hate.
Cooperation not competition.
Conversation rather than condemnation.
More care less harm.
More listening less violence.
The turn towards Mother Nature rather than against her.
A recognition in the value and worth of every human being regardless of race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, sexuality, body type and body and mind abilities.
This is why my favourite pattern within nature, apart from the wave, is the spiral. Again and again, experience shows me how we may feel that we are going around in circles doing the same things, making the same mistakes and never learning or moving forward.
But I beg to differ. I believe life’s journey is a spiral. Each year we go around, and it may feel as if we’re not moving. We’re not making any progress or making our mark. But I see it as coming back around over similar track but we have changed. Through the movement of time and experiences and knowledges, we’ve changed since the last time we were in this spot. It’s not the same spot. Things have shifted. and so we’ve changed. We’re not right back at the same point but moved further into the spiral. Not in a hierarchal way, , ascending or even descending, but more of a going deeper, more connected and centred movement of the journey.
Each rotation in the cycle, in the spiral throws up more learning and more insight that if we’re paying attention we can use on our life’s journey with more consciousness, connection and joy.
I share this because I’ve just recognised how I’ve moved through the spiral this year to come to further understandings and wisdom.
This time last year, preparing for anti-racism facilitation, I was reading What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri.
It was from reading this slim volume of wisdom that I fell into ‘solidarity’ is needed within the anti-racism movement. In fact I started using a anti-racism is anti-capitalism. Solidarity between oppressed and marginalised groups in society is the way forward.
I went on a journey from here, maybe a spiralling into despair, as I searched for a group or organisation to be a member of, in solidarity across different sections of society. I was looking into the communist party, unions, anti-racism organisations, trying to find a place where I could belong and be in solidarity with others.
In my search, I found racism and sexism, individuals and groups still perpetuating the racial capitalist system. Still working with hierarchies and the unconscious bias that they were better than me, than they knew more than me therefore should control me.
I become demoralised and retreated. I put away my radical thoughts and ideas, convincing myself that it was better to be alone and true to my ideals than compromise and waste my time explaining or highlighting blind spots to so-called comrades.
And then these part few days, solidarity has raised its head again but through a different door. Through the door of abolitionism.
Ours is a fight against powerful systems of violence and terror.
In recognising the interconnectedness of systems of state violence, abolition can be the basis of a new solidarity: one that acknowledges specific experiences of violence in particular communities, whilst building a unified, internationalist resistance.
Abolition doesn’t understand the concept of solidarity as an airy-fairy call for different oppressed groups to ‘just get along’. Solidarity is a vital strategic response to the prevalence and ubiquity of state violence.
Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean
As we have witnessed in the recent council elections, with the surge in the popularity of Reform. This isn’t because this party has set out a manifesto of policies that will solve the issues of poverty, unemployment, economic crisis, the state of the NHS, the policing in our schools and stop crime such as rapes and murders. No this party, it just playing out the age out trick of creating the ‘enemies within’. The ‘enemies within’ can carry all the responsibility for what’s wrong within British society today. The immigrants, the refugees, the gangs, the nasty women, the people with darker skin who are innately hardwired for crime. The general public, usually predominately working class white people, can blame others, other oppressed and marginalised people for all the woes of society. Smokescreens and mirrors, instead of people coming together, across class, race, gender, sexuality, religious lines, in solidarity and challenging racial capitalism and state control and violence which are geared towards keeping the majority of people in poverty at each other’s throats instead. While a few, usually white cis-gendered men, retain wealth, control and power.
I say Reform, but the present ‘Labour’ government operates the same way. They’re all apparatus of the State working to keep power and control through violence and terror in the hands of the few.
So for them the problem is not the historic experience of racism and the legacies of slavery and colonialism: it’s Black ‘gangsters’ on our streets. It’s not disinvestment from and neglect of working class communities: it’s Syrian migrants in our hospitals. It’s not military and imperial domination of vast swathes of the world: it’s Muslim extremists in our schools. Constructed ‘enemies within’ like these provide a constant justification for the use and expansion of state violence in order to maintain control; they tie people’s lived experience of the world to divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of ordinary people. – Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean
I see the value of solidarity now, in building power in the direction of marginalised groups because it weakens the State’s power and control which is based on divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of everyday people. The marginalised and oppressed.
Now maybe if I had this knowledge, last year, cycling and spiralling looking for my tribe, I might have stuck it out a little longer. Allowed our differences and bias to take a back seat because I believed we were working together across solidarity lines. Maybe.
This year though, with another trip around the sun under my belt, and another spiral deeper into my learning, I believe my solidarity within these groups would have still faltered as within and outside of these groups because they are not spurred on from the foundations upwards and onward with an abolitionist revolutionary thought and praxis.
I see now that these groups are looking toward reform rather than abolition. They are satisfied with tinkering with the edges. Gaining small concessions rather than a total overhaul. It’s like asking for and being satisfied with a more comfortable prison cell as a demonstration of change in how the State handles inmates instead of defunding/ abolishing the prison industrial complex all together.
I see that now as I continue to spiral towards consciousness, again and again. Onwards.
Our ability to reframe failure into something that aligns with growth is key. When I fail at my attempts to execute an idea, I now have more information and I can use that to move forward. If I allow myself to feel defeated and tell myself that I’m not very good at this, then failure becomes a toxic thought that limits me and ensures I do not grow. – Cheryl Taves
Today I am 150 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Ego speaking here, but I’m pretty proud of this achievement. It demonstrates to me that I can be consistent.
These 150 days are evidence that I can change the script. I can change the narrative from not being consistent enough in my art practice, hells bells in anything really.
I can change the narrative into something more true, more closer to my reality. I can change the narrative, I am changing the narrative toward recognising that I can be consistent.
My consistency muscle is being exercised, challenged and stretched.
With 150 days of turning up daily for my practice, I can quite rightly say, my consistency muscle has been strengthened.
I’ve been coming later and later to my creative sketchbook practice this month.
It’s day 123. 123 days since I started this practice of play within my creative sketchbook. Daily.
This piece tonight is significant because it chimes with my word of the year/ focus of the year being AFROSURREAL.
The right now. Capturing the now.
AFROSURREAL has been bubbling below the surface all year so far. I’m thinking it’s about time to share my musings and thinkings here in a mini series of posts.
Everything is overlapping and I’m fixing to gain some clarity knowing fine well that the practice of writing it out will only throw up more questions than answers.
The Matterings of (ordinary) Black Life is the practice. The push back against the colonial, historical categorisation of black people as subhuman. As stereotype as no life beyond the construct.
Right now. Black life. Black aliveness.
I’m living a/my reality which isn’t acknowledged or if is then it’s challenged/ denied/ erased.
It’s important to storytell, mythmake, historicise and archive within these liminal spaces. Centre the margins where these matterings happen.
Through the reconstruction and recalibration, healing and reparative processes challenge the exclusions and colonial impulses to conquer, control and exploit.
Expect to read more around AFROSURREAL and the overlaps with my other obsessions as through my research and readings and writings, I attempt to come to some understanding of myself and my creativity, moving backward and forwards between the now and beyond.
I applied to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant mid 2025. It was unsuccessful.
Undeterred, I resubmitted it under the project grant scheme. I was notified of being successful just before Christmas 2025.
Practicing Creative Fugitivity is its name, and it involves researching fugitive practice. It also involves reading in community Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.
A study circle of women of the global majority.
When did you first learn that you were a non-human?
The question that opens the first chapter of the text Fugitive Feminism.
A question that hits me in my gut with its open, blatant honesty and curiosity.
A question which niggles at a truth that I’ve not wanted to face up to as it would mean that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate, prove, live up to an unattainable category of being human.
Human as a category was never created to include someone like me within it.
Human = Whiteness
Human v Non-Human
You can’t have the light without the dark.
All constructs to create hierarchies. A hierarchy where white, EuroAmerican, able bodied, middle class, cis-gendered, college educated and suburban men reign supreme. Superior.
Conceptual Other. No Humans Involved. The Lack of the Human.
Black women. Outside. Out Outside.
Our exclusion determines the borders/ boundaries of the human.
But consider this …
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.
Combahee River Collective
Where the excitement lies for me and others, is once we realise that Black women cannot be human, then with the support of this book in community, let’s consider what if ‘human’ cannot and should not be reclaimed?
Speculate. Speculation. Speculative.
How might we divest from the human?
That the non-human Other actually decentres the human. Move beyond human to something otherwise.
Something else.
Becoming ( something else).
Thinking of how to be/ how to live beyond the binary of human v non-human could produce the means of improving our community/society/our planet.
Centring the human ( v non-human/ othering all else) has got us into the shit we’re facing now in terms of ecological disaster.
Finding a way to decentre the human, divest from what this concept / construction means and how it operates has to be the way forward.
Fugitive Feminism is the doorway into another way of being. A portal into an alternative world built upon the Black Feminist politics of liberation.
The path ahead is not clear or defined. It’s slippery and ambiguous. It’s experiential and experimental. Yet full of possibilities. Caring not harmful possibilities.
Speculative. Suggestive. Spacious.
And it starts and continues with the act of refusal. Refusal of the way things are right now.
Refusal of being defined by others to fit into their definition of humanity ( whiteness).
Refusal of being extracted and exploited for the benefits of a few.
Refusal of being non-human.
Refusal of being outside of humanity.
Refusal of the whole concept of human/whiteness/ fascist.
Refusal of these limitations when i, we, i and i can be something else beyond humans.
the zine that documents the zines I want to create moving forward into 2026
I’ve just been over on my Patreon page sharing about the first zine of the year. Do you want to know what I shared about it?
Okay, I’ll tell yo here too!
A few years ago, I gave myself the challenge of creating a zine a month. Check back using the ‘zine’ tags and no doubt you’ll find them, still there ready to download and peruse.
This year, I vaguely set myself this challenge again, to create a zine a month and share it here. I think. As I’m still in the process of committing. But last night, at a Zinester Sanctuary that I’m creating witha fellow fugitive, I had the time to create my first zine of the year. See the video above.
I looked back at one of my zines from my first challenge, this was a zine about the zines I wanted to create. I looked back to see if this list of zines with illustrations were still zines I wanted to create.
After this reflection, I then set forth to create the zine that hopefully is the blueprint for 2026 creations.
In the video what you are seeing is the front cover stating that ‘Abolition is a Global Struggle’ with FREE PALESTINE but also the caveat that this has to be completed ‘with patience and care’.
The next page with a wheel of a VW Campervan and the text ‘ like a bird flying into’, is a nod towards my love of nature and how she will always appear in my zine creating, some way or another.
The next double spread with an image of two little girls standing on the beach, myself and my estranged sister and the text reads, ‘me in all my fucked up glory’. This signifies the task of creating perzines, using the format to explore my life stories.
On the green page with a roughly drawn book in black pencil refers to my desire to dive deep into my black studies, studying blackness as fugitivity, fugitive spaces. ‘You will find comfort in blackness’ the text reads to accompany this intention.
The next page is a quote from Octavia E Butler, from Parable of the Sower which states, ‘All that you touch you change, all that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.’ This was a small print I received from a printmaker friend called Theresa Easton.
The second double spread, because I hadn’t finished yet with my intentions (so who says you can’t add in another page?) is a recognition of my word of the year which is AFROSURREAL. I’ll be exploring what this means further throughout the year here and on my website.
This is partnered with a splash of purple/ mauve as the text reads, ‘ in mauve there is a quiet power.’ This is a reminder for myself to use my zines to share my poetry. My voice is my power. This was how I started making small zines, booklets before my first collection of poetry, Family Album was published. Because I was reading at all these gigs and people would come up afterwards and say where can I buy your work and I had no where to point them to. So I got creative and created these little zines , one dedicated to the poems I’d written about my daddy and one other dedicated to my mummy, and sold them for £1 each. I’d forgotten about them until I just wrote about them here now. Don’ you just love the creative process?
And then moving towards the end of this first zine of 2026, which apparently has been announced as the year of the zine – 2026, we’ll see what happens there as zines could become if not already commercialised and co-opted and become unrecognisable from their origins ( which I’ll be exploring and sharing further about here), there is a polaroid photo of myself smiling. This was taken last year at a Outdoor Citizen gathering, and these were taken to put on the wall with details about ourselves so we could be putting names to face,s be recognised within the crowds. This image is here with the title ‘fugitive sista’ as a reminder of who I {BE} but also who I {BE}coming through my continuing thoughts and praxis around fugitivity.
The final page with the outline of a goddess in black pencil and spiral within her gut/ womb and the text, ‘ Today I will praise. I will praise The Black Woman.’ Today ,tomorrow and always, I will praise the Black Woman. I support this praise with my continuing reading and practicing of Black Feminist thought and praxis. This is my foundation always.
The back cover ends with another sticker and this time it states, ‘ From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Again reminding myself that I do this work, explore my creativity and share whatever comes up within a constantly changing context of struggles, struggles for liberation, peace, justice, self-determination and love.
2026, the year of the zines. Let’s make it the year of the zines that give voice to the struggles near and far , struggles for liberation, peace, justice, self-determination and love.
By taking time to acknowledge ourselves for what we have done, we recognize that we’re more capable than we thought, we’re doing more than we were aware of, and we’re making incremental progress in our skill building. When we allow a space for positive thoughts and feelings, we find we feel more encouraged and forward
movement is inevitable from that place. Some days showing up for your creative work is all that you can do, and that is enough and worth acknowledging.
If you’ve been around here for a few years then you’ll know that I choose a word each year to act as a guiding source for the year ahead.
I hold this word lightly as a beacon to support my movement through the year as I navigate through society, this world, with the ebb and flow of commitments, responsibilities, projects and inspirations.
Last year, fugitivity took hold of me and kept me refusing those things that have already been refused of me throughout the year.
Fugitivity and visual journaling went hand in hand in 2025 to the point that I was able to create a loophole of retreat, a space of freedom and play for most of 2025. No doubt fugitivity is changing my life and remains in my rucksack as I traverse into 2026. The year of the horse ( more on that later).
So what is my word of 2026?
Usually I have something chosen at the back end of Oct moving into November. It just comes to me, lands and takes up root as something that just feels right. And something I want to carry for a year or more and explore.
That didn’t happen this year.
I had the feeling of being ‘unapologetic’ to the max but that felt, as a word, so dated. I feel it has been co-opted by mainstream and capitalist culture that to hear it now feel so twee for me. It’s original radical power being neutered.
Then we had radicale ( with an ‘e’) meaning to get to the basic root of something. Its natural origin. It’s fundamental and essential, changing from the roots. As well as radical being judged as unconventional, pushing things to the limits.
But again this word didn’t sit well within my gut. I wasn’t feeling it.
For me my word of the year has to be embrewed with feelings as well as be able to stand the test of time, the year and beyond, as well as act as talisman, inspiration and haven. Words of the past has included voice, water, shakti, open, listen, love etc.
I have a tall ask for my word of the year but none of my words of the year so far has let me down. I suppose it’s a difficult act to follow after fugitivity as this practice has changed my life in so many ways.
But choose a word of the year I will because after so long in this practice, I would feel naked walking into 2026 without some word(s) at my back as support and/both motivator.
I’m making the commitment here now to go with – AfroSurreal – as my words of 2026.
Of course AfroSurreal is much more than a word it’s a whole artist and literary movement which blends the weird and absurd with the reality of blackness. That the reality of blackness, being black today is surreal.
AfroSurreal is also a way of {BEING} that roots me further into the RIGHT NOW. Creating the future that has to happen right now.
I’ll be exploring more and sharing about AfroSurreal over the next couple of days to get my basis understanding and direction down. And then look out for more posts about how I’m moving and shaking with AfroSurreal(ism) for the coming year.
I’m excited to see where this word will take me. A good sign if any that I’m chosen the right word ( movement) for 2026.
Living Wild Studios 