I’ve just sent out this month’s Studio Notes from Substack. It’s me rambling on about beauty but you might be interested in what I have to say. Head on over there an take a look. And if you want to start receiving these notes into your inbox each month, just subscribe. It’s free.
“We are not the idea of us, not even the idea that we hold of us. We are us, multiple and varied, becoming. The heterogeneity of us. Blackness in a Black world is everything, which means that it gets to be freed from being any one thing. We are ordinary beauty, Black people, and beauty must be allowed to do its beautiful work.” Kevin Quashie describes in Black Aliveness, or, A Black Poetics of Being.
a white banner shifts against Nelson’s Column, ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE.’
a bright white suspension of unwelcome and hate
ladies and gentlemen with heads turned up as if taking direction from God himself, listen to the message
from a man, on the platform, with Union Jack legs
as if whiteness and rightness runs through him like quickening sap/
the threat is real murmurs through the crowd/ a gathering searching for answers to stop the invasion
let me enter the scene/ from the extreme right/
let me mingle at the back/ near the man in a flat cap
let me feel the heat of the air/
let me sense the crackle of fear in their white, wholesome bodies
my body would be one of those coloured they want to stop
my body would be one of those aliens they want to exterminate
but what they don’t care to know is that this body belongs to a love evangelist
who’s at pains to show them how love can save us all
if only they’d part their ways and let me through
Living Wild Studios 