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.
Nothing I’m flicking through is feeding my desires. Nothing is filling the void of just wanting to switch off and forget my troubles. Pap TV is what I usually call it. The stuff that renders me brain dead.
And then I happen upon The Alabama Solution. This is how I be sometimes. I feed an itch, a curiosity.
I shared the other day about my abolitionist tendencies. Well this Oscar nominated documentary is furthering those occupations.
Man oh man, this documentary hard hitting. And I dare anyone to watch it and say those inmates deserve the inhumane treatments, the injustice they receive in prison. I dare you.
There is a tendency to think people who do the crime should do the time and deserve everything that comes their way. They’re in prison so must have done something to be there and what befalls them in there, well they had it coming.
They be evil. They be degenerate. They be monsters. Lock away, throw away the key. We say.
This indoctrinated, conditioned response to crime and punishment, criminals makes us, the general public, no better that the ‘monsters’ we are condemning. That we are putting away and not caring about.
They be human beings, with flaws, vulnerabilities dealing with issues with no help from anyone else.
No chance of redemption or rehabilitation because they are left to rot. Or are exploited, farmed out as cheap or free labour.
This here documentary The Alabama Solution explores the lives of the incarcerated. The viewer gets to see what it’s really like in the prisons in Alabama. How they are beaten and killed and no one is held to account.
What is remarkable is that these men are behind bars, classed as the underclass of society, the forgotten people, not by their families I may add, but they still manage to coordinate a mass strike across all of Alabama’s prisons in protest of the treatment they receive behind bars. In a peaceful way , they are demanding that their human rights be recognised and that the Federal Government steps in to compel the state of Alabama to treat their prisoners right, with respect and dignity.
Prisoners from all backgrounds, 20,000 strong refuse to work as slave labour anymore in 2022.
They downed tools. They rationalised that instead of meeting violence with violence they chose to hit them where it hurts, in the economics/ money, rather than hit them in the mouth.
Straight away the Governor was trying to break the strike. After a couple of days, rationing their food. Prolonging feeding for up to 14 hours a day and then when they did feed them just small amounts of food. But together the men shared the food they’d been stocking piling . As a community they came together to make sure no one starved. There was unity. Unity never see like it within prison system as it suits the system to have them fighting each other. Divide and rule. Divide and conquer.
But together, standing together strong, there’s power there and that’s dangerous. And has to be suppressed.
How come we, the general public, the majority not behind bars haven’t been able to organise a strike? A withdrawal of our labour to bring the system to a stop?
One of the main spokesperson for the prisoners, Robert Earl, who had already been beaten to near death for being an activist for prisoner’s rights and lost the sight in one eye for it, was taken from his cell in a head lock and taken to solitary confinement.
Again a similar tactic is being used, a tactic used from time in the Civil Rights Movement for example, cut off the head of the movement, the leaders and the strike will fold.
And you think it would happen, as the prisoners are vulnerable, no one can see what goes on behind closed doors. No one listens to them as they are criminals, they lie and are untrustworthy. Right?
They’re murderers and rapists. But that doesn’t happen. As this action, this strike is more than one man. Someone else steps in to take th baron, to keep rallying the cry that the strike continues until the demand are met.
And the demands are not unreasonable demands. They’re not asking to be all set free. They’re asking to be recognised as human beings with rights. To be respected and protected from violence within prison. Violence from the guards who are supposed to be supporting their rehabilitation.
But how are you gonna rehabilitate anyone if you’re beating on them?
I must go back and complete my watch of this programme now and see how the strike goes. However, this strike was in 2022 documented in The Alabama Solution documentary which was a decade long project of capturing the conditions in prison by the incarcerated cell phones.
I’ve just read that the 3 main instigators of this strike, including Robert Earl, have been placed back into solitary confinement as of January 2025 in retaliation for their activism and standing up for the rights of incarcerated citizens. And probably because of their involvement in the documentary.
You see what I did there. Citizens, human beings, not criminals. The language we use is part of our conditioning. Language is power. And I refuse to continue to use such dehumanising language in reference to people who are incarcerated. They are still people with needs and wants, desires drams, pain and sufferings.
Solitary confinement. No contact with family. This is an abuse of power behind bars. Out of public view and no reasons are given for these movements/ punishments. Solitary confinement is a form of torture. It is not a safety and security issue to the individual but it is an abuse of power by the authorities and highlights what a vulnerable position incarcerated people are in when behind the pros walls. This is another example of the denying of human rights.
There is talk of another strike happening this year, the withdrawal of labour. This can only mean that conditions have not improved within the Alabama Department of Corrections prison facilities. So I already know the ending, what the conclusion of this documentary will be. But I will watch it to the end.
Not as a spectator in the spectacle but as a witness for these incarcerated citizens as they, by any means necessary, attempt to get their voices, their issues, concerns and fears outside of those walks. The least I can do is watch and listen and share.
Oakmoss lichen is a sign of clean air quality in an area.
There’s a smear campaign against the current leader of the Green Party of England and Wales is Zack Polanski. It’s argued that Polanski, a Jew, is being anti-semitic because he’s arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.
I was brought up on the argument that people died so we could have the vote. So we must vote.
Reform are running on the slogan is if you want to get rid of Starmer, Vote Reform.
It’s a privilege that many people around the world do not have. The right to vote. The right to have their say.
Many people are turning away from Labour because they’ve moved towards the right in their rhetoric and handling of immigration. And the cost of living is sky high.
Rain or shine, day and night, I would walk to my polling station and mark the box next to the red rose with a bold ‘X’.
The Conservative Party, known for its racism and classism, old school boy elitist network, has broken records with being the first political party in the UK to have a Black Woman as their leader.
My pooling card came a couple of weeks ago with the instructions to turn up to vote with photo ID.
Millions of people go to the polls today to decided on the councillors to control their neighbourhoods.
Voting on empty promises.
Voting on empty reforms.
Voting on different names but representing the same arsewipe policies.
Voting on keeping things as they are.
Voting on keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor.
Voting cannot vote this away.
The tools we are given, granted and offered cannot build anything new.
The voting system was never meant for us to achieve any gains or resemblance of power.
Voting changed nothing.
W.E.B. Du Bois, disturbs the tale that all of our ancestors died for the right to vote. Du Bois echoed Parsons decades later in 1956, writing in a piece titled “I Won’t Vote,” “There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, “I Won’t Vote,” The Nation, October 20, 1956.
I no longer believe in the voting system. I no longer choose to uphold the system. I choose to refuse.
I’m been expanding my reading of late. I’ve just become a member of the Abolitionist Futures Reading Group which is focusing on abolition, obviously.
Reading in community, sharing ideas and thoughts which are probably considered radical, revolutionary to the majority is so refreshing and affirming.
It makes me feel less alone in my way of thinking and {BEING}. It gives me hope that there are alternatives to the current system and that together we can get there.
Abolition, might be associated recently with prisons, or defunding the police, and closing detention centres.
But abolition is much more than this. Started with the aim of abolishing Transatlantic Slavery, abolition of prisons has been there since the inception of prisons themselves. Abolition is revolutionary because in order to decarcerate the Prison Industrial Complex not only does the whole of society have to change, be overhauled not reformed as that just wouldn’t work, but we also, the people have to change.
The world has to change at the same time as the people within this world change. We have to move away from the indoctrinated belief that prisons and the police, state terror more like, are the only means of deterring crime and criminals. Which jus isn’t the case.
We have to stop focusing on the individual ‘evildoers’ who deserve the harshest punishments for whatever crimes they committed, to taking an honest look at our societies and cultures that have forced people to commit such crimes ( or in a lot of cases no crimes being committed but still punished with prison sentences.)
I’m talking about poverty, economics, drug abuse, race, class, sexuality, isolation, migration etc.
To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.
Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition. – Angela Y. Davis
Me reading, thinking and becoming anti-prisons, anti-establishment, becoming an abolitionist is just the next step on this journey of fugitivity, via black anarchism. And I’m so pleased and relieved that I don’t have to walk this path alone. I have a community around me as support.
Sweeping violins. A Southern Belle, pretty and shallow, chatters on as young men flock around her feet, captive. *Fiddle de de.* Relishing in colour, technicolor; rich reds, blues and greens of the gallant Old South. Pan out see mansions surrounding by plantations. Bonnets and ribbons. Dances and horses. Cotton.
I first read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell while completing an extra year at college. Gaining extra ‘A’ levels while I waited on my then boyfriend to make the grades.
I identified with Scarlett O’Hara, the bitch of a heroine, not Mammy. I definitely was no mammy. Not here to fetch and clean and be loyal. I definitely was not obese and coarse and ugly, or ‘have a shiny, glossy face of contentment as she be the most happy slave alive.’
Of course as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned where I’m placed in society. It’s okay to fantasise being the white heroine but I’ll never really be her. Better learn my place – to be there for the pleasure and enjoyment and whim of the white folk – and smile.
But what about my own pleasures and pains? Apparently they don’t exist. Apparently I’m incapable of such things, such finer characteristics. My reality states/shows otherwise.
It’s quitting time. I’m retreating into the woods in Aberdeenshire for the next week. I’m taking this opportunity as a reset. A chance to focus on my pleasures and pains. Drink on Mother Nature and give thanks for this life I have which isn’t being subservient/ submissive/ subjection to anybody.
I refuse the Mammy as well as the Scarlett, as they are both constructions and constrictions to control the female body.
I’m much more interested in the overspill, the excess, the unruly body. The blackwoman body that I live with/in daily and how nature supports me on this journey.
As a wind of flames sweeps through Georgia; menacing reds and oranges against a bleak dark sky swirl and crackle in time with fast ascending music. Real danger and Butterfly McQueen (real name not character name that would be Missy) flits around like a blue arsed fly worrying with no sense or plan.
Describe one positive change you have made in your life.
It’s a luxury I know. It’s probably frowned upon. It’s probably not seen as productive within white supremacy culture. It’s probably classed as dangerous. I know it’s where the best insights happen.
In the morning. In my bed. In a book (non-fiction at that).
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve taken to my bed. Well really, I don’t leave my bed, in the morning, until I’ve had a thorough lazy read. A slow imaginative wandering through my current squeeze of a book.
A Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran, an exiled Turkish author who is unhomed but can see how we’re all becoming unhomed , one way or another, due to the rise of fascism.
Climate refugees, political dissenters, people seeking asylum from persecution, may be where our minds go when we think of the homeless. And yet, within these times of far right practices, war and genocide, the silent majority may still be in their homes but feel no longer at home.
Home is no longer what we knew it to be. Home is no longer safe and stable. Home is terror and fear. Home becomes strange. We become strangers and unhomed.
Some of us have never felt at home even when we have made our homes here in the UK as the message has always been we’re not welcome here. We do not belong here. Even if born here.
We search for a language to talk, to share our feelings and experiences of being a stranger within our own lands. It’s a practice.
I continue to practice reclaiming my mornings. Reclaiming the slow rise, reclaiming the time and space to read at leisure. Finding some refuge, some peace within a cocoon of sheets and pillows. Warm and cosy and safe for now.
“When Brian asks me about the word exile as we sit in front of the audience, the words come out of me as if a film ribbon were spooling off its reel. ‘Let me list why this exile thing is no longer plausible and, in fact, already a stale joke. One: Exile is not as sexy as it has been, despite what some still want to assume. I know Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die. Putting the spotlight on “the exile” to divert from “the refugee” operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image. The Europeans’ need to believe that the continent is still a civilised haven is as critical as the refugees’ need for safety. Two: Exile is a title of nobility that generates undeserved attention. The undocumented refugees, the precarious majority of the unhomed, don’t even get a chance to relay their name so it can be put on their tombstone, whereas an exile is asked too often. Alas, many of us accept the invitation to go on and on about ourselves. We are the boring windbag aristocrats of the greater society of the unhomed. Three: The title exile gives you only two chances in life – you are either kept hostage by your personal melodrama or enslaved by the constant urge to reject your tragedy. Life cannot be diminished into such an unending test of dignity, and it certainly cannot be confined to the limits of the self. Four: If one accepts the title exile, one can never arrive home. But the fifth and the most important reason is …’ For a split second, I catch a glimpse of the listening faces. They are mostly activists, people who are already at work to build a new world, a new home. And it is hard to put your finger on it, but when you know, you know – they are with me, we are in sync. Also, now that ‘the most important’ has already escaped my mouth, I am at that delicious moment of no return. I gear up. “Yes, the most important reason is that you are no different than me. Do you, I mean, let’s be honest here, do you really think you are more at home than me? Of course not. Otherwise, why would you, as beautiful human beings of the earth, be trying to change the world and talk about building communities all the time? Why would you imagine shelters from, rather than movements against the new fascism building around the globe? Don’t you think there is already a sense of defeat there? Aren’t you already admitting that the world is not your home anymore but a hideous jungle from which you need to seek shelter? Yes, we are many in our discontent, but still, we cannot make enough of a majority; we cannot shape the political reality into a new home. We are not powerful enough to make this world our home again, not yet. From where I sit, you are no less homeless than me. Or, if you like the word better, we are all exiles already. Misfits, outcasts, the displaced and the disowned. We are the strangers of the world”
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.
Visual journaling in community is always time well spent.
Even if it’s their first rodeo, to witness the freedom, the mess, the expansion as paint meets paper meets card. Bliss. Magic. A gift.
Walking out with their own visual journals clutched close to their chests, promising to carry on the practice themselves, now they’ve got the power within their hands, hearts and soul.
A job well done any time the visual journaling practice is passed on.
I do believe it makes us better human beings. Better to each other and ourselves. Softer, caring and well-nourished.
If you’ve been watching the news this week, you’ve seen that it’s been dominated by what is happening in America. Or the actions America has taken elsewhere in the world. Flexing their muscles, going in for the strike.
In my opinion, what is happening, right now, is that white people can see the power of the state being used against people who look just like them.
This is where AfroSurrealism takes on significance – because the reality of blackness is the power of the state is always and, repeated for centuries and generations, been used against black people. Being black is a surreal experience. THEN. RIGHT NOW. ALWAYS.
The abuse of power has been turned up to the max so that no one is safe. But some people can’t see this yet. Maybe even deny it, spin a false narrative around it.
There’s a quote somewhere that I remember which goes something along the lines as, they’ll come for me in the evening, but then they’ll come for you in the morning.
Fascism had raised its head once again. But did it ever go away for black and brown bodies? Did it not just change its mask, switched up its playbook?
There’s protests across American cities against the unlawful killing of a white woman/ mother by an ICE agent. These protesters scream out, “say her name.”
The thing is this – no disrespect or condoning of this violence or unlawful killing as it is an abuse of power and murder. I am outraged but …
I am also outraged because #SayHerName was an awareness campaign started by Kimberle Crenshaw to bring attention to the unlawful killings of black women by law enforcement that were going unreported/ not getting the same level of outrage and attention as when black men and boys are killed by law enforcement, in comparison. And this doesn’t even start into the ‘white woman syndrome.’
#SayHerName was needed to highlight and remember and get justice (?) for black women who have been killed in custody, or when calling 911 for help, or when sleeping in their beds, or for just breathing while black.
#SayHerName is needed for these unlawful killings of black women not for the white woman killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday because everybody knows her name and everybody is saying her name.
What happened in Minneapolis was wrong and the Trump administration is lying about it and blaming the victim. This is an abuse of power and is being played out, as the images of the bloodied seat and the bullet hole in the windshield, as a threat.
You get in the way of us, protest our regime then this is what happens to you, is the message. They rule with fear, threats and intimidation. The ICE agent is immune from prosecution because he was just doing his job. His job for the state. Above the law. Lawlessness is the state. This is the only way to get the mass of population behind a fascist society. Fear, threats and intimidation.
Check the historical playbook.
The reality though, the truth that has to be stated otherwise I’d be silenced through fear and intimidation, is that #SayHerNane centred black women, centred blackness. But using it here in this instance for the murder of a white woman, this is just another thing that is whitewashed and co-opted by white people.
I’m thinking this and berating myself for thinking this. Condemning myself for seeing this play out in reality. I had to go online and check myself. Check that I’m not being unreasonable, or hateful or wrong. But I’m not alone in seeing this reality.
This truth.
( And do you also notice how much and often I’m couching my opinion in diplomatic ways, highlighting my intentions not to cause harm. Obviously needed as far too often people choose to see only part of the argument. Take issue with what isn’t the real issue as a means of not listening and not addressing the real issue! Kill the messenger and all that!)
I also have to ask ( myself, anybody else) if the woman who was killed by ICE was black or brown would there be such media attention, protests, calls for justice? Would her unlawful killing/ murder be used as a touchstone, as a moment that changes American history moving forward? Or would that be another case of #SayHerName?
I say this not to distract from the horrendous crime that has been committed by the state against a white woman. I say this because it’s all part of the same system that has been operating for centuries and it is just now, in this moment, that more people, white people are seeing that this shit is killing them too. It has been all along but just slower than black people (Fred Moten).
These are strange times (white) people are arguing. Democracy is being eroded. Violence is no longer buried and concealed. Violence is (now) at their (white) doors.
AfroSurreal. This has always been the reality of blackness. The violence. The absurdity of it all. No rhyme or reason except profits and power.
Now white people are waking up to seeing on their feeds people who look like them being murdered by the state. Unlawfully murdered by the state for demanding justice and fairness.
It’s awful that some (white) people are just starting to experience the dangers of oppression right now.
This is nothing new for / to black people. And saying this isn’t to wish ill will on anyone else or to take glee or satisfaction in violence inflicted on anybody.
Living Wild Studios 