Telling myself I’m starving, I went into a supermarket. Came out half an hour later weighed down with food and toilettes.
I said ‘starving’ but I’m not really. I had lunch about couple of hours ago. Really I don’t know what it feels like to starve as I’m always a couple of hours, footsteps or miles away from gaining access to an abundance of food. I know I will never have to go without.
Unlike the people in Gaza now.
We are in an historic catastrophe. I use ‘we’ as I stand as a witness to what is happening in Gaza, to Palestinian people now.
This means up until 20th July, 86 people had died of starvation in Gaza since the genocide began in October 2023. In the three weeks since, up until 11th August, that number of people dying of starvation in Gaza has risen to 222.
These are the numbers we know about. No doubt this number is rising daily.
I’ve just read this now. While I’m stuffing my face with food, man-made starvation and famine is happening in Gaza and it’s gotten to the point of being irreversible for the vast majority of people. They are so far gone without nourishment that even if they could access food now, it would make no difference to their bodies and minds and nervous systems. They are starving to death by a US backed Israeli genocide. This is happening on purpose and there are still people who are denying it’s happening or who are justifying it.
I got the information from Zeteo media. Go check it out and witness the devastation of life. I’m trying to figure out the next best thing I can do to change this situation in Gaza. Sharing this information, raising awareness is part of this action.
“On the afternoon of May 16, 2020, about a week before George Floyd was killed by the police, twenty-one-year-old Tye Anders was accused by the Midland, Texas, police of running a stop sign. He pulled over in front of his ninety-year-old grandmother’s house.”
Excerpt From We Refuse Kellie Carter Jackson
There’s Anders pleading for his life. There’s many policemen with guns drawn pointed at him and there’s bystanders filming it all. One woman who’s filming this is also pleading for the police to not shot Anders saying he’s scared. Hasn’t there been enough killing of unarmed black people, killed just because of the colour of their skin?
Still no guns are lowered and Anders is on the ground clearly empty handed but the situation is just escalating as the police continue to train their guns on his body.
Anders’ ninety-years-old grandmother steps out of her house praying. With cane in hand she walks towards her grandson even though guns are trained in her direction.
There was still panic still bystanders screaming for the police to put their guns up. Some do but still one cop is walking towards Anders with his gun raised. Trying to move and push her out of the way, his grandmother doesn’t believe that her grandson won’t still be shot so she falls onto her grandson, protecting his body with her own body. Not longer after this with the police and crowd pushing and pulsating around her , she loses consciousness.
Anders is arrested for fleeing the police. His grandmother is taken to hospital.
Reading this story this morning made me cry. Not because of the police brutality or the disregard for human life, black life. But because of what the grandmother in the story did. She’s ninety-years-old, frail and only has her prays and body, but used both in protection, in an act of love.
“Her collapse was not a coincidence. Protection is powerful, beautiful, and sacrificial because protection is love. But she should not have needed to put her body between the police and her grandson to protect him.”
Excerpt From We Refuse Kellie Carter Jackson.
Protection. She should not have needed to, but she did put her body between the police and grandson to protect him. This act of courage broke my heart this morning. Had me weeping. Maybe it was the last straw that pushed me over the edge into the breakdown. Maybe it was my imagination seeing this playing out.
Maybe I’m just sick and tired of living in a world where white violence is justified and black violence is really self-defence but is never judged that way.
I’ve always been a supporter of care work but even more so now. As care work, along with rest are forms of protection. Through the way I {BE} with myself and others, and the work that I do for self and others, I’m tending daily to the mental, emotional, and physical needs and health of black people, so we are better equipped to survive and thrive within a hostile, brutal, grinning world.
The political and media furore over chants at Glastonbury by Bob Vylan, a British punk duo has me reeling at the moment. I couldn’t get my head around it at first, why I was feeling such anger at this condemnation of their chant? At first I was thinking it was because this group are black and I felt it was racism again raising its ugly head. But then Kneecap is getting condemnation as well for ‘hate speech’, ‘inciting violence’, an Irish hip-hop trio from Belfast. I’m not saying that the Irish has not experienced their own form of racism, prejudice and discrimination either.
But then when I saw the newspaper headlines, and then the Prime Minister coming out say it was ”appalling hate speech’ wanting an investigation in the BBC and how they could allow this to happen, with criminal investigations being filed against both Bob Vylan and Kneecap, I realised why I was getting angry and really enraged. It was because there was all this disgust and moral hand whinging and condemnation of a chant, but not the same level of condemnation and rage and move to stop it for the genocide happening in Gaza, right now, or for the last 1 year, 8 months, 3 weeks and 4 days. As the Palestinians continue to be exterminated by Israel Defense Forces (IDF), there is no condemnation, not opposition from the UK government, the media, those in business, those who are showing again and again that they are controlled, owned by the Israeli Government and State. Proving that they actually have vested interests in Israel and continuing the genocide.
It is ludicrous to witness, the political and media condemnation of a few words chanted at a music festival while Palestinians waiting in a line for aid, starving people who’ve been herded into this state of the queuing dead, are massacred by IDF. These people dead on their feet, seeking aid, did not pose a threat, and yet the IDF, an armed force just opened fire on them because they could. Because they know, no one is trying to stop them. No one is condemning their actions. The world is turning a blind eye to their war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Anyone opposing their horrendous crimes are called anti-semitic and are cancelled, condemned, silenced.
Bob Vylan, facing a criminal investigation have also been dropped but their record company and are on a travel ban to USA. Swift and sharp punishment for expressing their desire to see a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. Mass disgust across the country and further afield about a chant, but where is the mass disgust and action against the mass extermination of a people? The Palestinians, the people of Gaza.
“It’s a Killing Field”, reported by Nir Hasson, Yaniv Kubovich and Bar Peleg within Haaretz, details how IDF soldiers were ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid. Unarmed people are treated like a hostile force and just shot and killed. Deliberately. Bullets is the IDF form of communication. Not chants, bullets. Where is the condemnation of this? Where is the Parliamentary emergency meeting to discuss this deliberate killing of human life, that is genocide, that are war crimes? None but there is one about Bob Vylan, and Lisa Nandy, British Labour Party politician serving as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport since 2024, standing up in Parliament, in solemn tones criticising the BBC the Glastonbury broadcast and Bob Vylan for the chanting. Claiming her moment in the limelight, making a performance, Nandy condemned the “appalling and unacceptable scenes” at Glastonbury and said the government would not tolerate antisemitism. But the government tolerates genocide. FACT.
I could go on as I’m sick and tired of hearing when someone criticises IDF, and the Israeli state of murdering Palestinians and claiming Gaze, the whole state, from river to sea, that this is being anti-semitic. This is just another tactic used for shutting people up. As when people are criticising the genocide of Palestinians and the stealing of their homeland, they are not saying they hate Jews or the Jewish people. They are saying that the massacre of a people is wrong. The IDF as an armed force is committing genocide. That is what is being condemned, criticised and left to the general public around the world to fight against as the Western countries are doing nothing to stop it.
Conflating these criticisms with Jewish people , calling it anti-semitic is like using a get out of jail free card on repeat. It’s not the same thing. And I would argue that if the chant, ‘death, death to the IDF’, is anti-semitic and hate speech inciting violence, what/who is it killing IDF? A chant, some words at Glastonbury or the Israeli government sending the IDF into war, ordering them to kill unarmed people seeking aid? Tell me which one is a whitewashing of crimes against humanity? The chant is not a chant of hate for Jewish people. The chant is anger at the genocidal actions of a genocidal army, the IDF, who are beginning to ask themselves if this was is just, and what is the humanitarian price the Gazan population paying for this war?
I hope you are well. Or as well as you can be, as I know you have a tendency to fall out of love with yourself. Waste time on not looking after yourself and beat yourself up for it too.
I just hope you’re learning because, at the moment, I think you’re doing remarkably well. You’re still here aren’t you? You’re still smiling? So you must be doing something good.
And even if you’re not, just remember that you are good. Good enough just the way you are. For reals.
And I know you have your current worries and concerns. No doubt worrying about where your next pay check is coming from and do you have to compromise your integrity to get it.
But listen, I know you and I know you always find a way. Because you are a fighter. You’re resourceful and determined and you love life far too much to just give up on it. To just give up on yourself.
I just love how you’re living your life on your own terms not being worried about what others think about you or what they might say.
I just love how you’re striving for what makes you happy to hell with everyone else. This is inspiring. This is you.
This year has seen you really lean into a morning routine to set you up for the rest of the day. And it’s been rewarding to see how this has helped you to move forward.
I say continue on this path of making sure your needs and wants are met each and every day first as this puts you in the best position to then help and support others.
Simple small things like enjoying that first cup of coffee. Listening to Love Devotion on repeat in Insight Timer. Small things that might seem insignificant but actually remind you that you are loved, loving and loveable by yourself, first and foremost.
And then look for that love from others as it is there. The love. It’s always there. Love.
Keep following those sparks that reveal joy. Which make you light up from the inside out. Solitude and quiet, just as much as company and music. Getting out in nature and moving that wonderful body of yours.
Someone said to you recently that life is long, instead of thinking of life being short, too short, so seize the moment now. And that still holds true but to think of life being long is to not only savour it now and to be grateful for it, it also means that we never really leave or die. We just transform and transcend into someone or something else in time. Over time. Through time.
This opens up whole new portals and possibilities and is exciting. Therefore, no need to panic or rush or run around like a chicken with no head. You’re okay resting, taking that afternoon nap, without fear of missing out.
Everything goes into the mix to make up this weird and wonderful life. You’ve just got to remain open, baby. You’ve just got to keep that beautiful heart of your open and welcome whatever comes your way. The good, the bad and the ugly.
Everything of this beautiful terrible life is welcome here because it is yours. Your terrifyingly beautiful life.
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future if change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, on Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984), 37.
I’ve always felt nervous when meeting new people. Not because I’m worried about what they’ll think of me, but because at some point in the conversation I will no doubt be asked the question, “So, where do you come from?”
When a white person asks me, this question comes with the implicit assumption that I am not ‘from here’. They might think this is a simple question to ask but it is not a simple question for me to answer.
Should I say Bradford, West Yorkshire, where I was born and brought up until the age of ten? Or the North-East Coast where I live now with co- parenting my daughter? Or even London, where I went to University and got in touch with my ‘black’ side? Or Trinidad, Ghana, Barbados, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone where my ancestral roots lie?
When I was younger in the 1970s and living in Bradford, my dad didn’t talk about Trinidad, but we knew it was the land of his birth. One of the reasons we knew this was because of the black crushed velvet scroll that hung in our front room depicting the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. We didn’t even know he had siblings until, after 25 years of no contact, he received a letter from his sister, Tantie Gladys living in the United States, which started a new relationship with ‘family’.
After my dad’s death in 1981, all the silences changed. Our mum told us the stories our dad had told her but had decided not to tell us about his land, his family, his home. We moved to Newcastle then, to be closer to mum’s family.
It was being closer to my grandparents, listening to them talking and seeing photograph after photograph, that I began to understand my heritage. My maternal great granddad, my nana’s dad, was from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Charles Mason was billed as the first black man in Newburn, our small village.
I knew that someday I would visit my ancestral lands, Trinidad, Ghana, Barbados, on my granddad’s side, and Sierra Leone and Nigeria, a new piece of information which places my Trinidadian family as descendants of slaves.
“Where will you be buried?” asks a friend. For her the answer is simple; born in England, lives and works in England, dies in England, buried in England. But for me, it’s a tricky question because frankly, I’m not sure where I’m from. I live in Nirth-East England, but I don’t call it home; it’s my base. I wouldn’t call Bradford home, even though I still carry the Yorkshire accent around with me.
‘Home’ as a concept is problematic as it makes visible such notions as gender, diaspora, identity, culture. ‘Home’ as a term includes the sense of ‘knowing home’, what and where home is. It also encompasses that feeling of ‘being at home’ or away from home. But most importantly, ‘home’ includes that matter of ‘belonging’. There are multiple and fluid meanings of home, from private to public, from physical to imagined. The idea of home is plural, a conflicting site of belonging and becoming.
‘Confused’ is one word that should be on my passport. In 2007, I took the plunge. I approached a visual artist friend and said, “I’m going to Trinidad and Tobago. Want to come?” At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was planning. I was excited, worried, nervous and scared. When I tried to visualize myself there all I could see was the touristy, travel brochure images of the Caribbean; blue sky, blazing heat, turquoise sea, crystal white sands and swaying palm trees. All my knowledge of my heritage was based upon Westernized sources, framing the islands in a certain way.
Having completed a visit to the Caribbean, I can not really imagine what it is/was like to live there, to be born there and grow up there, as my ancestors did. I am second and third generation of immigrants, depending of which side of my family is in focus. I do not have that first hand knowledge of ‘home’, be it the Caribbean or Ghana, but I do of England. As
Avtar Brah says, ‘home’, is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement. My experience of my ancestral homelands is limited. In terms of nostalgia, I have a longing for places that are far removed from my everyday but are part of my identity. I may gain an impression of these places through my travels to them or through my family members, sadly all of which are now dead, except my sister. I have that sense of loss of place and of people. I use my writing to create those lost worlds.
There is a photograph of me, in holiday gear (green and white striped top and white cargos), grinning like an idiot, clinging tightly with two hands, onto the arm of a man I’ve just met ten minutes ago in Laventille, Port of Spain, Trinidad. My smile speaks of satisfaction, joy, relief and belonging. This man is a cousin I did not know I had. This embrace is one of ownership. He is family and he is mine. He is part of my past, my present in that photograph, and my future. The past is in our futures, in our nows. I carry with me the baggage of the past into my present and future. My Laventille visit was like going to collect baggage from the left luggage department,finding and claiming baggage that I didn’t know I had lost, but is now vital to me in my task of trying to know myself better.
This feeling of belonging, this split identity/mixedness of being/feeling British, Caribbean, African without exclusive claim to any of them is something difficult to live with, to function with.
This is an updated and redrafted extract taken from my 2010 PhD thesis, ‘A Drift of Many-Hued Poppies in the Pale Wheatfield of British Publishing’ Black British Women Poets 1978 – 2008
This piece originally was published over on Medium with Binderful. I’m drawing this piece into the Living Wild Studios archives. Because I can!
Image credit — Donovan Valdivia
“How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognition, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?”
Claudia Rankin
In August 2014, there’s a summer of “hands up, don’t shoot” protests, in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the unlawful shooting of Michael Brown Jr.. In November, Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer responsible for Brown’s murder isn’t indicted. In December, filled with rage and helplessness, I organise the first ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest in the North of England; a political poetry reading at our city centre library. Together artists and writers, cram into a hot room on the top floor of a building made of glass, and pour out our rage and pain through our writings. Black people’s words. Our ancestors’ words.
I’m criticised by one Black woman, in particular, because I invite white poets to read. They could only read the words of Black people as this event is centring our lives. Black lives. A white people’s presence is not what this Black woman wants. She wants a safe Black only space. I respect and understand her views. We all want a safe space for Black people. But I feel we can achieve so much more when we work together, Black and white, to solve our society’s problems. I know where she’s coming from though; a place of pain and suffering and hatred. As Black people, for so long, we have endured so much hate and violence from the hands of white people. For far too long, we have been excluded from a share in the economic wealth our ancestors paid for with their lives to create. We’re sick and tired of being excluded from the abundantly spread societal table which our ancestors give the skins off their backs to forge. And this hurts.
In March 2017, there’s a ‘Stand Up to Racism’ demonstration in London, Miss Ella, my seven year old daughter, and I dance behind the sound system truck, towards Trafalgar Square. Crowds behind metal barricades line our route, with the Metropolitan Police shepherding us along. We shout, ‘Refugees are welcome here.’ Miss Ella, dressed as her superhero, Black Widow, looks as if she’s just stepped out of a Black Panther’s meeting. With her long brown hair blowing in the wind and her peachy fist punching the air, she’s learning long before I did how to use her voice to bring about change. She carries her homemade banner stating, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ high with pride and courage. Along the way, a white woman with screwed up face screams at us to shut up and go back home to where we come from. Disallowing our protests, devaluing our presence here.
I recognise where she’s coming from; a place of her ignorance and pain and hatred. As white working class, for so long, she’s been fed the lies that Black people and immigrants come over here and take their homes and jobs. For so long, the poverty they’re experiencing is down to these Black illegal criminal and not a capitalist system rigged in favour of a few priviledged people. We’re just as sick and tired of this too. And we know it hurts.
In May 2020, there’s ‘Black Lives Matter’, protests around the world. In response to the recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, to name just a few, the streets are talking through fire and smoke. Thousands take to the streets, Black and white, to demand justice for all our Black brothers and sisters who have been and continue to be murdered by state sanctioned violence.
I’ve grateful for their voices and bodies. This time, I protest through my words and art. As the Covid-19 pandemic still poses a real threat here in my part of the world. I’m a Black, fat woman carrying yet another target on my back. While protesting, the odds of getting molested and arrested, and not surviving the experience is higher for me than any white person. Just as the odds are greater for me of dying from the Coronavirus than a white person.
Black, Asian, and ethnic minorities in the Western world are dying at a disproportionately higher rate and number than white people during this pandemic. Many explanations for this reality have been voiced with the blame thrown at the feet of Black people. That it is our unhealthy bodies and behaviours which are spreading this disease, conveniently not addressing the inherent racism and systematic inequalities that have operated for over 400 years that has brought about this dis-ease, making our weathered bodies more susceptible to this virus.
‘We rather die on our feet than keep livin’ on our knees,’ taken from the James Brown song, ‘I’m black and I’m proud’, I feel this as we see thousands of Black people (and white people) take to the streets, even though there’s a greater risk to their lives than ever before. But I recognise where’s they’re coming from. We’ve had enough. We’ve endured enough. We’re not prepared to accept Black lives being devalued anymore.
This is what I’m noticing when I move my body outside. Sharing the beauty in decay, something I used to shield myself from out of fear. But now I appreciate the natural cycle of things. From death there comes rebirth. A renaissance.
Living Wild Studios 