fugitivity

It’s quitting time, quitting time @ Tara

| Sheree

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

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.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

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.

Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind

Found poem: 

Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind

I’m no Missy either.

Taking the time to play

| Sheree

I’ve always loved drawing.

At different times of my life, I was either really into drawing or gone off the boil from drawing.

Basically, if I allowed my drawings to come into contact with other people, that’s when my drawing would go off the boil. I wouldn’t do it, I’d let the practice slide because someone or other had said my drawing wasn’t very/any good.

Or they’d looked at what I’d shared and start giving me pointers on how to improve it. How to shade ‘properly’ or how to get things into ‘proportion’. Basically saying that what I was doing, instinctively and true to me, was wrong.

For large stretches of time, I didn’t allow myself to draw, to play because in comparison to others, my work just didn’t match up. Didn’t look like theirs.

And then one time, while feeling less than, while feeling the odd one out, not accepted or appreciated, I picked up a pen and started drawing again. I found solace and safety in the lines I drew.

Faces, I love drawing faces. Usually of black women. Seeing myself reflected.

I completed a 100 days of black women one time, a few years ago now and I loved where this challenge took me. It took me to a place and peace of accepting my drawings. My style, my subjects and themes, my shading and perspectives.

Fuck man, we’re all individuals, unique and no way are we supposed to or should be drawing all alike, to a certain standard or brief.

My drawings are an expression of me, and how I see/ move through this world.

I’m dealing with it. I’m embracing it. And fuck everyone else!

Coming in late

| Sheree

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.

Mornings are for the taking

| Sheree

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”

Excerpt From
Nation of Strangers
Ece Temelkuran

let this be the healing

| Sheree

after Danez Smith

let this be the healing

the out of time and space

to flow back to the source

of love & care

let this be the honey to the wounds

the joy within the unknown

the hope to survive

in the mouth of the dragon*

let this be the refusal

the movement underground

to protect our vulnerabilities

let this be the healing

*a line from Audre Lorde’s ‘ The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ in Your Silence Will Not Protect You.

Re-engaging with Fugitive Feminism

| Sheree

How would you improve your community?

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.

Playful Palimpsests

| Sheree

I go to my local probably about once a week if not more. I was brought up next to a library, in Bradford and in Newburn. They were places I could go to for some sense of freedom and adventure.

The librarians knew me and would recommend books to me and events. They wouldn’t rush me, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.

Today, I love to pop in to see the book sales at my local libraries. As I have a few on my doorstep now. I flit between them, collecting worn and torn books that I repurpose.

I was brought up to know it was ‘wrong’ to write in books. They were sacred in our home. Probably because we were poor and if we bought books, usually from the indoor market in town, we knew it was money we couldn’t afford to spend on books. But my parents spent it anyway, as they valued books, learning and education. It was our way out of poverty.

I wonder what they would say now, if they saw what I did to books?

10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock. I have to feel the paper first though before I buy them. Even if only 10p, too shiny the page and the paint won’t grip it as well. The paint just swirls around and doesn’t stick.

I like my pages rough and matt finished. Ready to absorb whatever I put down on it.

This sketchbook was my side hustle for the last month. Side hustle to my main creative sketchbook. Here I just lay down colour and see what happens.

I like when what’s underneath the paint bleeds through. I like when the different layers of paint and pencil and pen bleeds through to the surface too.

It’s like a palimpsest. The marks beneath is the feeling I’m after. The haunting, the trace, the evidence of time and the passage of time. The archive is present now.

A 50 day streak

| Sheree

Yesterday marked 50 days of my creative sketchbook practice. 50 days of consistently turning up to the page to play and experiment.

What I’m learning is that I can trust myself to turn up for myself. I’m learning that my practice muscles can be strengthened. I’m learning that I love creating colour fields. It like what I create with visual journaling but different.

Here with these colour fields, there’s layers built up and then stripped back. Marked into. Scratched away to leave textures I like to see and feel. This practice is definitely expanding my palimpsest exploration and obsession.

I’m learning that I want this my creativity to be the main focus of my day and everything else is the add on, not the priority. Not the main meal. My creativity is my life source/force.

I’m practicing taking my creative sketchbook practice into my life. The attitudes, the risk-taking, the consistency, the trust in self and my art-making, these values and practices I’m carrying with me throughout my day, no matter who I come into contact with.

This creative sketchbook practice keeps me centred and focused on my feelings of joy and abundance. This practice keeps me present and checked in with myself, moment to moment.

On top of my visual journaling practice, this safe space of play and to {BE} me, is enough. Is more than enough to fill my day with bliss and connection. A practice that I’m finding opens up doors inside and outside of me, for me and others.

The Zinester Returns

| Sheree
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.