history

PAD / 010 -trying to love your two mothers is a dangerous game if you have to put your life on the line in the name of justice

| Sheree
Black Britain: A Photographic History edited by Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

PC Gumbs, London’s first black policeman
image 09/09/68

My mother says to rub vaseline into my neck
and the collar, to stop the rub; soften the wool.
They say make sure you wear the white bands on your arms,
otherwise they’ll only see ya teeth in the dark.
Only good enough to direct traffic, they roar with laughter.
Brillo pad hair. Toilet set lips.
I say nothing. I recognise the privilege
to wear serve Queen and country.

They say I’m a coconut, sell out, slave
to the white man and Babylon.
They do not spare their vitriol against me.
I survive in the liminal spaces, in the shades of grey.
No one admits the fight has to be from within.
The ranks have to unfiltered by difference.
My mother brought me up on wishes
from velvet green isle;

always with an eye and heart on the other mother.

My birth mother is proud even if this adopted mother
chooses to turn her back, allowing my brothers
in blue to kick the shit out of me too.

PAD/005 – Protest

| Sheree

Cinnamon sky rumbles
as electric clouds jag
over glass shop fronts.
Scarlet waves fire street

corners, claiming them forever.
Coppers and politicians
worry the faultlines
left behind.

PAD/ 004 – We are here, because you were there

| Sheree
Magnolia Tree

In pursuance of the powers vested in me by section 32 of the Police Act 1964, I, Right Honourable William Whitelaw, one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, hereby appoint the Right Honourable Lord Scarman to inquire urgently into the serious disorder in Brixton on 10 to 12 April 1981 and to report, with the power to make recommendations. *

Stories keeps being told, this is a tolerant country. It’s official.

Britain is tolerant, fair and just. There isn’t a race problem. Never was.

People who are different are treated the same. Tolerated. As long as they don’t make a difference.

Small minorities are accepted as long as they stay small.

Get to ‘swamping’, and then these minorities become a threat.

They start to threaten the whole fabric of the superior British characteristics.

Tolerance, liberty and civic duty. Values out the window, when the nation’s anxieties are raised.

Fear. And the country’s doors are closed.

The drawbridge raised.

Their shields are driving them back.

* The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Report of an Inquiry, By the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman, O.B.E, November 1981

PAD/001 – A Month of Poetry

| Sheree

Happy April. Time for showers, blossom and light. Oh and poetry.

Forsythia

As I mentioned last week, I’m honouring National Poetry Month with the challenge of writing a poem a day.

I’ve set myself this task many times over the years, and I’ve always been amazed at the creations along the way. Poems have emerged onto the page that I didn’t even know were in me and needed expressing.

So today I come to the page with an open heart and a rough idea of the themes or issues I want to explore. But who knows with the creative process. Anything could happen.

Anyway day 1 – PAD/ 001

Trying to understand “the difference between poetry and rhetoric”

After Audre Lorde

The contested site of black settlement in England

is shrouded a heavy fog of amnesia. The wrong colour,

the wrong body, the wrong sound.

Read the history books, you’d think we just landed

the day before last. 400 years of being here, lost

in the mire, weighted down with size 10, Dr. Martens.

Like transplanted birds of paradise, West Indians

struggled to put down roots. Alien soil. On corners,

skylarking and limin’, jobs, homes and a little bit of peace

denied; harsh whispers on the bitterly cold wind.

The contested site of black settlement in England

is captured in stills. Images speak for themselves.

Black faces filling the frame; black blooms pressed

against hothouse glass. But still an absent presence in failed memories.

April – National Poetry Month (USA)

| Sheree

Spring’s in the air. Filled with love. There’s magic everywhere. When you’re young and in love- The Flying Pickets ( well that’s who I heard sing it first and I’m sticking to it!)

April is just around the corner. The blossom will be blossoming. And I’m returning to my first love; poetry.

We’ve been in and out of love over the years, poetry and I. Sometimes she hasn’t treated me well, while other times I’ve neglected her and gone off with some other genre of writing.

I don’t even know if we’re good together, as I was brought up on dead white men’s poetry and I could never measure up to them and their creations. And then somewhere along the way, I gave up trying to.

But when I’m facilitating writing workshops, I say poetry is just ‘playing with words’ in order to break down the fears and insecurities we may be bringing into the creative space. ‘Playing with words’ eases the pressure and injects a bit of fun into the proceedings.

So I’m taking my own advice and going to spend April playing with words each day on the hope of creating some kind of whole at the end of each day.

For more ease of creation, I’ve decided to base my creations around one theme/ focus/subject which is loosely around Black British history through the photographs of the past that are in the public domain along with an exploration of the Race Relations, Commonwealth and Immigration Laws which came into effect during the 60s and 70s.

I’ll also be touching upon the uprisings that also happened during these turbulent times as a demonstration of push back against the messages of go back home even though for the second generation of immigrants onwards this has been the only home most of us have known.

So this is the intention, as I also attempt to tap into the surging, fresh Spring energy of the season, to reconnect my ancestors’ bodies with nature through the process of playing with word to create poetry this April.

I hope to document some, if not all of my creations here as a means of accountability and in the spirit of sharing stories.

La Jablesse

| Sheree
La Jablesse, Zak Ove

After Zak Ove

Come, follow me, young man, into the forest. Come. You like the sway of my hips, and my secret smile?

Then come, follow me, if you want to see more, to touch more. I’ll be all yours in the hidden forest away from the waging tongues.

Pay no mind to my necklace of antique nails or the weathered ropes I wear like a scarf or shawl. It’s just my unique style.

Come. Not yet. Don’t peak under my wide brimmed hat or under my long skirts. Patience, you naughty boy.

Come follow me and I’ll be all yours in time. Brass horns and trumpets I adorn because I love to make merry and dance.

African mask I wear because I know where my people come from. Smelling of jasmine and rose with a hint of decay. Come.

Pay no mind to the way I walk, one foot on the road and one beached tree trunk for a cow’s hoof in the grass. Come.

Come into the forest, deep into the forest where the trees are tall and thick and no one will hear you scream as you are lost and fall down a ravine.

Listen, I need you, handsome young soul, to keep my own beautiful. I feed off your fear and lostness and fall.

Listen I’m happy to own my own narrative again. They call me La Jablesse- she-devil.

Listen, I say, I’m a woman in control of who she be and who she chooses to take to forest, to bed, and to death.

Part 2 – Exploring Rituals To Be More Present in My Life, Never Mind Writing

| Sheree

A poem can start with the sound of water falling onto my body. Allow it’s curious wet teeth to sink into my flesh, to pull out chucks of questions to fuel a conversations with myself, later. 

The ability to be present was a luxury my mother never had as she worked 3 jobs with her hand down toilets and fixed smile for the men with keys and brutal laughs. 

I claim the ability to be present. To allow my yearning for a past to awaken a future I will imagine, as I salver my arms and legs and belly, housing a familiar homesickness I’m not sure where from, with coconut oil. 

Turning cold hard oil, soft and warm against my skin, I reconstruct fragments of history, lost in colluded archives, and turn them into bleeding scars and pickled memories of somethings rather than nothings.

When I’m ready to forgive and understand, I’ll conjure Dad back from the dead, sit him down, and ask why he never ever mentioned love, in all his administering of disciplined care. 

Dressed, hair twisted and walking across green fields, and under cherry blossom, I swallow doubts to turn a phase over and over against the roof of my mouth, rewriting with each footstep. Slide stepping cliches, kicking around experimental metaphors. 

Or the poem could hit me full force when I walk into the coffee shop. Glasses steamed, journal in hand,  eyes on drinks board, but already knowing my order by heart, the table I’ll take – number 13, my lucky number.

Acting like the fugitive from my life, here, I steal time to soften my gaze and repurpose the image of  the sea into an open window that will startle you, dear reader, into a new perspective, into a new way of holding your mind and your heart towards yourself.

Part 1 – Rituals

| Sheree

A poem can start with the sound of water
Falling onto my body
Allow it’s curious wet teeth to sink into my flesh
pulling out chucks of questions to fuel a conversations with myself later

The ability to be present was a luxury my mother never had as she worked 3 jobs with her hands down toilets and grinning at men with keys and brutal tongues

I claim the ability to be present
To allow my yearning for a past
To awaken a future
as I salver my arms and legs with cocoa butter.

Bound up with Memory*

| Sheree

After Marcia Michael

My body has a yearning for the past. In this country, I am duped to believe and live as if we were nothing .

Nothing until they allowed us into existence. Nothing until they opened their arms, and allowed us to carry on being their slaves into the 21st century.

Search and recovery, my body reclaims her history.
My mother transported it on her skin, buried in the stomach of the ship, boat, truck.

My father carried it in his voice, trapped in the belly of the ship, train, coffin.

I cannot rely on any colonial archives for finding me and my people. Now or in the future.

Colluded, concealed, constructed, the archives have fabricated the narrative that sees we as other.

Reduce us to a footnote, a scar, a tear.

My body is my archive.
My presence is a testimony.

My imagination will do the rest.

*Quote from Toni Morrison 


The Object of My Gaze, on going project by Marcia Michael. Me Remembering you – transformations, 2021