You know when you have to do something but you don’t want to do it?
That was me today. I had a meeting which I had to go to in order to keep receiving some money. And I just didn’t want to be there.
Before I got there I said to myself, do this and then you can go try that new coffee shop afterwards.
Do you do that? Bribe yourself into doing something? In getting things done even when you don’t want to do it?
But there I was and in the process of doing the thing I didn’t want to do and ended up enjoying it. It wasn’t as bad as I imagined it would be. It turned out to be an enjoyable meeting.
I sailed out of there with a smile on my face because in the scheme of things, I’m doing a good job. I’ve got my freedom, I’m my own boss and I’m doing something I enjoy.
Yes my bank balance is not busting a gut but I get by. And that’s all I want to do. I want to get by doing the things that bring me joy rather than be rolling in the green and be unhappy and unfulfilled.
So yeah I went to that coffee shop after the meeting I didn’t want to go to and enjoyed dreaming on paper afterwards.
I’ve been thinking of moving to the Highlands, buying a small cottage by a loch and swim every morning.
There’s a river too, that haunts the glen, between my cottage and the mountains. I feel it, breathing within the shadow of mountains.
I know this is not just a pipe dream. I know someone who’s done it, made the move across the border, living a blessed life.
I’ve been thinking of an open fire where I’d bake bread with the sun rise and when ready sit sit out on the porch with thick slices, warm and buttered. Dripping butter and the air smelling like home.
My home.
I’m thinking there’s one village store miles away. I walk every other day for exercise. On the way, I bird spot. Blackbird, moorhen, blue tit, eagle.
Small talk with the store owner might be difficult after long moments of silence in my cottage by the loch. In the silence I can hear myself better.
Being a water woman and a mountain woman, I will welcome the solitude and the haunting rolling out before me as nothing would hold me back.
i try to connect beauty using words as healers of possibilities from the state within, the voice, a teacher, a sage, where my poetry winters, where I can see the ‘I’ like a clearing through the trees, where imagination lingers inch wide mile deep, conjuring for change and connection. i try language, not to trick or demonstrate my intellect, but to spark simple, stretching blossoms into ‘we’ rather than ‘them and us’. from the state without, i’m a beast, caged and muzzled. swallowed. cornered and supposedly cowered, i come out writing, wading into dangerous waters, owning my imagination to practice potential futures.
*“An ars poetica poem is a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.” —Poets.org
Laughter and fun, with trust and communication, honesty and commitment but not in a heavy sense but much love and affection and respect and joy, I spent a long time in a relationship that wasn’t joyful and really what’s the point, life’s too short to waste time and energy on people who don’t treat you right or who aren’t happy in themselves, I want to be with someone who makes time for me and us, just like I make time for them and us, hey I get it, people are busy, leading busy lives but I’m of the belief that if you want to be with someone you make time and effort to be/do just that.
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was five I said to my mum when I grow up I want to be a lollipop lady.
I saw a lot of lollipop ladies as I walked to and from school each day. Not only did I love the bright yellow uniform and the hat. But I also loved how they had the power to stop traffic.
Lollipop ladies just walk out into the road put down their lollipop stick and stick up a hand and the cars stop for them.
I thought that was cool.
But the main reason I wanted to be a lollipop lady was because they were always smiling. They always greeted me with a smile and a good morning or the question, ‘Good day at school?’
Lollipop ladies not only looked like they were enjoying their job but they were also sharing that joy with others, even if only for the little time it took for me to walk across the road in front of them with the cars at bay.
They were smiling.
So I wanted to be a lollipop lady when I was five and I told my mum. My mum said I couldn’t be a lollipop lady. No, she said. Maybe when you retire but not until then. You can be anything you want to be Sheree, she said. Save being a lollipop lady until you retire.
I better start filling out my application then as I’m getting old (er).
March is nearly over. I spent a lot of it getting ready for a trip that didn’t happen. I’m still sore around the wound but will share here at some point.
The journal above which I share is the journal I created for my travels. It’s an Elle Decorating Magazine which I’ve repurposed. I pulled out the images and text I wanted to use in my visual journaling and then painted over the remaining pages.
It’s rough and ready. Messy and grungy and in the process I didn’t realise how much it has reflected my mood.
It’s not perfect.
I’ve been all over the place in terms of my moods these past few weeks. Serene and blissed out to stressed and anxious and angry.
And this messy, at times ugly, journal has captured it all. And I am grateful for its space and non-judgmental welcome.
I’ll be back here over the coming days to share the spreads that have been created in this journal. Just so you can see a bit more of my process and practice.
One more thing. The back of this journal was converted into a mini guide book to take on my travels with me. Since I didn’t make that trip, I haven’t been back into the back of the journal. I was also contemplated chucking the whole thing and start a new journal as I felt it would be painful and annoying to continue to use the journal as its purpose was for my time away.
But instead of avoiding the pain and frustrations and disappointments, continuing to use the journal has meant I haven’t run away from the feels but have allowed myself to sit with the feels.
I’m not sure if that means I’m a glutton for punishment or if I’m just all in with this life, my life of attempting to thrive rather than just survive.
Still showing up in this journal, just created from a magazine man, has given me the time and space to work through my feelings and come through feeling grateful for my life and the people I have around me who care about me and love me.
Visual journaling, it kills me in how it’s such a powerful tool for staying present and connecting with the self. Amazeballs!
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
Living Wild Studios 