love

Current Reading

| Sheree

along with other themes and issues like abolition, emergence, black study, black anarchy, fugitivity, living archives , ancestral wisdom, African cosmologies

Already, just a few pages in, and I feel that this is going to shift my practice along even further down this path of refusal, stealing my body away through liberatory practices and beings.

A plot upon a plot

| Sheree

After my day retreat with WOC Azadi I came home with a date in the diary to play.

I’d set it up with Theresa Easton to go play with her letterpress printing gear again. I didn’t have so much as a plan as I did have a word: PLOT.

I rocked up with a number of different subtracts to play with and just wanted to explore what I mean when I use the word, PLOT.

We set up the printing plate with the word PLOT repeated in different type fonts. We arranged them into a neat A5 sized piece and then let the inking commence.

I played with different coloured inks, directions of papers, different papers and got myself into a meditative rhythm.

It was so much fun and I’m so grateful to Theresa to allowing me to play in her studio for free.

It was good to catch up too and chew the fat.

More. I want more play like this.

psychic intrusions

| Sheree

For half of my life, I lived with someone who made me question my reality.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that within white supremacy culture and racial capitalism, I was primed to see myself as guilty and so discipline myself accordingly.

So then when I get into a relationship with someone who had their own mental issues and superiority complex and sense of entitlement, then I’m already primed to let whatever they do slide and make the (wrong) assumption that it is me who’s wrongs too demanding. Too needy. Too much. Too stupid.

I was primed and it was frequently reinforced that I knew nothing. That my reality was not reality and that if only I listened to the white man, let him lead me and control me then I would be saved. Or at least assimilated.

Psychic intrusions, near and far. The far is society itself. The colonial settler mindset that those who are colonised are already flawed, wrong, inferior and in need of assistance. In need of direction. In need of being controlled.

Psychic intrusions that meant that for most of my life I’ve been hating on self. Thinking and feeling less than. Thinking and feeling that I need to prove my worth. Prove my humanity.

Of course my eyes are open now.

Of course I’m taking back my psyche and coming out fighting.

I’m not playing this subordinate role anymore. I’m not playing stupid. Because that’s what it all was/is a charade. A falsehood.

I ain’t stupid.

Three Sisters Brighton Beach

| Sheree

On the early morning of 13 May, a call went out that someone was in difficulty in the sea off Brighton Beach. When the rescue team got to the beach, the bodies of three women were found.

I’ll be honest. At first, I thought this was a tragedy involving (white) women with the use of the word ‘women’ and with the media coverage this disaster was receiving reinforced this assumption.

Later these women were identified as three sisters. Three black women, Jane Adetoro, and Christina Walter and Rebecca Walter.

What a heartbreaking tragedy to happen within one family. My heart and deepest sympathy goes out to their family and friends.

In a heartbreaking tribute, their father Joseph said: “No words can truly describe the pain of losing three daughters in the prime of their lives. Jane, Christina, and Becky were more than daughters to me; they were my joy, my strength, and the beautiful light that filled our family with happiness and love.”

Sussex Police are investigating this tragedy and believe at this stage that there are no suspicious circumstances or criminal intent in connection to these deaths.

I don’t know how they can come to such findings so early in their investigations. And should keep an open mind. The only consolation is that the police and media are actively investigating and reporting the death of these three black women as far too often, as I’ve shared recently, the disappearance, murder and deaths of black women in suspicious circumstances is ignored, neglected and dismissed.

I hope the mysterious and tragic deaths of these women is soon to be investigated and explained for the sake of their families as this is such a sad sad case of affairs.