This wasn’t the way he promised it would be.
Bare floors, five to a room, babies’
faces lined with hunger, piercing
cries towards an empty oil lamp.
Love squeezes out of lives.
Boys shooting boys as regular as angel
dusting on banana leaves, long
and glistening. Violence standing
caged on corners with broken
standpipes, living next to dread.
The seething and faltering silence
as the dreamed for life
bobs on a distant horizon.
The moon is nowhere in sight.*
*Laventille, Smokestack Books, 2015
I’m practicing how to show up in spaces, alone and with others, in fullness.
I’ve used wholeness before. Striving to get back to that sense of being whole, as we enter as already into this world. And then for the rest of our lives society and culture pull us away from our wholeness. When we realise, usually when much older and not giving a fuck, we spend our time and energy attempting to get back to that wholeness. This is a practice too, but to be whole sounds final and also out of reach.
Fullness. While fullness seems something that can be embraced now. In the present, moment to moment. Fullness for me gives the middle finger to those who have criticised me by saying I’m too much. Too Black. Too fat. Too loud. Too enthusiastic. Too Alive. Too much.
Fullness is me embracing my too-muchness and giving off that ‘don’t care less’ energy.
I’m showing up in fullness. Come join me.
A book is much more faithful than a lover I think.
A book can open you up to so many different experiences at the same time as reaffirming everything you’ve been feeling and thinking and struggling with.
I’m not sure a lover can do all that for me. But many more than one lover could?
Hence spending copious amounts of time in bed with books.
Reclaiming the Black Body: Nourishing the Home Within by Alisha McCullough is one of my current reads.
I used to be of the persuasion to read one book at a time. Devote all my time, focus and attention to one book in order to reap the glory/ knowledge/ whatever!
But these past few years, as I’ve become thirsty for stimulation and attempting to find like-minded people/ theories/ lovers, I’m moved into reading multiple books simultaneously, also known as “syntopical reading”.
And these books are not on the same topic either. They range from poetry around grief, non-fiction on gardening, personal essays around deep time, romantic and crime novels and short stories about myths and history. The list goes on!
I’m so enjoying this eclectic and multiple reading practice as it’s keeping me engaged, creating unique and original connections and it’s keeping me feeling loved.
By me.
So one of my current squeezes is Reclaiming the Black Body and I’m devouring it in small digestible bites because it is speaking to my soul.
This book is calling to attention the deep-seated, long-time, disproportionate amount of trauma, violence, marginalisation, discrimination, and adverse childhood experiences of Black women and femmes, and confounded by misognoir and racism, how we have learned to cope with it all through increased imbalanced eating behaviours.
Usually called “eating disorders” but even using that language implies that the individual is to blame and implying that some of us are just not equipped to nourish our bodies and do not know how to look after ourselves.
‘Disorder’ implies stigma and comes from the Western health ‘care’ system which from time has excluded and harmed Black people.
So this book is a balm for the wounds of silent struggles Black women and femmes have been going through around eating imbalances including myself. And is a vindication that we’re not fucked up and broken and just beasts, being less than human but that we are doing our best with the tools that we have to strive and thrive within a system that is hell-bent, historically and now, to demonise the Black body.
I will continue to cosy up with this book and others in bed, night and day, as reading is hitting the spot!
I developed a fear of taking up space in my own body.
I wish I could pinpoint the day, the moment that this fear took over my life.
Maybe it was after another beating from my dad for asking why?
Maybe it was after another meal where I didn’t like the food but was forced to eat it?
Maybe it was after my dad’s expected death and the silence that followed?
Maybe it was after another day at school of fighting the bullies who called me a fat black cow?
Maybe it was after those suggestions from my family to stop eating chips and bread and to eat something better?
Maybe it was after my ‘so-called’ school friends laughed and teased me because when I jumped my boobs jumped too?
Maybe it was after when I was still a girl I had a woman’s body that bled monthly?
Maybe it was after I walked down a street and a strange man leered at my body as something to have?
Maybe it was after I’d devoured my teen magazines and saw only white skinny girls getting the guys?
Maybe it was after we went roller skating and I couldn’t roller skate but spent time on my butt?
Maybe it was after that trip to Paris and the French guy I liked didn’t even look at me?
Maybe it was after I’d convinced myself that being smaller and whiter inside would help me to be smaller and whiter outside?
I’ve got a chapter to write and it’s going nowhere fast.
I hate it when I think I have all the time in the world to complete a writing task and then I procrastinate.
I know I procrastinate because it’s important to me. Very important to me and I don’t want to get it wrong. So I do nothing instead.
Well not really nothing. This is my bedroom wall, where I’ve started to put up post-it notes to help me with the chapter on fugitivity.
This makes me feel as if I’m doing something. Seeing this everyday also, I hope, makes something go into my creative brain subconsciously. I’m hoping that living with it makes the wheels start turning and connections being made.
What I’m learning with fugitivity is that is’s not linear. Not a straight line from captivity to freedom, from unfreedom to freedom. It is argued that fugitivity performs freedom ‘as a constant struggle’ ( R. Slavitt cited in Davis, 2016).
This I hold close as I attempt ( struggle!) to write this chapter around fugitivity as this is not going to be a linear chapter from A to B to C etc. This chapter with its content and structure and form will be dancing with unfreedom and freedom, constantly struggling to convey meaning around fugitivity at the same time as remaining free from the academic frameworks and restricts and expectations.
In order to write about fugitivity I need to take on board fugitive methods and practices.
I’m spiralling and circling back and forth in a good way, in an honest way and hopefully the chapter will be the result.
This piece originally was published over on Medium with Binderful. I’m drawing this piece into the Living Wild Studios archives. Because I can!
“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.
I have a love/ hate relationship with my body.
Usually I’m in the hate spectrum. I’ve internalised beliefs about the Black woman’s body that are oppressive and ugly that have been passed down through generation and generation.
I can’t remember a time that I haven’t felt that my body didn’t fit. That my body was too big, too fat, too Black. I’ve learned how to keep myself small, keep myself invisible( even while being hypervisible), keep myself safe.
Those moments when I’ve felt glory being within my body have been few and far between. And when I’ve got to that point of accepting my body, accepting myself, I can’t remember how I got there to get back there now.
My mum was thin once. But most of my life I remember her as being overweight. I saw pictures of her slim and I asked her what happened. Even that question is loaded and judgmental and wrong.
She said when she had lost all the weight she wasn’t well and she wasn’t happy. She said she was happier being fat. I didn’t ask any further questions probably because I didn’t like her answer.
I’m pondering this now, here. Wondering and wandering around my body.
My time of hibernation is coming to an end and there is a whole heap of resistance. It’s not as if I’ve got loads of work lined up. It’s the thought that my time will not be mine alone, to do with what I want come April and beyond.
I took a major risk taking/ making the time away to rest and dream. But for me there was no other choice. I think I was a bit burnt out around the edges and I needed to pull back and heal. And I have done that but there is no end point for healing. No rubber stamping a certificate.
I continue with my morning routine and hope to continue beyond the hibernation period. And this will be where the true test lies. To continue to love on myself daily before I have to meet the world will make the difference between continuing on the healing journey or coming to a full stop. As there can be no healing and growth and self-love if I don’t protect the time to {BE}.
Living Wild Studios 