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.
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.
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!
Things are definitely looking up when I give myself the time and space to look to the sky.
Spending time cloud watching is always a good indication to/ for myself that I’m slowing down, that I’m breathing that little bit deeper, than I’m present.
When clouds go missing from my radar, from my daily view then it’s time to worry.
As it’s another indication that I’m not taking my medicine, that I’m allowing the shit of this world to overtake me, to bog me down.
Cloud watching, cloud appreciation is such a simple task, gift to myself and yet the loss of it, can mean the loss of self.
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.
I’m about 116 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Started back in December 2025, my creative sketchbook practice is about turning up each day to the blank page, in an altered book, and getting creative. It’s about playing with my resources, stuff I’m been accumulating for years and always seem to have an excuse not to use. Not to start.
Well 116 days ago I started. I put paint to page without knowing what was going to happen. And over 100 days later, it’s the same feeling. Turn up to the page and dive into the unknown, allowing my intuition, my inner wisdom to guide my hand and heart towards what becomes. Towards what is created.
What I’m gotten into the habit of doing is when I used a brayer with paint on the page, I start by adding a drop or two of paint on a blank page of another sketchpad. A kid’s cheap wire bound sketch pad. I’ll roll out my brayer coating it in paint before I let it roll into my creative sketchbook.
And repeat with other colours, other rolls of paint in different directions. Each time, paint is added and subtracted from the kid’s sketchpad.
I’m calling this my sidekick. Think Robin to Batman. Think Watson to Holmes. An associate, a supporting role. A necessary comrade in the scheme of things. Without which the main action, or in this case creation would not occur.
Always a happenstance. Sometimes a masterpiece. This sidekick is full of surprises. And sometimes are much better to look at than the ‘so-called’ finished piece in the creative sketchbook.
Sometimes pages from the sidekick are torn and stuck into the main squeeze, the creative sketchbook, and are involved once more in the daily creative practice. Reusing, recycling, reviewing.
Each sketchbook, each piece, each stroke of paint feeds into the next from the last. I just love the process and what it throws up. This might be just another reason why I keep returning and keep diving into this creative sketchbook practice. Daily!
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.
Living Wild Studios 