Our ability to reframe failure into something that aligns with growth is key. When I fail at my attempts to execute an idea, I now have more information and I can use that to move forward. If I allow myself to feel defeated and tell myself that I’m not very good at this, then failure becomes a toxic thought that limits me and ensures I do not grow. – Cheryl Taves
Today I am 150 days into my creative sketchbook practice. Ego speaking here, but I’m pretty proud of this achievement. It demonstrates to me that I can be consistent.
These 150 days are evidence that I can change the script. I can change the narrative from not being consistent enough in my art practice, hells bells in anything really.
I can change the narrative into something more true, more closer to my reality. I can change the narrative, I am changing the narrative toward recognising that I can be consistent.
My consistency muscle is being exercised, challenged and stretched.
With 150 days of turning up daily for my practice, I can quite rightly say, my consistency muscle has been strengthened.
Nothing I’m flicking through is feeding my desires. Nothing is filling the void of just wanting to switch off and forget my troubles. Pap TV is what I usually call it. The stuff that renders me brain dead.
And then I happen upon The Alabama Solution. This is how I be sometimes. I feed an itch, a curiosity.
I shared the other day about my abolitionist tendencies. Well this Oscar nominated documentary is furthering those occupations.
Man oh man, this documentary hard hitting. And I dare anyone to watch it and say those inmates deserve the inhumane treatments, the injustice they receive in prison. I dare you.
There is a tendency to think people who do the crime should do the time and deserve everything that comes their way. They’re in prison so must have done something to be there and what befalls them in there, well they had it coming.
They be evil. They be degenerate. They be monsters. Lock away, throw away the key. We say.
This indoctrinated, conditioned response to crime and punishment, criminals makes us, the general public, no better that the ‘monsters’ we are condemning. That we are putting away and not caring about.
They be human beings, with flaws, vulnerabilities dealing with issues with no help from anyone else.
No chance of redemption or rehabilitation because they are left to rot. Or are exploited, farmed out as cheap or free labour.
This here documentary The Alabama Solution explores the lives of the incarcerated. The viewer gets to see what it’s really like in the prisons in Alabama. How they are beaten and killed and no one is held to account.
What is remarkable is that these men are behind bars, classed as the underclass of society, the forgotten people, not by their families I may add, but they still manage to coordinate a mass strike across all of Alabama’s prisons in protest of the treatment they receive behind bars. In a peaceful way , they are demanding that their human rights be recognised and that the Federal Government steps in to compel the state of Alabama to treat their prisoners right, with respect and dignity.
Prisoners from all backgrounds, 20,000 strong refuse to work as slave labour anymore in 2022.
They downed tools. They rationalised that instead of meeting violence with violence they chose to hit them where it hurts, in the economics/ money, rather than hit them in the mouth.
Straight away the Governor was trying to break the strike. After a couple of days, rationing their food. Prolonging feeding for up to 14 hours a day and then when they did feed them just small amounts of food. But together the men shared the food they’d been stocking piling . As a community they came together to make sure no one starved. There was unity. Unity never see like it within prison system as it suits the system to have them fighting each other. Divide and rule. Divide and conquer.
But together, standing together strong, there’s power there and that’s dangerous. And has to be suppressed.
How come we, the general public, the majority not behind bars haven’t been able to organise a strike? A withdrawal of our labour to bring the system to a stop?
One of the main spokesperson for the prisoners, Robert Earl, who had already been beaten to near death for being an activist for prisoner’s rights and lost the sight in one eye for it, was taken from his cell in a head lock and taken to solitary confinement.
Again a similar tactic is being used, a tactic used from time in the Civil Rights Movement for example, cut off the head of the movement, the leaders and the strike will fold.
And you think it would happen, as the prisoners are vulnerable, no one can see what goes on behind closed doors. No one listens to them as they are criminals, they lie and are untrustworthy. Right?
They’re murderers and rapists. But that doesn’t happen. As this action, this strike is more than one man. Someone else steps in to take th baron, to keep rallying the cry that the strike continues until the demand are met.
And the demands are not unreasonable demands. They’re not asking to be all set free. They’re asking to be recognised as human beings with rights. To be respected and protected from violence within prison. Violence from the guards who are supposed to be supporting their rehabilitation.
But how are you gonna rehabilitate anyone if you’re beating on them?
I must go back and complete my watch of this programme now and see how the strike goes. However, this strike was in 2022 documented in The Alabama Solution documentary which was a decade long project of capturing the conditions in prison by the incarcerated cell phones.
I’ve just read that the 3 main instigators of this strike, including Robert Earl, have been placed back into solitary confinement as of January 2025 in retaliation for their activism and standing up for the rights of incarcerated citizens. And probably because of their involvement in the documentary.
You see what I did there. Citizens, human beings, not criminals. The language we use is part of our conditioning. Language is power. And I refuse to continue to use such dehumanising language in reference to people who are incarcerated. They are still people with needs and wants, desires drams, pain and sufferings.
Solitary confinement. No contact with family. This is an abuse of power behind bars. Out of public view and no reasons are given for these movements/ punishments. Solitary confinement is a form of torture. It is not a safety and security issue to the individual but it is an abuse of power by the authorities and highlights what a vulnerable position incarcerated people are in when behind the pros walls. This is another example of the denying of human rights.
There is talk of another strike happening this year, the withdrawal of labour. This can only mean that conditions have not improved within the Alabama Department of Corrections prison facilities. So I already know the ending, what the conclusion of this documentary will be. But I will watch it to the end.
Not as a spectator in the spectacle but as a witness for these incarcerated citizens as they, by any means necessary, attempt to get their voices, their issues, concerns and fears outside of those walks. The least I can do is watch and listen and share.
Oakmoss lichen is a sign of clean air quality in an area.
There’s a smear campaign against the current leader of the Green Party of England and Wales is Zack Polanski. It’s argued that Polanski, a Jew, is being anti-semitic because he’s arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.
I was brought up on the argument that people died so we could have the vote. So we must vote.
Reform are running on the slogan is if you want to get rid of Starmer, Vote Reform.
It’s a privilege that many people around the world do not have. The right to vote. The right to have their say.
Many people are turning away from Labour because they’ve moved towards the right in their rhetoric and handling of immigration. And the cost of living is sky high.
Rain or shine, day and night, I would walk to my polling station and mark the box next to the red rose with a bold ‘X’.
The Conservative Party, known for its racism and classism, old school boy elitist network, has broken records with being the first political party in the UK to have a Black Woman as their leader.
My pooling card came a couple of weeks ago with the instructions to turn up to vote with photo ID.
Millions of people go to the polls today to decided on the councillors to control their neighbourhoods.
Voting on empty promises.
Voting on empty reforms.
Voting on different names but representing the same arsewipe policies.
Voting on keeping things as they are.
Voting on keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor.
Voting cannot vote this away.
The tools we are given, granted and offered cannot build anything new.
The voting system was never meant for us to achieve any gains or resemblance of power.
Voting changed nothing.
W.E.B. Du Bois, disturbs the tale that all of our ancestors died for the right to vote. Du Bois echoed Parsons decades later in 1956, writing in a piece titled “I Won’t Vote,” “There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, “I Won’t Vote,” The Nation, October 20, 1956.
I no longer believe in the voting system. I no longer choose to uphold the system. I choose to refuse.
I’m been expanding my reading of late. I’ve just become a member of the Abolitionist Futures Reading Group which is focusing on abolition, obviously.
Reading in community, sharing ideas and thoughts which are probably considered radical, revolutionary to the majority is so refreshing and affirming.
It makes me feel less alone in my way of thinking and {BEING}. It gives me hope that there are alternatives to the current system and that together we can get there.
Abolition, might be associated recently with prisons, or defunding the police, and closing detention centres.
But abolition is much more than this. Started with the aim of abolishing Transatlantic Slavery, abolition of prisons has been there since the inception of prisons themselves. Abolition is revolutionary because in order to decarcerate the Prison Industrial Complex not only does the whole of society have to change, be overhauled not reformed as that just wouldn’t work, but we also, the people have to change.
The world has to change at the same time as the people within this world change. We have to move away from the indoctrinated belief that prisons and the police, state terror more like, are the only means of deterring crime and criminals. Which jus isn’t the case.
We have to stop focusing on the individual ‘evildoers’ who deserve the harshest punishments for whatever crimes they committed, to taking an honest look at our societies and cultures that have forced people to commit such crimes ( or in a lot of cases no crimes being committed but still punished with prison sentences.)
I’m talking about poverty, economics, drug abuse, race, class, sexuality, isolation, migration etc.
To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.
Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition. – Angela Y. Davis
Me reading, thinking and becoming anti-prisons, anti-establishment, becoming an abolitionist is just the next step on this journey of fugitivity, via black anarchism. And I’m so pleased and relieved that I don’t have to walk this path alone. I have a community around me as support.
In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas‘ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.” The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.
Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.
This is Afro-Surreal!
This was my first brush up against the term Afro-Surreal, even though as soon as I read what it means/ what it is, I knew in my bones that I’ve been living it, I’ve been experiencing it from time.
Miller takes the time to lay out what Afro-Surrealism is NOT.
Afro-Surrealism is not SURREALISM or AFRO-FUTURISM
SURREALISM is a white, European, literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the subconscious. It’s dreamlike, fantastic imagery and an illogical juxtaposition of subject matter.
Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: “European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical. Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement “is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black.”
AFRO-FUTURISM
Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future.
Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need to speculate about the disasters that are coming our way or are just around the corner, somewhere in the future. The worst case scenarios of bombs, genocide, floods, fires and destruction are here now.
What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.
RIGHT NOW. Trump is President of USA and is destroying/ dismantling democracy over there, at the same time as creating wars and genocide around the world.
RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.
Briefly, the ‘A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL’ includes:
The unknown worlds and wonders are emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, Jean-Michel Basquiat,Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet, Zora Neale, Chester Himes etc.
Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past, revisiting the old ways with new eyes. Appropriating symbols of the past, conjuring the ancients for now.
Like the collage of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the use of excess is used as subversion. Hybridization is a form of rebellion, refusal, disobedience.
Afro-Surreal was the word I chose for 2026. My guiding word of the year. I might not have posted a lot about it here, and yet, it has been a constant so far, bubbling away in the background. Shimmering away just beneath the surface, ready to boil to the top, or over when something happens to question or disrupt my reality.
I chose Afr0-Surreal as my word of the year because I was doing it already. I had finally found a word for what I was experiencing and I wanted to explore it further. Unpick it, hold it up to the light and examine it closely.
In a sense, it’s an attempt to go back to the beginning, go back to the source of this term and its meaning and how it does show up in my life and practice.
D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote “The Afro-surreal Manifesto”. He is the source who coined the term. He could only find the term being used one time before this by Amiri Baraka, who used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. Miller went to Baraka asking him if he had any issue with him using Afro-Surreal and running with the term and concept. Miller asked permission and was granted it. Since then Afro-Surreal / Afro-Surrealism has gone on to be a genre or school of art and literature.
I’ll start my study with looking at what Miller has to say about Afro-Surreal and continue from there as since 2009, Miller came out in October 2024 to say that Afro-Surrealism is dead. And when I read this I was like, noooooo. I’ve just come to the party and it’s over? But then on further reading I totally get why Miller is saying this.
Go back re-read the paragraphs I have already written about the inception, the birth of Afro-Surrealism. And then imagine or consider this, predominately white institutions, universities, academics trying to erase the work, trying to erase the manifesto created by Miller in 2009 as the beginning of Afro-Surrealism, trying to change the history of Afro-Surrealism, sound familiar?
We’ll be exploring this and more but let’s get things straight from the start, the names we need to know and give credit to. Amiri Baraka and D. Scot Miller. Remember those names as we insert them back into history, into their rightful places of the founding fathers of Afro-surrealism. And as Miller has said lately, in 2024:
So what to do?
When Brooklyn Rail contacted me, I understood the impact and reach of the publication, and after some serious reflection, it came to me that if I brought Afrosurrealism to life, I was the only person to be able to announce its demise in order to divorce my vision from this white-led hostile takeover. So I killed Afrosurrealism in front of the very people who need it alive in order to feed off of it.
After making plans for the year, 2026, April was a time to reflect and reset after the first quarter of the year.
April didn’t go to plan.
April is always a funny, awkward, weird month for me, what with it being cut up with Easter holidays. And both my babies being born in April. This year was also another April birthday as we welcomed Nath’s partner into the fold.
April is something and nothing.
April, I thought it would be a good time to review the situation. It happened I suppose but not to the depth and width that I would have like. That I probably needed.
April has come and gone.
Come the end of the month and I don’t feel any further forward. And it feels like last year, when I couldn’t get traction after an elongated winter hibernation. Every month that came along was like a reset, a restart as I had no momentum.
I’m not sure if I’m that bad this year but there’s that lingering feeling of what am I doing? Where am I going?
April, Who am I?
I could blame the menopause as I feel as if I’m in that stage of life now. Everything is slowing down or giving up working ‘properly’ bodily, emotionally and psychologically.
Some days I’m missing the plot , dropping the ball, checking all the way out.
In these moments of losing myself, or any kind of sense of self and direction, I fall back into trusted routines and rituals.
I go back to the start, back to ‘go’ and don’t collect my £200. But restart anyway.
I invest in my morning rituals. Those habits that ground me and set me up for the rest of the day.
Waking up early, getting some fresh air into the house and my lungs. Making fresh ground coffee and grabbing my visual journal and letting everything spill onto the page. Get ready and walk out. Walk where? Anywhere. Just be outside and give thanks to be able to {BE}.
May. This is my plan for May.
To stick close to my morning routine and everything else can follow. The sea and Mother Nature are in there too, no doubt.
Hopefully, putting down this trusted track will help support getting me back to myself.
Living Wild Studios 