I wrote this spoken word poem after the collection of essays ‘White’ by Film Studies academic Richard Dyer
In order to have Blackness or Brownness, we must have Whiteness
talking about racism puts the onus on the victim
without any inclination to discuss the system
it’s easy to talk in the language of DiAngelo or McIntosh
that keeps it between people, not how White power has quashed
and undermined movements like the Black Panthers
and DiAngelo tells a clipped narrative that doesn’t really answer
questions about history and we got to this
since White supremacy is fluid and adapts and disjoints itself to fit
cus terms like “fragility” and “privilege” tend to only flirt
at the frames of…
I wrote this piece after a fellow student on my masters course posted a poem by Palestinian-American poet-journalist Noor Hindi called ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying’
Additionally I also found it an incredibly sombre experience to attend a Free Palestine protest in Northampton in May 2021.
My degree was a gentleman’s club
of dead poets. Tattooed trees planted by
corpsed hands from the Firm of
of Pitt & Pitt, an England gassed
by the Etonian variant. I wanted to pen
incantations on #MeToo and BLM
but we were forced to write about stems
and rosebuds. So, naturally I wrote of 400 years
in verse and line breaks that bloomed claret
not the sustained incandescence of the Mayflower
in big 2021 … but Black Britain looks cross-eyed
at the British Museum. Despite the
asylum-like White walls, 180,000 Londoners
marched for a free Palestine –
a nation state…
I started writing a poetry book in lockdown about late Millennials / Generation Z, and this is one of the poems I came up with.
Yes, I wrote a poem about Pokémon … fight me.
I have burned untold days
on Leaf Green, Emerald and Heart Gold
throwing balls at battle beasts for lols
just to give myself a shock to the system
that there’s more to life than 9 to 5
kids in 2016 spoke to me about Pokémon
like they discovered it. They stare perplexed
at my guffaw. I was there in its
heyday of 2004 in battles between
Magma and Aqua, and they still lecture me.
I couldn’t blame them. Once those ‘mons
latch on that’s you for life. They spoke of this
new magic called Pokémon Go. I remember
Pokemon…
Working with Norfamton these past weeks on the Windrush Doorstep Befriending Team, it was interesting talking to Shereen on how the original critiques of the Scandal did not go far enough in their primary challenges to the Home Office.
Having grown up in close proximity to the Windrush Generation as a grandchild and great-grandchild of Jamaican and Grenadian migrants, watching the crisis unravel since 2018 struck a nerve. Before my paternal Jamaican grandparents moved from Staffs to Spain, I once upon a time would have been roaming around their house to see photographs harking back to their lives in the 1960s and 1970s. But today, I can only easily visit my maternal grandparents to see such photos of Black Northants in this era, in the years that followed numbers of Caribbean arrivals by air and sea.
In 2016, Professor David Olusoga released his documentary series ‘Black and British: A Forgotten History.’ In episode one ‘First Encounters’, archaeologist Dr Richard Benjamin talks about how proud he is of the men that stood watch at Aballava.
Whilst watching the first episode featuring Aballava, we must acknowledge that Olusoga and Benjamin were also not the first Black and Brown scholars to discuss Black history — from J. A Rogers and his work that combatted racist views of history, to Trinidadian Ron Ramdin on the working class, resulting in The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (1987). A short breath after Peter Fryer’s Staying Power (1984). An argument could be made, though, is David Olusoga was the first to take it mainstream.
Anyone that was came through the British education system would have learnt about…
I wrote this poem inspired from a thread on Twitter I saw not long back all about the language Caribbean people use, something I have oft seen in members of the Windrush.
You know your conversationalist
is a West Indian when they sit
mugging the Queen’s English
growing up I recall
my grandmother and her friends
proclaiming Will Shakespeare “a jobsworth”
you know them ladies
with their diddly hands
like a cantankerous rex in the front room
instead of calling us kids rude
they would call us “boisterous youths”
or “rascals.” Women with names
like Phyllis that’d say
“I’m jos going out to the veranda”
using words like finicky
as she plays with her needle and thread
labelling her niece, a “craven buzzard”
for taking the last piece of plantain
like “highfalutin rapscallions”
I wrote this poem last year inspired by the these leaflets going around Bristol which got me thinking about Englishness and different white identities. This piece also somewhat comes inspired by ‘White Teeth’ by English novelist Zadie Smith.
This would be an opportune moment to direct you to a great piece of poetry by Northamptonshire’s own Will Reid with his ‘My England’
A few months ago
there were leaflets going round Bristol
saying “it’s okay to white”
but that is not the same as being English
race and culture split like Brexit
I have been told I am English
but what is English culture
cus the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh
have theirs, with a pride in self
the etymology of English / England —
etymology meaning word history — comes from
the Old English pertaining to the Land of Angles
who were Germanic in origin
so, when the far-right boast English nation
history replies with songs of immigration
what…
Not wanting to get sucked into the recency bias that comes with new dramas, I waited three weeks to watch Bridgerton.
Writing as someone that watches an awful lot of historical dramas, it is by no means a surprise to see that Bridgerton was attacked for its inclusion of Black and Brown characters by the usual racist hordes in the period drama fandom. Also disliked by some for being ‘too modern’ in its construction, the modern-ness reminded me of what happened in the 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House on BBC One. During the mid-naughties, the Andrew Davies adaptation of the classic Dickens novel took a massive step forward in the way television programmes of that kind were made…
There’s been lots of chat on Critical Race Theory, so I wrote this poem after a piece I heard performed by Jess Green at an open-mic night in Kettering, Run Your Tongue open-mic (2018).
when I was doing my undergrad at university,
it was by chance I found out about Critical Race Theory
that there was scholarship that articulated my encounters
with Britain, as numerous just pass racism off as banter
I found out my life is also grounded in an academic position
pioneered by the likes of Richard Delgado and Patricia Williams
but Kemi says that critical race theory is regressive and racist
and she’s showing how Whiteness is more than white faces
in that debate, you saw this was more than denial
as she then proceeded to put Black Lives Matter on trial
but when you follow the theory…
Most of us went to school learning how activist Rosa Parks sat down to stand up, but her activism didn’t start here and her story is one that fits into a range of subjects — from history and PSHE to journalism, criminology and the social sciences at large.
Recently in conversation with a friend about how the world wars are taught, we came to the agreement that the inter-war years are treated like they don’t exist. That void of 1919–1938 where race riots could be be found in many British cities, and the infamous Tulsa massacre of 1921. …
