Another invisible door

When I was a fish my friends were fish too. It’s funny, we found each other again when we were human. I just can’t find my ancestors. Because I was a fish for too long, I think. Some of them might have swum with me, I hope so, alongside me, before my leap into the dry oxygen above passing over in some ship into the dreams of my mother who made me real again.

Wake up gasping for the breath of the broken surface, broken the from the wrong side.

If you were a fish it means you’re always looking.

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Clean eating

When you used to write every day. When did that stop? You’ve been asleep for so long, with eyes open and limbs moving and brain firing electricity everywhere but onto a blank page. Will January change things? Will the return of the light help? You’ve been feeling like yourself, that hasn’t changed, but the words were afraid and stayed away. No you were afraid and stayed away. After so many years and so many edits you’re frightened to keep writing because the words keep coming out true.

Cocoa farmer David Kebu Jnr holding fermenting cocoa beans
Irene Scott/AusAID [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Cocoa farmer David Kebu Jnr holding fermenting cocoa beans. Irene Scott/AusAID [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
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Quiet loud quiet

Any time the season changes we remember, because we can see, how things that were hidden can be revealed and how many ways we can change and be changed. Maybe it’s completely normal, for example, to have had languages that your tongue can’t speak any more, to have lost accents and memories, to move without conscious effort from one code to another.

image of hampstead heath in autumn

At some point in childhood it made sense to become invisible by fitting in: even as your sister convinced her playground colleagues that we had our own lion back home; or, having been born and initially raised in Broad Hull, to have said of you, ‘she can’t do an English accent.’

I miss the dust devil audience for We Are Dey Champions. I miss the kreosote ginnel to Oldfleet. But they are there in each question that begins, ‘Are you’ or ‘Where’.

Look, it’s the same for us all.

I still drop my hs when I can.

I put them back in if it’s going to help.

Within you there is another you, and within her another invisible her, and so on, and on, forever.

Sites.

I’ve been thinking about the places where experience, the history of our experiences, sits within our bodies.

In the hips, so that a yoga stretch can make memories surface.

In the spine, so that something unresolved can make you unable to unfurl.

ceiling light

In the centre of your chest, where your heart is, even though it’s just a pump, proven quite easily so by a simple test. Just a pump that we can feel sink when we hear bad news, or that grows heavy with sorrow. What’s happening inside? Does your blood get thicker so it can’t move so well? That this amazing muscle suddenly adds fibres to itself and fits and starts and murmurs?

We might not have souls that mimic our bodies, pinned like a paper clothes pattern to our edges. Our consciousness could be in our hearts, though the neurons in our brains do the work. And these places in our bodies, these repositories, are they like rock pools washed in and out by a tide? Filled now by a wave of consciousness, and left with the sandy residue of a past.

What anemones flower in those places in the dark of the middle of the night?

What can be re-opened. What can’t be lost.

I’ve been thinking about changing the title of my book in progress from ‘outrigger’ to something about a house of many rooms, after a bible note I heard at a friend’s funeral this week gone. This life is only one of those rooms. Imagine if we could open the doors and walk between each one.

We could say see you, instead of goodbye.

Pick me up and turn me round

 

I used to dismantle, remantle, unstock and restock the shelves of a tall wooden, cheap, bookcase every time I moved house. I think I’ve lived in 19 houses or flats, 2 countries, 5 cities. I think I might have got the bookcase when I briefly owned a house, and then when that didn’t really work out, I think what happened was that I felt dislodged, and as though I didn’t really live anywhere, unless the bookcase was with me.

It was pretty big, though. About 3 or 4 of my house moves happened within 18 months. The bookcase couldn’t survive that. Especially as at the time I was trying to let past things unfurl away from me, so that I could find myself again. Who knew where I’d gone? The bookcase, with its books, was like a tether. I used to look at it when I lived alone and feel at least something that I could recognise. But you can’t live in the past. And when some of the moves meant sharing a bunk bed with my mum, or renting a box room with just enough space for a child’s MDF bed, I couldn’t put the bookcase back together again. I wrapped the books in parcels of four or five, black plastic bags taped around them. They looked like packages of drugs I’d seen on TV. My grandma kept them in her loft.

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A great height

When I flew to North America I looked out of the plane window down at land brown and vast and felt, for the first time, no connection to what I saw. I was a stranger to it.

The school I went to had its own reverend. I think in one of the assemblies that he addressed that he talked about the feeling of coming home when he saw the arch of the Humber Bridge. I sort of knew what he meant, but only really sort of, because for me Hull means the turbid thick brown water of the River Hull, not even of the Humber, and it means the wrought iron bridges that would sometimes make me late for school if a boat were coming down the river so that they had to cantilever up. Also something about the smell of creosote on wooden fences, and the smell of chocolate (not there anymore) near by the permanently raised bridge recently visited by Banksy.

There is something about the physical landscape of a place that ties me to it, even places I haven’t been before. Birmingham greets me as though we’re good friends. The first time I came to East London it felt like we had something in common. Maybe I just like places of migration and movement, places with people and change. That vast landscape beneath the plane (Greenland?) was empty, so high up, and as terrifying as the ocean.

Our Daughters’ Daughters Will Adore Us

In 2016 an MP who was a woman was murdered. In 1918 a few women were allowed to vote for the first time in British history.

In 2017 a self-confessed molester became the President of the USA, and another in the closet molester of women began a man-slide down from grace, pulling Oz’s curtain with his fall, so that many other men with their trousers down were revealed.

This year we were made to reveal that women are systematically not paid as much as men.

I watch a programme about contemporary women, loaded with power and wealth, who derive their identities from the men they’re married to, refer to male gay friends as ‘my gays’, but become homophobes to attack one another (‘I heard that her husband’s gay‘).

The [otherwise excellent] National Theatre production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made me cry with anger at the use of a black woman as a setting, as a scenario, in which to tell stories of men’s relationships with each other.
All of this is to say that I’m confused, but maybe hopeful. But maybe just in despair.

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Enjoy that winning feeling

I started to go through the papers and books and folders and bags of stuff kept in corners and in piles and on chairs and behind the doors. I want to move house so I’m cleaning house. I found things out about my past. I found how much I was paid in my first career-type job, which was surprising because in my memory I’d been paid more than that. I found what I was paid for the next three jobs. The evidence was the faded printed payslips. My pay was reducing with each job. Which was weird.

I remembered something about how I was just going for jobs that sounded interesting, and were trying to do good things for people, and that I wanted to do, even if they would eventually end (at least one) in a tearful meeting with my boss, saying I can’t afford to do this, I need to pay rent and eat and pay for transport to get here. And another one ended with fewer tears at leaving, but more with rage at local authority corruption.

I’ve been lucky because I haven’t had to be homeless (technically) from leaving jobs, I mean, I’ve had periods of not really living anywhere, but I haven’t ever had to sleep on the street. That’s definitely more lucky than a lot of people. And I’ve been able to choose my jobs, sort of. I mean, I’ve been knocked back a lot, but I was raised with my mam always telling me this story, that I hated, about some sparrow who managed to survive winter because it didn’t feel sorry for itself. I was raised within racist communities. I went to a secondary school where everyone was richer than me but only some of them cleverer than me. I had a father who’s now estranged.

A Yoruba female hairdresser dressing the hair of a woman. Halftone after a photograph by A.W. Gelston.

Credit: Wellcome Collection, Free to use with attribution

I’ve been an outsider most of the time, so it doesn’t hurt me that much to get rejected for jobs. I didn’t ever think that much of people who knocked me back for that kind of thing. I hate to get rejected for my writing as that comes from something more soft-bellied than my working class instinct for work, and my Hull-upbringing instinct for dour expectation of class, gender and race based discrimination in the workplace.

On the other hand, some of that belligerence still comes through when my writing’s rejected: something about the potential of hob-nobbing in the literature world were I to become some kind of published person makes me nauseous. I don’t really want to mix in with the circles that I’m told form the literati. I tell myself that I just want to write small things that I like.

But

nothing changes on its own.

I see that in my work-self’s context. The poor old archives world, with so many good intentions pinned to its lapel but at heart lethargic towards change, is being slowly brought to the point where its local shop for local people will be filled with strangers touching their precious things. So I mustn’t let a squeamishness seeping of the last parts of my kidhood shyness stop me getting in to the literati glitterati by the window, back door, cat flap, mousehole, or mud-clung to the sole of a shoe.

One day you’ll come down to your stone flagged kitchen to have a blue china cup of tea at the kitchen island, your toes warmed in fleece lined slippers, and you’ll have my book tucked under your arm.

I might have a chip on my shoulder but I am from Hull, so the chip’s dusted with American chip spice. On the other shoulder there’s a pattie buttie. And as I’m from Nigeria too why not add an akara necklace, and moin moin for boots? I’ll stop now. Hungry.

***
I saw a friend post some kind of twitter meme where you noted five books that weren’t necessarily your favourites, but on seeing the list a stranger would know who you were (or something like that). Here are mine, at this moment in January 2018.
Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (I didn’t know someone else could write about my childhood, I mean, the facts were all different).
Number 9 Dream, David Mitchell
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig
Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

***
I didn’t really make new year’s resolutions, but I did download a checklist app so that I can see whether what I think I will be up to this year (and what I think would be a good idea for me to get up to) actually happens. My to-do lists at work got very complex by the last month of the year. For such a simple sounding job – more focussed in principle than other jobs I’ve had – it’s turned out to need the most brain wattage of my work life. I’m kind of into that though. It’s interesting trying to get untangley. I think by the end of December I had two notebook to do lists, a post it note sub-list, an excel spreadsheet, email flagging system and a kanban board all on the go. I was full of winter lurgy, [pre]menstrual hormones and painkiller though, so I might have hallucinated some of that.

***
In January you shouldn’t talk about the dead year at all. So sorry, I don’t mean to. The three theatre things that changed my life and perspective in 2017 were The Ferryman (Jez Butterworth), Salt (Selina Thompson), Barbershop Chronicles (Inua Ellams).

http://theferrymanplay.com/
http://selinathompson.co.uk/work/salt/
https://fueltheatre.com/projects/barber-shop-chronicles

Hey ho, let’s go.

A Japanese style monkey wearing a black hat and red shirt while holding a fan and a flower.

Credit: Wellcome Collection

The maker of miniatures

I went to see the Basquiat exhibition at the Barbican. I don’t have anything clever to say about it. It made me think again about identity and who we think we are, or might be, or become. It seems to me that Basquiat was between more worlds than only being the black artist in the white scene, homeless to famous, private school to sleeping on a bench, between languages, between forms of expression.

Maybe the most punk rock thing to do is something that you think is a good idea and probably everyone else will hate. Has anyone read the Stephen Millhauser story, In the Reign of Harald IV? What do you think is going on at the end of it?

Here are some more discarded words from the old version of the book.

My head thuds. ‘Set me off again?’ I ad-lib, ‘That was a long time ago.’ I hold my breath. Don’t push too far. Let it come. What more there is, let it come.
‘Yeah I suppose so. I mean everyone’s a bit nuts when they’re kids. I’ve done my share of wild things,’ Debbie says. Her attention is somewhere inside her head. She laughs.
I laugh too, clipping it, trying to cover up clipping it. Act natural. I have my hands shoved into my jeans pockets and I feel your hand grow inside my fist. A tiny baby hand becoming fleshy. I jerk my hand out of my pocket. Debbie doesn’t notice. I flex my fingers, find a glove in my jacket pocket and put it on.

Shared Ownership

This rewrite I’ll break the back of, at the cost of thousands of words of the old version of the book. Probably about 40,000 words. They weren’t, or aren’t, bad words. It’s not their fault, but they don’t work together, not as a whole. The great white whale of the novel is being gutted, with the blubber cut away.

Some of the waste words I’ll put up on this blog now and then, so that they have some kind of after-life. Maybe they’ll turn into stories of their own, part-buy, part-rent. Part old, part new. Part lost part found. And still not enough in the bank.

 

Here are a few of them:

It’d been at least twenty years since the last time I’d seen Aunty Maggie and dad’s funeral.

I picture her by the graveside, her dyed-red hair pulled back into a ponytail so hard it lifted up her eyebrows. I spotted her between the bounces of light reflecting from my Nigerian aunties’ lip gloss; I caught sight of her between their Hayes head-dresses; Aunty Maggie’s brown eyes set into a face drawn with lack of sleep and a lot of eyeliner. Her lips disappeared into her mouth. Her black cotton blouse still carried its shop creases. Her black skirt was pulling itself apart at its seams. Her legs ending in patent black high heels.

I could smell overturned earth. I could hear traffic going by behind the cemetery’s trees and wooden fence.

Maggie accepted my other relatives’ remembrances of my dad while she destroyed an order of service between two wrung hands.

 

<<SOUND ON>>