2018

Sites.

August 19, 2018 — 1 Comment

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

April 21, 2018 — Leave a comment

 

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

April 3, 2018 — Leave a comment

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

February 3, 2018 — 1 Comment

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

January 5, 2018 — 2 Comments

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