Skin Deep Zine Issue 2 by Skin Deep

Our aim is to create a current publication in Oxford which provides an opportunity to discuss issues of race, racial representation, and racial identity.Â We seek to cultivate a space where different experiences of race can be shared, retold and examined. Skin Deep zine recognises the value of heritage, tastes, styles, stories, traditions, imaginations and cultures that are not often given room in mainstream white spaces. Throughout this zine we have attempted to weave together the personal, emotional and critical experiences of those who have been kind enough to offer their ideas, and we invite you to share in these narratives.

ISSUE II

NOVEMBER 2014

Roots / Routes The colonial garden was pruned to the point of pre-

dictability. No weeds were allowed to grow, no â&#x20AC;&#x153;exoticâ&#x20AC;? flowers were allowed to bloom, and no other garden was to be imagined. The garden was a project that could not

accommodate a diversity of vision and growth. In our efforts to uproot this imaginative roadblock, we challenge

you to plant your roots and to find new routes out of this dull and deceptively beautiful garden. We seek not to build a better garden, but a more engaging and inclusive one. *** Necessary to any progressive and productive discourse on race and racial issues, is a determination to conceptualize theories and ideas in different ways, venturing on new

pathways and articulations. Sometimes to create something

new we must revisit the roots and foundations of the issues. Roots can be cultural and historical, but they can also be

theoretical. The roots we are trying to cultivate grow above ground. They make visible what was previously hidden and

less understood. They create new routes and channels for discussion.

CONTENT 8

Where are you really from?

The death of a vegetable cart vendor

Teaching your face a lesson

A crisis of cultural identity

On the trauma of all these black bodies

Malcolm X speech at the Oxford Union

Malcolm X commentary

Guerillagardenwritingpoem

Ferguson blog post

Bounty

Haikus on idealism

On the politics of feeling

All the words for almost

The alternative film list

On two ivory towers

Credits 7

WHERE

ARE YOU

really

FROM? VISHNU STRANGEWAYS

I am from the place at which low resolution jpegs of Hindu mythology meet sweat-shop labour manufactured totally cute t-shirts. I am from an eBay seller that ships off multi-pack bindis to girls at Bestival. I am from bored chichi housewives in North London who find that Ashtanga yoga really helps them relax. I am from your Mahatma Gandhi favourite quotation on Facebook. I am from a lotus bud that the Buddha held gently on his hand or head or whatever. I am from a guy who signs AllOut petitions and then writes “not into Asians sorry it’s just a preference” on his Grindr profile. I am from lying in a hammock on a beach in Goa and looking towards the sea contemplatively with your white friends. I am from telling brown people I’ve just met about my favourite curry. I am from your English is soooo good! I am from a history that thanks the British for their trains and their civility. I am from a place where beards are parsed as animalistic and tribal unless you’re a cute white guy in Dalston. I am from the place that you’re not usually into but you’re so hot. I am from your witty geeky asexual sidekick in a long-running sitcom about medicine or a general professional industry. I am from the place that allows you to be obnoxious to cornershop owners and throw food around in Indian restaurants. I am from the place where yeah but we do need to do something about immigration. I am from a place that has lumped all brown bodies together into some hazy non-specific continent. I am from a place that has somehow managed to pre-exist my existence. I am from a place that warrants unprompted interrogation. I am from a place that signals I am not from this place. That’s where I’m really from.

Okay, but where are you really from?

THE DEATH OF A

VEGETABLE CART VENDOR LINA ABUSHOUK

mdurman was a big city. Mahmoud, the vegetable cart vendor would never have been able to cover the whole city with his old mule and his own heavy legs. It was too much to ask of an old man, but what he did cover was of impressive proportions for a man his age. He walked everyday from Wad Nubawi to al Mulazmeen, stopping to knock at five hundred doors. His customers knew him by name and he knew most of their names, and if he didn’t know a customer’s name, he at least

knew of the family to which they belonged. Omdurman was an old city. Not everyone could live there. Mostly because people did not want to move and allow new tenants to settle. But Omdurman was also a city that was stuck in the past. Vegetable cart vendors had walked these streets since the Mahdiya and they would continue to walk these streets for the next fifty years. Omdurmanis, unlike Khartoumis, were in no hurry to modernize. Their city was famous for its traditions and to their traditions they would stick.

It was this quality in Omdurmanis, this need to maintain tradition, that kept Mahmoud, a born, breaded and buttered Omdurmani, working at such an old age. He came from a long line of vegetable cart vendors. His great, great grandfather had sold vegetables to the Mahdi family and until this day Mahmoud sold vegetables to the descendants of the Mahdi. He knew the address of each descendant, and would call on their houses every day without fail. “Oh family of the Mahdi, these vegetables of mine are for sale. Cheap, cheap, their prices are. Show me a penny and I’ll show you a bushel. Oh family of the Mahdi, open your doors, your vegetables have arrived,” he would holler as he knocked on the door of

each member of this historic family. The family were often embarrassed that Mahmoud had such a long and specific greeting for them. They would often try to guess when the noisy vendor would arrive and send one of their sons to stand outside to greet him. It became a game between the little boys, catching Mahmoud before he began his ritual holler. If a boy had caught the vendor, his cousin would buy him flavored ice after school the next day, and if both cousins had failed they would not buy flavored ice the next day. This innocent game between the old man and little boys would come to an unfortunate end one day. Hassan, the great, great, great-grandson of the Mahdi had been playing on his video game one hot summer afternoon when his mother told him to get up. She thought she heard the sound of an approaching cart, so she hurried the boy and told him to run to the door. Hassan had had a long day at school and was doing reasonably well on the game.

He had just gotten his fox to jump over the steaming lava pit. He told his mother, “Mama, wait a bit. I am going to beat Salah’s top score. Please mama, let me finish. It will be the only good thing to happen to me today.” Yathrib was in a rush and had no patience for such foolishness. Mahmoud had hollered at their door three days in a row. She would catch him today. She had a blistering headache and their friend Samia was having a visitor over, a visitor who might not understand the idiosyncrasies of Omdurmani traditions. She yelled for the boy to go out. As Hassan was walking towards the gate, he picked up a few rocks along the way. Flinging them at the door, watching them hit the metal and make loud thuds before they hit the ground. Some of them flew through the door and out to the street and some of them barely reached the threshold.

Mahmoud was just about to arrive when the little boy flung his best shot. The rock soared through the air, at a speedy pace, and hit the old man’s head just as he was about to park the cart and holler. Mahmoud fell to the ground. He died that day and so did a tradition.

FREY KWA-HAWKING

TEACHING

your face A LESSON

ractise a three-hour-long sermon about your face every morning, and deliver it with your eyes closed, but feel your mouth moving. Check your face obsessively, every few minutes, as if something would have changed. If it changed, would you feel sorry or relieved? Answer the question. Have an argument with your face and don’t ever fix it up. Have a relationship with your face that others would kill to have with their fathers. Have no relationship with your face. Take your face to war. Take seventeen different pictures of your face in exactly the same position and change the filters, again and again, till you find something you don’t mind sharing with others. Use the pinkest filter, the royalest, the one most unbecoming, and use it fucking seriously. You’re in a sea of people who are not your race, so you turn to the mirror. Has anything changed yet? Put your face on posters all over the bathroom wall of the club. Put your face on a blimp across the sky. Build a nation and have your face as the anthem, as the prayer, as the final thing left

after the nation gets destroyed. Rebuild the nation. Looking in the mirror calms you, so check your image in everything reflective you find, shamelessly, or like a hunted dog. Freak yourself out when you remember the bone under your skin, the blood in your lips, the nerves. Polish your face till it shines. Practise the lines your fingers make across your cheeks. Gender your face. Degender it. Has anything changed yet?

Write an entire essay on your face till you don’t see it anymore, you don’t see anything, and then sleep. And wake up and look at your face again. Tire of your lovers’ faces and return to your own, with grace, with theatricality, with tears of gratitude. And if you’re mixed, in your worst times, search guiltily for traces of your heritage in what you have. Compare yourself with jealousy to those who look more Chinese, more white, less boy or girl or obvious than you. Forgive yourself. Do not sleep with your webcam on. Your body is something that you can trust, but then there’s your face, your face. When you look in the mirror you don’t know what you’re looking at. Cut off all your hair. Teach your face a lesson. Don’t compare yourself with others. Stop being so vain. When you catch yourself looking at your face, stop. Practise not having a face. This is difficult, but will pay off in the long run. Don’t look in a mirror for a month, as if a flagellant, then look in the mirror and let it hit you. Look in the mirror. Has anything changed? Don’t look away.

C R I S I S O F CULTURAL IDENTITY Mili Malde

n The Big Sea (1940), the AfricanAmerican novelist Langston Hughes narrates his departure from New York on a ship for Africa. In this journey he leaves behind everything he has known and been taught, as he seeks the world of his ancestors. By returning to the continent of his people, he envisages that he will finally dispense with the hierarchical culture of America, a society in which African-Americans are placed firmly at the bottom. Upon his arrival in Africa, he faces the shattering realisation: ‘The Africans looked at me and would not believe I was a Negro. “I am a Negro, too”. But they only laughed at me and shook their heads and said: “ You, white man! You, white man!’ This is the experience of many of us when we return to the country of our heritage and ancestors: instead of feeling like we belong in a place that we assume is devoid of the very discrimination, oppression and prejudice we suffer elsewhere, we find that we are not completely accepted in the way we had envisaged. Frantz Fanon expresses this as the pain of being ‘sealed into that crushing

object-hood’1. Being perceived and transformed by others into an external object inevitably leads us to internalise this view of ourselves; we end up conceiving of ourselves as different, ‘other’ or lesser, even in the place where we assume we should belong: the nation of our ancestors. This conception of ourselves is prevalent in our everyday lives in the UK, as encapsulated in Jean Rhys’ novel, The Day They Burned The Books (1968): ‘I was also tired of learning and reciting poems in praise of daffodils, and my relations with the few ‘real’ English boys and girls I had met were awkward. I had discovered that if I called myself English they would snub me haughtily: “ You’re not English; you’re a horrid colonial”’. My life, too, is pervaded by this non-acceptance and by the belief that I am fundamentally different and ‘inferior’.

age I was intrinsically conscious that I could not be ‘English’ because I was not white-skinned. Despite my selfidentification as British, the question that I routinely face is, ‘But where are you really from?’ This constantly makes me acutely aware of my cultural displacement and weak sense of belonging. The way in which the Indians, or ‘browns’ (a term which also encompassed Sri Lankans and Pakistanis), were grouped and stereotyped at school was deeply unsettling and unfair. The constant jokes perpetuating Indian stereotypes such as; being studious, not going out, working in corner-shops, eating curry, alongside the throwing around of terms like ‘freshie’ (an Indian immigrant with poor English skills typically talking about education with a mocked accent) was common.

Much media space has been devoted to the notion that ‘Britishness’ has a white racial connotation. Britain’s multinational state has always been reluctant to grant the status of ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ to its non-white citizens, who have to find an identity within an ill-defined ‘Britishness’. I have never called myself ‘English’; from a very young

This was, in part, cultural essentialism, which can be described in a broad sense as the simplification of ethnic minority cultures and a tendency to consider them as tightly bound entities possessing a small number of unchanging key characteristics2. The conflation of different Asians (for example, not recognising the cultural distinction between a Pakistani

1 Frantz Fanon, ‘Fact of Blackness’, Black Skin White Masks (1952): p109

2 Ali Rattansi, Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction (2011), p. 27

and an Indian) is insensitive and displays ignorance. There has been common failure to understand the complex nature of the identities of Britain’s Asian minorities. Indeed, to generalise Asians originating from a single ‘nation’ fails to take into account the colonial nature of those national boundaries when in fact a significant diversity of ethnic cultures within these colonial areas should be acknowledged. India’s internal cultural heterogeneity is scantily appreciated; identities based on religion, caste, sub-caste, and various other kinds of descent groups, as well as rural/ urban and regional differences create a variety of distinct yet interrelated cultures. This was still condensable by some of my classmates to ‘curry’, ‘Bollywood’ and comically parodied knowledge of Hindu traditions. In order to integrate with white people and to make friends outside of my ethnic group, I ended up partially rejecting my culture and heritage. I strove to escape that grouping, to be different, or, more specifically, more ‘white’. I modified my manner of speaking, would go out more and

engaged in activities and sports which were predominantly ‘white’. Whilst I believe that I generally succeeded, it is unreasonable to think that I had to try as hard as I did; I found myself putting in excessive effort and time to break through the mould which seemed to surround my white peers. When they first met me they would not be as friendly or as approachable as they would be to the other white people; it was only after they had gotten to know me, seeing me for who I was beyond my ethnicity and skin colour, that I was able to make good friendships. In a recent article in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof argued that the problem is that there’s ‘a broad swathe of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.’ Furthermore, the 2001 Cantle Reports about ‘segregation’ suggested, as confirmed by opinion polls, that whites are, in reality, less likely to want to engage, mix and ‘integrate’ with ethnic minorities rather than the other way round.

Now that I am more mature and more accepting of myself and of my heritage, this racial-cultural discrimination and institutional oppression has provoked within me a deep contempt for the cultural systems on which a sense of Western, British superiority is founded. Yet, while I may hate the notions of ‘Britishness’ so prevalent in England, it still feels like my home; I do not identify with India in the same way. Living in an English society, going through an English education, engaging with English popular culture, and consequently developing hybrid, complex, syncretic, multiple, hyphenated identities means that I do not outright reject all things ‘white British’ in a simplistic and ignorant way. My identity is in flux between conflicting, competing cultures. While I identify with one emotionally as my ‘home’, I also identify with the other as my heritage. The Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga delineates this idea of multiple identities and conflicting attitudes as the native’s ‘nervous condition’, whereby one’s existence is strung out between the incompatible

layers of different cultures.3 The imposition of the majority culture through education creates a nervous condition of uncertainty and leads to the blurring of cultural boundaries, the feeling of an otherness within. Living in a society where these different cultures are forcibly made to interact means that I find myself trying to live with two different, incompatible identities at once, or the pain of what Fanon describes as a ‘hybridized split existence’. The attempt to reconcile these different identities, amidst the layers of different value systems is part of a process of ‘becoming white’, endeavouring to ‘change your race’ by assimilating to the dominant culture 4. Yet despite absorbing white values, it seems I never quite can become ‘white enough’. While the culture of my generation of Indians living in the UK is certainly changing due to immersion into British culture, we should not feel that we must sacrifice our heritage and culture in order to increase our sense of belonging within another culture. The impossibility of ‘becoming white’ means that we should accept ourselves for who we are. Yet we must understand that we may not be able to identify fully with the country of our heritage, the home of our parents, nor will we feel like we fully belong here in the UK alongside our white counterparts. We must accept that living as a minority in a majoritywhite culture, we will inevitably find ourselves living this hybridized split existence of conflicting cultural identities.

be simply ascribed to the ‘easy’ identities of ‘English’ or ‘Indian’ or ‘British-Indian’ etc. definitive categories under which society wants to define its peoples . Yet the social importance of this issue will only be accentuated in the future. Diasporas, cultural interaction and intercultural marriage, all underwritten by increasing globalization, will hugely increase the number of people born to parents of differing cultural backgrounds or born into a society with a cultural environment dissociated from that of their parents. Thus an understanding and appreciation of the effect that hybridized cultures can have on people and society is hugely important for future social cohesion in our globalized world of unprecedented cultural interaction. This understanding and appreciation has thus far not been forthcoming.

The contemporary importance of this issue is demonstrated by the many people experiencing difficulties growing up in a world where their competing cultural identities cannot 3 Robert C.J. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), p. 23 4

Ibid.

ON THE TRAUMA OF ALL THESE

BLACK BODIES OTAMERE GUOBADIA

hat is an ocean but a multitude of blood drops?

When I walk down these cobbles at night, splitting through alleyways and side streets, I will bleed the swing from my hips; strip myself of all that trademark Technicolor; bury the pink infinity scarf under my arm out of view. It is my failed Chekhovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gun. This is a hurried and decisive process. In the twinkling orange light, I will unqueer my aesthetic, losing in the process all purpose and revolutionary tendency. There is just one thing you must remember: Black is the colour of mourning.

At sunrise, I will chalk this all up to common sense- still trying to hold together a body insistent on discarding the unforgivable parts of itself. Clad in underwear, I will dance to Nina Simone in the shadow of last night’s impropriety. I will remind myself that I made it home without hearing a whistle or a wicked laugh - all those stinging accusations of betraying my own race to this white, shameful thing: ‘queerness.’ It is a most perverse kind of police brutality, bleeding me of all colour until the only thing that remains is black. To the black men that interrogated all the flesh I was baring that night, homosexuality comes in incomprehensible hues. The coolness of Buckinghamshire hills and Received Pronunciation’s crisp vowels have replaced the singsong Africaness of my voice. Did I not say that I was discarding the unforgivable parts of myself ? It is 2 am. In this club, I will seek validation in ways that only a queer black body can, giving up ownership of my body in ways that our histories are accustomed to. I will allow incursions on my thresholds from strangers. I will convince myself that lips are a thing that I love, convince myself that I am loved by every white hand that touches this skin. These are not mere metaphors. I am trying to concretise my pain, to unbind it from my flesh, to reimagine the violent contradictions of Africaness and Queerness in this body as something other than sin. I am imagining that in some distant, untouched history of our bodies, there were no words for ‘he’ or ‘she’, just proverbs describing how affection tumbles out of our eyes rolling over unsegregated flesh; dreaming that these bodies were one lovable object, capable of loving even themselves.

And what will save all this black flesh? Perseverance? Rage? Prayer? Are the gaps between colliding planes and bullets stopped short of hearts not filled with Hail Marys? Is this the most we shall ever be?

I am still unlearning my own oppression. Every day I know now what I want to be. I am unravelling the violence woven into my skin. I am imagining a new black masculinity. There are no more dreams of white suburbia. I want to be the black boy with hair the colour of candy floss, and the Oxford man that wears pink suits, and writes empty letters of epigrams, and no longer burns his own vanities! I will spin velvet rage into golden thread for no master but myself; I will fade my oppressors’ names into history. I want to be the boy in that photograph- the queer kiss at the centre of the universe after this long bloody war. To love oneself is to reinvent ones histories. I hear my ancestors singing now. Yes- they are singing about love, about intertwined bodies and spirits, impervious, for now, to the violent whiteness of the approaching missionaries. They will burn your songs and your vanities; they will burn you. But do not worry about the trauma just yet. Yes, there is so much vivid queerness in these bonfire melodies. I am home…

Can you see the bruises? Can you see the scars where he lashed me

Extracts from Malcolm X's speech at the Oxford Union 1964

r. Chairman, tonight is the first night that I’ve have ever had opportunity to be as near to conservatives as I am. And the speaker who preceded me, first I want to thank you for the invitation to come here to the Oxford Union, the speaker who preceded me is one of the best excuses that I know to prove our point concerning the necessity, sometimes, of extremism, in defence of liberty, why it is no vice, and why moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. I don’t say that about him personally, but that type. He’s right, X is not my real name, but if you study history you’ll find why no black man in the western hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa, and took us into the western hemisphere and sold us there. And our names were stripped from us and so today we don’t know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name. I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defence of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an American or a

European or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defence of liberty, the liberty of any human being, is a value. Anytime anyone is enslaved, or in any way deprived of his liberty, if that person is a human being, as far as I am concerned he is justified to resort to whatever methods necessary to bring about his liberty again. Questioner 1: What exactly sort of extremism would you consider the killing of missionaries? I don’t encourage any act of murder nor do I glorify in anyone’s death, but I do think that when the white public uses it’s press to magnify the fact that there are lives of white hostages at stake, they don’t say “hostages,” every paper says “white hostages.” They give me the impression that they attach more importance to a white hostage and a white death, than they do the death of a human being, despite the

colour of his skin. I feel forced to make that point clear, that I’m not for any indiscriminate killing, nor does the death of so many people go by me without creating some kind of emotion. But I think that white people are making the mistake, and if they read their own newspapers they will have to agree that they, in clear-cut language, make a distinction between the type of dying according to the colour of the skin. And when you begin thinking in terms of death being death, no matter what type of human being it is, then we all will probably be able to sit down as human beings and get rid of this extremism and moderation. But as long as the situation exists as it is, we’re going to need some extremism, and I think some of you will need some moderation too. One of the reasons that I think it is necessary for me to clarify my own point, personally, I was in a conversation with a student here, and she asked me, she told me that “I’m surprised that you’re not what I expected,” and I said what do you mean? And she said,“well I was looking for your horns,” and so I told her I have them, but I keep them hidden,

unless someone draws them out. It takes certain types to draw them out. And this is actually true, usually when a person is looked upon as an extremist, anything that person does in your eyesight is extreme. On the other hand, if a person is looked upon as conservative, just about anything they do is conservative. And this again comes through the manipulating of images. When they want you to think of a certain area or certain group as involved in actions of extremism, the first thing they do is project that person in the image of an extremist. And then anything he does from then on is extreme. You know it doesn’t make any difference whether it is right or wrong. As far as you’re concerned, if the image is wrong, whatever they do is wrong. And this has been done by the western press, and also by the American press, and it has been picked up by the English press and the European press. Whenever any black man in America shows signs of an uncompromising attitude, against the injustices that he experiences daily, and shows no tendency whatsoever to compromise with it, then the American press characterizes him as a radical, as an

extremist someone who is irresponsible, or as a rabble-rouser or someone who doesn’t rationalize in dealing with the problem. As I said earlier I am a Muslim. I believe in Allah, I believe in Mohammed, I believe in all of the prophets, I believe in fasting, prayer, charity, and that which is incumbent on a Muslim to fulfil in order to be a Muslim. In April I was fortunate to make the Hajj to Mecca, and went back again in September, to try and carry out my religious functions and requirements, but at the same time that I believe in that religion, I have to point out that I am an American Negro. And I live in a society whose social system is based upon the castration of the black man, whose political system is based upon castration of the black man, and whose economy is based upon the castration of the black man. A society which, in 1964, has more subtle, deceptive, deceitful methods to make the rest of the world think that it’s cleaning up it’s house, while at the same time, the same things are happening to us in 1964 that happened in 1954, 1924 and 1884. They came up with a civil rights bill in 1964, supposedly to solve our problem,

and after the bill was signed, three civil rights workers were murdered in cold blood. And the FBI head, Hoover, admits that they know who did it, they’ve known ever since it happened, and they’ve done nothing about it. No matter how many bills pass, black people in that country, where I’m from, still our lives are not worth two cents. And the government has shown it’s inability, or either it’s unwillingness to do whatever is necessary to protect black property where the black citizen is concerned. So my contention is that whenever a people come to the conclusion that the government, which they have supported, proves itself unwilling, or proves itself unable to protect our lives and protect our property, because we have the wrong colour skin, we are not human beings unless we ourselves band together and do whatever, however, whenever, is necessary to see that our lives and our property is protected, and I doubt that any person in here would refuse to do the same thing if he were in the same position, or I should say were he in the same condition. Just one step farther to see if I am justified in this stance, and I am speaking as a black man from America which is a racist society. No matter how much you hear it talk about democracy it is as racist as South Africa or as racist as Portugal or as

racist as any other racialist society on this earth. The only difference between it and South Africa, is that South Africa preaches separation and practices separation, America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference, they don’t practice what they preach, whereas South Africa practices and preaches the same thing. I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil. So my contention is, we are faced with a racialistic society, a society in which they are deceitful, deceptive, and the only way we can bring about a change is speak the language that they understand. The racialists never understands a peaceful language, the racialists never understands the nonviolent language, the racialist has spoken his type of language to us for over four hundred years. We have been the victim of his brutality, we are the ones who face his dogs, who tear the flesh from our limbs, only because we want to enforce the Supreme Court decision. We are the ones who have our skulls crushed, not by the

Ku Klux Klan, but by policeman, all because we want to enforce what they call the Supreme Court decision. We are the ones upon whom water-hoses are turned on, practically so hard that it rips the clothes from our back, not men, but the clothes from the backs of women and children, you’ve seen it yourself. All because we want to enforce what they call the law. Well any time you live in a society and it doesn’t enforce it’s own laws, because the colour of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice where the government can’t give them justice. I don’t believe in any form of unjustified extremism. But I believe that when a man is exercising extremism, a human being is exercising extremism, in defence of liberty for human beings, it’s no vice. And when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings, I say he’s a sinner. And I might add in my conclusion, in fact, America is one of the best examples, when you read its history, about extremism. Ol’ Patrick Henry said “liberty of death”—that’s extremism.

I read once, passingly, about a man named Shakespeare. I only read about him passingly, but I remember one thing he wrote that kind of moved me. He put it in the mouth of Hamlet, I think it was, who said “to be or not to be”. He was in doubt about something. Whether it was nobler, in the mind of man, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune— moderation— or to take up arms against the sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them. And I go for that; if you take up arms you’ll end it, but if you sit around and wait for the one who is in power to make up his mind that he should end it, you’ll be waiting a long time. And in my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change. And a better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone—don’t care what colour you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth. Thank you

EDITOR’S I

invite you to read, and carefully consider, the words of this speech, given by Malcolm X at the Oxford Union on the 3rd December 1964, half a century ago. Before coming to the Union, Malcolm had recently returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he had undergone a spiritual and political development, which complicated and added layers to his already comprehensive antiracial discourse. When one hears his speech, one recognises that the points being made remain applicable to the American context, particularly given the events that occurred recently this summer in Ferguson. The militarisation of the police force demonstrates the American government’s continued need for the suppression of black voices and the negation of black experiences of injustice. Malcolm’s message still remains relevant today, because the circumstances that he described continue to exist. In this speech at the Oxford Union, Malcolm takes the conversation beyond the freedoms of the black man and expresses to his audience the fundamental necessity of the emancipation of all oppressed individuals. He speaks in defence of the liberty of any human being, regardless of the colour of their skin. It is in this speech that we see the progression of his ideas and thoughts on emancipation. He challenges the conceptions that members of the Union, and people in general, have of his politics. He emphasises the danger

commentary MALCOLM X’S

speech

of assuming that a man can only have one type of politics, and how such an assumption has the capacity to stunt and interrupt progressive discourse. At this point in his life, Malcolm was still navigating and developing his antiracial discourse and attempting to engage others in his way of thinking, whilst never diluting the importance of individual freedom from his message. It is deeply unfortunate that his life was taken early, and that this new turn in his politics could never be fully realised. Malcolm’s politics reflected the rage that he, and others during his time, felt towards the deeply divisive nature of American society, with its unfulfilled promises of reform. By 1964, the black man in America had already endured four hundred years of racial subjugation and enslavement. For four hundred years, he was thought to be nothing more than a dispensable commodity. And for a hundred years after, following the abolition of the slave trade, black peoples in America began to make gains towards equal recognition before the eyes of the law, but the social, economic and political circumstances of their daily lives remained unchanged. When we understand the context from which Malcolm’s ‘militancy’ emerged, it becomes harder to believe how the rhetoric of peaceful protest would ever have been able to bring about the changes that were so urgently required within American society. Why should the black man

convenience the politics and power of the white man at the expense of his own freedom? How would being ‘conservative’ in this context aid in the fight for the freedom of the black man? Any reactionary counter-movement to bring about the empowerment of the black man in America would have to respond in a manner that was comparable to the oppressive system in which they lived. If the language and action of those in power is that of violence, then any response would have to include the possibility of engaging in a violent manner. After all, Malcolm wanted freedom, ‘by any means necessary.’ I am not, necessarily, saying I agree with the whole of Malcolm’s politics, but we are asking you to consider why his politics were conceptualised in this way. Forty-nine years after his death, Malcolm’s legacy is still defined as militant and extremist. I do not feel that his methods and ideologies should not continue to be questioned and challenged. Rather, I ask you to also consider why his ideologies may have been shaped in this way, and how they continue to influence our fight for total human emancipation.

Anuradha Henriques

GUERILLA GAR DEN T

he mouth of the city is tongued with tar its glands gutter saliva, teeth chatter in rail

clatter, throat echoes car horns and tyreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s screech, forging new language: a brick city smoke-speak of stainless steel consonants and suffocated vowels. These are trees and shrubbery, the clustered flora battling all hours, staccato staggered through streets.

Meet Rich and Eleanor on Brabourn Grove as he wrestles her wheelbarrow over cobblestones to the traffic island by Kitto Road where this night, coloured a turquoise-grit, cathedral-quiet and saintly, makes prayer of their whispers and ritual of their work: bend over, clear rubble, cut weed and plant.

But more than seeds are sown here. You can tell by his tender pat on tended patch; the soft cuff to a boyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head - first day to school, by how they rest with parent-pride

WRITING PO EM. against stone walls, huff into winter’s cold,

press faces together as though tulips might

stem from two lips, gather spades, forks, weeds and go. Rich wheelbarrows back to Eleanor’s as vowels flower or flowers vowel through smoke-speak, soil softens, the city drenched with new language thrills and the drains are drunk with dreams.

The sky sways on the safe side of tipsy and it’s altogether an alien time of halflife and hope, an after-fight of gentle fog and city smog, where the debris of dew drips

to this narrative of progress, this city tale; this story is my story, this vista my song. I cluster in the quiet, stack against steel seek islands, hope, and a pen to sow with.

INUA ELLAMS

#OccupySLU

communiqué occupation of University

implicitly, with fearful faces on the street and with police guns pointed at us, that our lives are worthless in the eyes of this society that claims to have achieved justice for all; having undergone all these abuses and more in our Old Word, we decided to venture forth in search of a New World of our own.

from Saint

the Louis

“They (the occupiers) are a group of people who met in the heat of Ferguson, and are committed to preventing the non-profits from swallowing the movement they have been living in for the last two months. The other night, they led a thousandsstrong march to SLU and decided to remain there, in that bastion of wealth and whiteness. This is a statement that came out of the last few days.” We’ve Discovered White People! Five hundred and twenty two years ago, the great Christopher Columbus discovered a New World. Monday, on the day we all celebrated the daring achievements of that fearless explorer, we too discovered a new world: the world of white people. Having spent the last 65 days protesting the police murder of Michael Brown; having been beaten, shot at, tear gassed, ridiculed, and smeared since the death of our brother; having been treated as criminals and problems and sub-human beings under police occupation our whole lives; having been told explicitly and

And we have found it. We have discovered the world of White people. They call this settlement Saint Louis University, or sloo in their informal tongue. The first thing to note about the world of White people is that the police are friendly and they pretty much let you do whatever you want as long as nobody is actually getting physically injured. Strangely, they do hang out behind the trees and take pictures of you, but whenever they ride by on their bicycles they have big smiles on their faces and say obvious things about the weather. The second thing to note about White people is that most of them, those who’ve greeted us, anyway, are very friendly. They are curious and concerned about the world we come from, and seem genuine about wanting to help us escape the brutal police state, which locks us up in cages, which kills us with impunity, which terrorizes us every day of our lives because of the color of our skin. We appreciate their smiles and claps and support. But. We are reminded of bedtime stories our families told us about a strange people called ‘White Liberals.’ According to the stories, these people are split in half on the inside, and will support you

with their words but never their actions. They also will only like you if you pretend to be like them, and will stop supporting you even with their words if your anger disrupts their busy schedule. We wonder if we haven’t met a lot of them since our arrival. But not all of the White natives we have met are friendly. What is so strange about them, though, is that they don’t seem to notice that they are being unfriendly. In fact, they often insist that they are being friendly and treating us with respect, even as they dismiss our accounts of the world we come from, a world they’ve never been to. Since our arrival, we’ve identified two main ways in which the Whites that are not friendly express their unfriendliness without knowing it: First, they seem to insist that the destruction of property is somehow comparable to the murder of a human being with brown skin. In fact, they seem to believe that the protection of property is more important than the protection of our people from injury or death. After our brother Michael Brown was shot dead with his hands up in the air by Officer Darren Wilson and Mike’s body was left to rot in the street for four and a half hours in front of our people, our children, our mothers, all of us. We were angry. We were filled with rage at our situation. The media and politicians then suggested that Mike’s murder was somehow justified by his having taken some cigars from a store without giving the store pieces of magic paper. This angered us more. Some of our brothers and sisters were so angry that they set the store on fire and took all the things they wanted, without any respect for the magic paper that our oppressors are always telling us is so important.

The White people who keep telling us these actions are ‘just as bad,’ or even that they are in any way comparable to the ending of a human life of beauty and value beyond measure, are telling us (maybe without knowing it) that we are lower in value than dead things, that we are mere objects. When they do this, it makes us feel deeply hurt. And it makes us wonder if they even know what it means to love another human being. The second way the White people that we have discovered are unfriendly to us without seeming to notice has to do with their fetish, a flag with stars and stripes on it. To our surprise, it is the same exact fetish that our oppressors have hanging in the Sacrifice Halls where they tell us how long we have to spend in their cages. In our rebellion against them after yet another one of our brothers, VonDerrit Myers, was murdered by another police officer whose name we do not know, some of our brothers turned our oppressor’s fetish upside down. Some even set it on fire. When we discovered this New World inhabited by Whites, we claimed it for our own just as the great Columbus did, and we planted an upside down version of the fetish in this new, undiscovered soil, as a sign of our freedom. But some of the native Whites of sloo were very upset by this, because for them the fetish was a symbol of all that was good in the world, and because, they said, their family members had fought and died for the fetish. After a very long and tense discussion, it became clear that this White tribe was prone to mistaking the symbol for the things it is supposed to symbolize. They insisted that it was the flag that their ancestors fought and died for and not their families and homes (which, of course, would have been just fine without a flag to symbolize them). Through this discussion, it seemed that we

learned what we already knew: that we were from different worlds, and being from different worlds, the same piece of fabric can mean completely opposite things.

most importantly, people with uniforms and guns who make sure this one world continues to feel like two.

Still, we think these unfriendly Whites were so upset about something much deeper and much more serious than their fetish. We think that they thought we were accusing them, as individuals who cared about their flag, of being guilty of all the oppression we experience in our world. When we spoke about how privileged they are to live in this beautiful place where the police smile at them and say really stupid things about the weather, they thought that we were blaming them for what we suffer. We want to tell those Whites, from the bottom of our deep hearts, that this is not what we mean. They, as individuals, did not create the world we have suffered in, the world where we fear for our lives every day. They are not guilty. It is not their fault that we live in a society where Black lives don’t matter. As individual Whites who love their fetish, they are not to blame for their privilege.

We encourage others to join us or, better, to immediately start using your bodies to open passages of your own.

But here at sloo, a passage is opening.

For Michael Brown, VonDerrit Myers, John Crawford, and all the Black men whose lives were and will be stolen by police.

Written by anonymous participants of #OccupySLU

But nonetheless they need to understand that it exists, and they need to ask themselves how they are going to use it. And the Whites we have met, have two options: either they will use that privilege to help us dismantle the oppression that our people continue to live under, or they will continue to reproduce the world as it is. Because we are discovering this New World is actually not a New World at all. It is the same world, kept separated from itself by misunderstanding, an inability to feel for one another, and,

BOUNTY The following piece is taken from a diary entry written by Jodie Reindorf. A harmless, and in my opinion, tasteless brand of inoffensive confectionery. And one of the few words that makes me totally livid. ‘Bounty’ is a word that is used to describe a person who is black on the outside, but deemed to be white on the inside.

Yes, race is an entirely social construct. Of all genetic variations, people could have picked height, weight, lefthandedness to group and categorise people. The only difference being that race is overwhelming correlated to geography in ways that height and left-handedness are not. Anyway, the way I see it, it is the historical connotations of belonging to racial categories that adds light and shade to how people racially self-identify.

I remember the day that the word was spat out at me, like the vile poison of a cobra. And the worst thing of all? It was said to me by a black person. Though I was in a school where I was in a very clear minority, I had grown accustomed to a sort of solidarity that developed between the black kids across all years and across the boys’ and girls’ schools. But with one word my illusions of this fraternity were shattered and I was left questioning what people think ‘blackness’ even means.

For me, being black has meant working ten times harder than my peers for the same recognition. It means walking into a room and sometimes feeling noticeably different. It means I am always in touch with my Ghanaian roots. It is cultural vibrancy and colour and family and joy and pride. In itself it is neither good nor bad but a hybridisation of values, cultures and social consciousnesses. At least, not until someone makes a negative judgement on you based on it. Or any judgement at all.

Some people think it is just a skin colour, for others it is an entire identity, a lifestyle. I think that both are incredibly limiting ways to look at it.

Fortunately I’ve led a life that has, in comparison to many other black people past and present, been somewhat uninhibited by my race. I’ve

been places that some of my white and black peers alike have not dreamed of. But the reasons why their dreams never reached such lofty heights are for often diametrically opposed reasons, which often intrigues me. So yes, I am well educated and well spoken. I did not listen to rap music or find the need to constantly make others aware of my race; that never needed more pointing out in my opinion. It was an obvious fact that had ceased to bother me. I do not therefore ‘fit’ into the boxes constructed for a black woman to fit into. More oddly, such attributes were deemed to be ‘white’. But on that day - bounty day - I came to realise that it’s not only my predominantly European society that constructs and buys into this box. Black people have been in that box so long that they’ve started to own it, become defined by it, limited to it as well as by it. With hindsight I should have asked this rogue what he felt being black really meant. Listening to rap music out loud on his mobile phone at the back of the bus;

growing his Afro beyond the length of school regulations in an attempt to self-verify his race; wearing his school trousers so far down that walking became cumbersome; appearing not to give a crap about anything, in case he appears to be keen on something. Refusing (or was it simply failing?) to be motivated by anything or for anything. Resorting to drawing attention to himself for being black, and making sweeping generalisations about what he considered to be ‘what black people do’. His behaviour led me to ridicule him in my mind, though on most occasions I would never verbalise it. But on bounty day I saw red. I had it out with him there and then. I told him that just because I act in a different manner to him, or specifically more like our white counterparts, made me no more white nor he more black. I was very comfortable in my cultural identity. I’d had it up to here with his goading and teasing. If all he had to say for himself was his ‘blackness’, I felt very sorry for him indeed.

I told him. I screamed at him in blind fury. The whole school bus looked on in a stunned silence as they watched the scene unfold. But what followed is in my memory far more interesting. Shocked by my response and clearly intimidated by my vehement reproach, he began to backtrack, realising now that I am an ‘angry black woman’ instead. What’s more, I sat back, chest heaving, but satisfied that he had begun to realise that yes, I am a black woman and that I should be identified as such. Maturity however makes me wonder why this felt like such a victory. Perhaps because this moron had been winding me up for weeks and I finally managed to shut him up. But it was more than that: I’d had the wit to rebuff there and then what someone else would have called a cultural identity crisis. Or had I? I had simply been moved from one box to another. My passionate defence fell more tidily within the ‘black woman’ box than some of my other attributes, so people could see that, yes, I was black, but I ‘acted black’ too. I still don’t know

how to feel about this. The angry black woman is a stereotype that we see daily on TV- ‘oh no she didnnnn’t, hold my weave whilst I take this bitch ouuuut!’ But we fail to give any consideration as to how and why the black women we see are always ready to fight. It’s just become status quo: black women are aggressive. And maybe we are. Maybe there is something in our DNA that makes us fighters. Or maybe it is years of circumstance that have meant that women of colour have had no choice but to be strong and fight to get through life. Maybe, just maybe, there is a reason for this. But if that is the case, why should the proverbial thorn in the black woman’s side then be, as was in my case, the black man?

JODIE REINDORF

HAIKUS ON IDEALISM

Down the spines of my textbooks

o ye ki a dupe

The beautiful in

I remember the growl in your throat ma

o ye ki a dupe

reimagining our world

o ye ki a dupe

as a place of hope

o ye ki a dupe ara son ategun fe iji ja ko gbe wa lo

I cannot see for this baptism of fire And the sun that falls out of her safety in your mouth.

Place your palm over these lips, That I can hold onto the mother that spill from this careless.

The relics that dance foreign between my teeth Are forgetting who you are

ema fimi sile mi o fe soyin nu

Find me in folds and agbada Swimming between the space left by the teeth my father Lost to cigarette butts And his quickclench fists And the first time I found myself and

The ends of softening dodo Shrunk in my hands

I am learning to love these scars as the braille Which help them hear me in this dark

oye ki a dupe

Your chatter is cluttering this landscape

And borrow for just a second

Or did I grow around the whistling sound

The gate guarding utopia is now high enough to climb

Lori oke meji, we wear our trauma like trinkets

And the space between you and your daughter on her 25th birthday

And caves are our homes

Can be traversed

But a cave is no home

Look what you have done, it is all on the floor This mother tongue and English cannot rhyme It will snatch the shape from these stanzas Like all the anthologies I found my mother in

Se o ti ri omo ale ri? My talkback spits back the sweat of my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s labour And the fingers she peeks through as she cannot bear to Watch me swallow this sun whole with The bravery in knowing this world is our own and all change is me

Some days I drool my homeland

Where is the safety in home? My wrists are itching I am forgetting the words to the songs you wrapped me in Iro yin where I find sleep

Adura yin niferan mi I am unearthing the prayer you gifted me

The word you have buried in me is rabid and strength It barks to warn them, There is fight in the ticks in this wrist â&#x20AC;&#x201C; searching for

I am not here to dwell We have work to do. Us three, orange rings glowing lazily in the dark.

The power I found In believing resistance Cannot be in vein

ANNIE TERIBA

ON THE POLITICS OF FEELING O

ften, when people reference this quote of Baldwin’s they appropriate and mobilize it as a social commentary on the condition of the African American in America. His condition, the African American’s, is so unjust that it inspires rage. The rage is Baldwin’s, but it is also ours, the readers, who identify with the sentiment that Baldwin is conveying. At this point, many of us believe that we have engaged with the quote sufficiently and that we have understood it. But I would urge you to look further, to reach deeper and feel more. In the process of generalizing the quotation to a social commentary, we ignore the feeling of the individual; we ignore Baldwin’s feeling of ‘rage’. It is easy to see how Baldwin’s rage can be overlooked, because on the spectrum of ways in which we engage with the world feelings don’t tend to rank very high. To feel, we are taught, is to be unthinking; it is to engage with the world in a manner that is unscientific and “not objective”. That part of our existence, feeling, is frequently unarticulated. Sure, we engage with feelings on a superficial level. One might come home one day and declare to an audience of no one in particular that

"To be a Negro in this country and to be reltively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time." (James A. Baldwin) they feel sad or happy. One might provide anecdotes for how this feeling came about and psychoanalysis of the situations that might have given rise to that particular emotion might ensue, but beyond that the conversation doesn’t go any further. We have had our feelings and we have voiced them. Surely, that is enough for one day. In case it was not clear, that is not the type of feeling I am talking about. As sensuous beings, our interactions with the world necessarily inspire sensation. Touching a table is sensuous, eating food is sensuous, even having an argument engages some facet of our senses. And these senses often inspire feelings. Even when you think you are feeling nothing, you might articulate that as feeling ‘numb’. If we return to Baldwin, with this in mind, we might engage with what he has to say a little differently. Baldwin’s feeling of choice in this situation is rage, an emotion we are comfortable engaging with. We are comfortable with the notion of ‘rage’ because it is a feeling that has been politicized and masculinized. Malcolm X, both beloved and hated civil rights activist, mobilized rage as his feeling of choice. It was a strategic decision that was not without consequence.

Malcolm came to be defined by his rage. He became one dimensional, in the eyes of the public. But Malcolm was practical, he knew that rage was an emotion that was effective and got people listening Malcolm was representing a people oppressed; he was representing the downtrodden black man in America. And if an oppressed people, who are so readily ignored by virtue of their position, are to be heard they cannot afford to articulate their feelings in an emotion that is meek. Malcolm did not believe, as Martin Luther King Jr. did, that the predictable and conservative language of nonviolence and peaceful resistance would serve the needs and convey the emotions of African Americans. Malcolm felt that they need an unpredictable, volatile and, sometimes, violent emotion.They need rage. Baldwin identifies with that. He is a conscious ‘Negro’ in America, he can’t afford not to feel this rage that seems to have seeped into the collective black consciousness and held it hostage. But notice how Baldwin said that he feels rage “all most all of the time”. Baldwin has other feelings that he is not giving voice and articulation to.

If any of you are well acquainted with rage, I’m sure that you recognize that it is an exhausting emotion to constantly be tapped into. Rage commands the attention of your entire body. Rage makes you shake, it makes you scream, it even, sometimes, results in acting out violently. Beyond the physical strain of allowing a single emotion to inhabit your being, there is also the fact that to feel a single emotion for most of the time is boring. As sensuous beings we delight in being able to have a complicated array of emotions that we can tap into subconsciously, or consciously, create compounds of feelings. We are complicated enough to hold two, or more feelings, at a time. By being enraged most of the time, Baldwin is limiting his capacity to fully express himself. What other feeling is his rage compounded with and what are the feelings that he taps into when he is not tapping into rage? This not to say that Baldwin’s rage isn’t valid or necessary, because it is. Baldwin is clearly having an affective reaction to the social conditions and realities that he finds himself in. He is challenging the reader to consider what America as a space does to the ‘Negro’ on an individual, emotional and psychological level. His blackness makes it almost impossible for him to be anything but angry. He is using his rage as a tool for anti-racism. And while effective, mobilizing rage in the consumptive manner that Baldwin is can also be damaging. To prioritize rage is to give it primacy over other feelings. But it is clear the Baldwin feels more. Baldwin’s work speaks to the fact that he has an overflow of emotions moving around behind the scenes of his rage. Baldwin was certainly feeling inspired. Without inspiration Baldwin would not have become the prolific writer

that he was. He would not have articulated his rage in the dramatic and captivating way that he did. His rage took center stage for political reasons. But to our skeptical minds an unreliable, constantly changing feeling like inspiration cannot be a tool for emancipation. Inspiration, when it is there, can give articulation to resistance. But it is a feeling that is fleeting, never staying in the mind or body for too long. It is not a feeling that that the oppressed can afford to espouse. And so, oppressed people in their efforts to speak about their conditions are either forced to, or understand the necessity of, suppressing, or not relying on, certain feelings, as these feelings that belong to the realm of the secure and free. But these feelings, these meek feelings that are deemed not strong enough to embody and manifest our condition, are powerful. Love, desire and inspiration are part of our sensuous and affective interactions with the world. We should not suppress them simply because they have been used by the oppressors against us. The oppressor may have left us no option but rage, and in rising up to the challenge and being heard in our rage we become recognized, but at what expense? Power is great thing, especially when viewed from the viewpoint of the oppressed. But power is also destructive; it can take something away from you. The ‘Negro’ in America has been denied economic and social rights, but the danger is that in his efforts to redeem those powers through rage he loses his right to full self-expression, his right to feel something other than rage. He loses the right to feel freely and fully.

LINA ABUSHOUK

ALL THE WORDS FOR ALMOST

stupid and warm under benâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sky: ozone and moon wallpapering the london fog of shitty barstool tunes and all reminds me i am drunk and angryish because these black skinnies are from H&M and motherfuckers already got a hole in the left front pocket so here i am fisting down my own leg for pounds and quid when jack! jackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the name mate sees me wet leaf swirling in gutter he happens to know where i am oh yea? im walkin just thataway and suddenly god is almost a good god & this man is almost attractive when he whips me down the darkest goddamn alley i see him see me full of want and pink slips jack: palm me jawbreaker sour and hard me: flattered then immediately fearful and his jaw meets my elbow almost biblically i am become death on his ass and he runs off i am shaft/BJ penn/Carl Sagan/the most interesting boy in the world until my brain keeps on with its reckless memory and suddenly i am almost wrecked fuck me! because he almost did and if almost sexual assault isnt enough to sober me clear as a cane field burned clean when i go to tell mom bout this almost (flag on the play! 15 yards) i cant do it i lost my label maker and dont know how to say: in a foreign country walked with a stranger and he tried

hey ma got drunk to blow me

in an alleyway he was a bit stronger than me but praise that temper your husband drags around because i kicked him in the head and stomach hey mom my body got violated again only because im finally remembering the word for violation momma this is the seventh time and i dont remember the first six is it still a red flag if i begged myself to beg for it? to love it somehow? if anything im an accommodating guy no not really but i have a meeting in six minutes so i have to run

yepyep love ya talk

okay talk soon

KAMDEN ISHMAEL HILLARD

ON TWO

xford was always a novelty for me. It was a palace of learning and achievement, of selfstudy and personal growth, a castle across the pond and in the sky. And in many ways, for Oxford, I think I was a novelty right back. I’d wanted to study at Oxford for as long as I could remember but when it came time to apply to college, I was so taken by academic shiny-objectsyndrome (entranced by politics one minute, music the next, and neither every other day) that I knew I needed a liberal arts education. I ended up at Yale, a palace in its own right. Having grown up mostly in Princeton, New Jersey (the home of another Ivy League institution), the transition to Yale was smooth. Tasting freedom, I dove eagerly into more intense versions of my high school passions. Overall, nothing much had changed. Except one thing was very different: I had black friends!

Aside from a wonderful senior who took me under her wing when I was a freshman, I didn’t have any close black friends in high school. I was certainly friendly with some black classmates, though there were never more than two or three of us in a class. But on my very first day at Yale, I laid eyes on a girl across the dining hall in my college who somehow radiated comfort. Under that special shield of first-day introductions which magically repels self-consciousness and excuses awkwardness, we became fast friends. She was an African in diaspora, just like me.

Comparative racial politics is inevitably deep water to wade into, not least because of the inherent limits on one’s own ability to perceive “truth.” My experiences are mine alone, and as tempting as it is to extrapolate grand themes from my few years at Yale and my tiny slice of Oxford, I’ll resist that impulse.

What I can say is that for me, leaving Yale for Oxford was like coming up for a breath of fresh air, when I hadn’t even known I was oxygendeprived. As a visiting student, I felt I was the sole architect of my own identity, which afforded me free reign to build the room for my Blackness anywhere I chose. And, in the end, I didn’t even have to choose. Building an identity from scratch for just two terms, I unbound my Blackness and let it roam free. It floated through walls and drifted through ceilings, and I very rarely (if ever) felt the need to build it a Room. I adored my first two and half years at Yale and I’m thrilled to be back for senior year, but it takes some time away to realize how thick your own walls have grown. In America, the walls that encircle our identity get built without your having to lift a finger. They get built by family and friends, movies and magazines, substitute teachers who mispronounce your name, and cute boys in the 8th grade who think you’re incredible best friend material. They’ve been built by the time you’re in the second grade and you write a letter to your 18 yearold-self in which you dream of one day having long flowing hair, the kind that will never grow naturally out of your own scalp. They’ve been built by the time you’re in middle school and you overhear your mom close to tears of fury because a neighbor attributed your brother’s college acceptances to affirmative action. And they’re built by the time you’re in college and don’t even realize you expect to be hit on at parties by guys who look one way, and not by guys who look another way. The danger of these identity walls is that sometimes you don’t even know when you’re helping to build them, mounting the bricks higher and higher. You can’t always tell which are the bricks you chose and claimed to lay down proudly in the name

EMEFA ADDO AGAWU

IVORY TOWERS

of Black Pride or Pan-Africanism, which ones were handed to you by nameless faces, neither protagonists nor villains, or which were hurled at the walls and crashed to the floor amongst the chipped rubble. The danger is that if you don’t get a chance to escape and build for yourself – not only to build, but to design, draft, and engineer - it gets harder and harder to find the tools to dismantle the house, shake the foundation, sweep out the rubble, and start anew. No institution is without its challenges, least of all a university like Oxford. And yet somehow, despite having far fewer people of color, far fewer places that can style black hair and, perhaps because of the more isolated lifestyle the college system facilitates, fewer students who can call a person of color a close friend, at Oxford I found spaces in which I could rebuild. At Oxford, my walls were shaken when I saw a homeless population for the first time that wasn’t overwhelmingly black and realized I had never even considered that possibility. At Oxford, my walls tumbled down when I told someone I was from Ghana and he said, “oh Ghana, that’s below Burkina Faso, next to Togo?” At Oxford, I built my own home when I sang the kind of music I wanted to sing, from choral music to jazz a cappella to show-tunes, and didn’t feel a subtle but steady pressure to sing in a certain way. At Oxford, I built my own home when I felt fully all versions of myself at once, none slamming up against thick walls, no rubble to get in the way.

SKIN DEEP ALTERNATIVE FILM LIST 5 Broken Cameras

(Palestine, Israel, France, 2011) directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi Language of film: Arabic, Hebrew (English subtitles available) The film is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements.

Ackee and Saltfish

(England, 2014) directed by Cecile Emeke - Language of film: English This film begins with the story of two best friends, Olivia and Rachel, who are both craving ackee and saltfish, and they go to pick up some at their local Jamaican takeaway restaurant after Rachel forgets to soak the saltfish. This film comments on the gentrification occurring in metropolitan cities such as London and how it is related class and race.

Algeria: Women at War (England, 1992) directed by Parminder Vir Language of film: Arabic, French (English subtitles\ available)

Using a combination of interviews and archival footage, this documentary film offers a rare insight of the key role Algerian women played in their country’s liberation struggle from the French thirty years ago. It raises critical questions about the balancing act between women’s and national liberation struggles, and it highlights the equally important position of women in Algeria in today’s politics.

Antônia (Brazil, 2006) directed by Tata Amaral

Language of film: Portuguese (English subtitles available) This film is about an Afro-Brazilian hip-hop girl group from São Paulo who faces violence near their homes and sexism in the musical industry.

Battle of Algiers (Algeria, Italy, 1966) directed by Gillo

Pontecorvo Language of film: Arabic, French (English subtitles available) As discontent and violence escalate in Algeria, people of Algiers rise to fight against the French colonizers for their independence.

City of God (Brazil, 2002) directed by Fernando

Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Language of film: Portuguese (English subtitles available)This film features the story of two boys growing up in Rio favela, and how life becomes very different for them.

Concerning

Violence (Sweden, 2014) directed by Göran Olsson - Language of film: English Based on Frantz Fanon’s book, this film narrates the daring moments of the events that lead to the fight to end colonial rule in Africa. Entre les murs (France, 2008) directed by Laurent Cantet

- Language of film: French (English subtitles available) This film is based on the autobiographical novel about a teacher working amongst a group of multiethnic students in a poor Parisian neighborhood.

Estamira (Brazil, 2004) directed by Marcos Prado

Language of film: Portuguese (English subtitles available)A film documentary narrates the experience of an elderly woman of color suffering from mental illness who lives and works in a landfill site in Rio. The film serves as a very thought-provoking social commentary.

Hafu: The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan ( Japan, 2013)

directed by Megumi Nishikura and Lara Perez Takagi Language of film: English, Japanese (English subtitles available) This film dissects the many cultural meanings, both positive and negative, of being Hafu, a term used to describe a Japanese of mixed heritage. Detailing the nuances of this hybridity, it tells the compelling stories of the voices and visibility of five Hafu Japanese as they to their other roots in Australia, Korea, Venezuela, Mexico and Ghana to provide an absorbing look at ways of being Japanese.

SKIN DEEP ALTERNATIVE FILM LIST Have You Seen the Arana? (India, 2012) directed

by Sunanda Bhat - Language of film: Malayalam (English subtitles available) Set in Wayanad, part of the fragile ecosystem of the western mountain range in South India, the film takes its audience on a journey through a region that is witnessing drastic transformation in the name of “development.” It explores the effects of this rapidly changing landscape on people’s lives and livelihoods.

La Haine (France, 1995) directed by Mathieu Kassovitz

Language of film: French (English subtitles available) After a young Arab is severely beaten by the police, riot ensues in the suburbs outside of Paris. As the victim’s three friends tries to make sense of the aftermath of the violence, they stumble upon a gun discarded by the police and threaten to kill a cop if their friend dies. This film explores the use of violence as well as the riotous relationship between police and disenfranchised youth.

Noor (France, Turkey, Pakistan, 2012) directed

by Çağla ZAencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti Language of film: Urdu, Panjabi (English subtitles available)This stunning and poetic film is about the life of Noor, once a member of the Khusras (Pakistan’s transgender community). To want to be a real man, Noor takes the job at a truck depot and has a girlfriend, but whose brother objects to their relationship. An unexpected incident inspires the disillusioned Noor to start a spiritual journey behind the wheel of a stolen truck. This 2012 Cannes selection surveys a breathtaking Northern Pakistan landscape along a transformative road trip.

To be Takei (USA, 2014) directed by Jennifer Kroot

Language of film: English - This documentary film narrates the life of Takei and his husband Brad as they prepare for Takei’s dream project, ALLEGIANCE, a musical based on his harrowing childhood experiences inside a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. This film looks into Takei’s life history, from his rise to fame as helmsman Hikaru Sulu on the iconic television series, STAR TREK, to his advocacy for marriage equality and civil rights across the United States. What emerges is a portrait of an outspoken activist who utilizes wit, whimsy, grace and humor to bring attention to the sorrows of his past and the joys of love and creativity in his present.

Welcome (France, 2009) directed by Philippe Lioret

Language of film: French, English, Kurdish, Turkish This film highlights the plight of immigrants as it tells the story of a Kurdish boy who has travelled from Iraq to France and is planning to swim the Channel to reach England.

Who Will Be a Gurkha? (Nepal, 2012) directed

by Kesang Tseten - Language of film: English Gurkhas, famous for wielding a curved khukuri knife, have been fighting for Britain for 200 years. Today, Nepalis continue to be lured to the British Army as paid Gurkhas, undergoing grueling tests to win the very few positions available. The selection process presents an elaborate modern-day ritual born in the days of Empire.

SKIN DEEP TEAM Editors

Anuradha Henriques Lina Abushouk Creative Director & Graphic Designer

Sylvia Hong Deputy Editors:

Mili Malde Mahoro Seward Yuna Chang Roseanne Chantiluke Anastasia Mok Sasha Kosminsky Aliya Yule Isabella Woolford Diaz Artwork

Heidi Sincuba Jerome Toole Tunji Adeniyi Jones Arieh Frosh Sylvia Hong Cover Art

Arieh Frosh 47