“Édouard Glissant is widely acknowledged as one of the most important Caribbean writers of the past half-century.
In 2002, Linton Kwesi Johnson became the only second living poet and first black poet to have his work published in Penguin`s Modern Classic series. Both poets are major key-figures of this and the last century, Linton Kwesi Johnson, the father of Dub poetry and Edouard Glissant, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature for his writings on creolization processes and aesthetics of worldliness.
These two friends meet on a summer day…. Starring Edouard Glissant, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, with music by Linton Kwesi Johnson and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Child”
…..we should always remember though that archives aren’t an idealised mirror of the past….they are only a mirror to how some saw that past and chose to frame it.
Father with Son, Bakersfield, California, Leon Borensztein
Text (c) Blake Andrews
I suppose Leon Borensztein might not technically qualify as Lost and Found since many are already familiar with his work. He’s been making photos for over 30 years but it wasn’t until last week that he finally appeared on my radar. I was browsing at Ampersand in Portland. When I stumbled on his new book American Portraits, 1979-1989 I was immediately smitten.
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn’t—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun….
A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments of Teaching
by Maria Popova
Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
1 -Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2 - Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3 - Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4 - When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory.
dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory
5 - Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
“Everything bad is good for something” New work in development
Michele Wolfson cites that “…in the transitioning from one geographical place to another, participants related moving into a psychological in-between space. In this space, they questioned, re-examined, and reflected on the meaning of who they had been [before] repositioning themselves in new contexts.” This series is an attempt to explore notions of migration and examine further the ‘psychological in-between spaces‘engendered by those who leave everything behind in search of lives that perhaps they will never find.
In 2004, the European Union enlarged its membership to include the so-called A8 Eastern European Countries: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. This led to Britain’s largest ever wave of immigration into the country as an estimated 1 million people left their home countries and came to Britain. This work is about one of those who made that journey. Marcela left her village of 2000 people, in Slovakia and travelled for 26 hours by coach to come to England – without knowing a word of English.
Marcela is absent from the images in this series, the family which she has left behind in her village outside of Bratislava are revealed within the spaces of England that is her new home, and that has taken her away from them.
April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King is assassinated.
On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the scene of the crime, and there — to their astonishment — found that they had unfettered access to the hotel’s grounds; to the abandoned buildings from which the rifle shot likely came; to Dr. King’s room; and to the bleak, blood-stained balcony where the civil rights leader had fallen, mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet, mere hours earlier.
Unpublished: Outside of room 306, Theatrice Bailey, the brother of the motel’s owner, sweeps blood from the balcony.
My parents, Alford and Amy Jackson, both left Jamaica one by plane, the other by ship; unknown to each other, and yet, both destined to meet in the life at the end their travels in England.
They would be travels that would take them from, what was, to what would be, and travels that would see them leave behind all that they knew and loved - never to see them again.
Fathers, mothers and brothers would be left behind to come to a country that needed them but didn’t want them; needed them but wished they would leave.
This is a work in progress about the legacy of migration, about the journey into old age and about those who came and never left
It’s early March 2012 and a stonemason, at the National Memorial Arboretum, is busy at work under a grey sky. As behind him, an olive drab tarp is draped and secured over a wall that will soon stand as a monument to 256 lives that are no more. Yet, somehow the wall seems too small; too inconsequential for the pain of loss borne by loved ones left behind to grieve whilst others have been able to forget.
Soon a candle will be lit here and a plaque mounted upon its wall that bears words of remorse, regret, and of loss. Wreaths will be laid and politicians will speak empty words and then once more the past will be forgotten.
Thirty years ago, on March 19th, the war would begin as Argentinian scrap metal workers, accompanied by a military force, would land on South Georgia Island, hoisting an Argentinian flag.
A few weeks later on April 2nd the Falkland’s Island would be invaded by thousands of Argentinian troops and a British armada assembled to set sail to the free the islands.
Thirty years later, I am on assignment for the Independent on Sunday to photograph a widow whose husband would be killed in ‘Bomb Alley’ when his ship HMS Argonaut would come under attack by an Argentinian fighter jet.
Margaret Allen cries as she recounts her experiences to the journalist. She cries when she remembers her husband of just one week before he would set sail for war. And she cries when she speaks of how his body was buried at sea and how perhaps she would never have closure because of this.
Perhaps it’s true that for the dead age shall not weary them or condemn them but less true that we will remember them, as most of us will not; as we can never truly remember those who we never knew.
That remembrance is left for Margaret to endure.
Margaret was a remarkable and lovely woman whom it was my pleasure to meet and I wish her well in her remembrance as she keeps the memory of her husband alive and as she thinks of him at the going down of the sun and in the morning.
Race is always an issue…even to those who will tell you otherwise. Yes, in fact, even to those who will they tell you that they don’t see colours - only people. (Insert smiley face here)
Yet, whether we blame subjectivity or ideology…nature or nurture…we cannot deny that when we meet someone for the first time our minds assigns them a ‘race’. We posit them into a camp and perhaps subconsciously - or consciously - before we find out ‘who’ they are, through the process of typicality we begin to deduce who we ‘think’ they are.
We begin to substitute the holes in our knowledge with what we think we know or what society has told us we know about them. So, in that sense, the Germans have no sense of humour apparently, the French are rude - so I’ve been told - Asians work hard and blacks are indolent yet athletic; and are violent and yet lack ‘bottle’.
I know this because the media constantly tells me this…it very kindly and openly tells me ‘what’ I am.These dominant fictions are constantly recycled of course, regurgitated and repackaged, via verisimilitude, within in a loop of affective socialisation. The message is indeed the medium
The ‘message’ is not always overt of course, and those who tend to question are often labelled as having ‘chips’ on their shoulders; but the message is there whether some choose to see it or not. But of course when the world is in economic decline, politicians without answers, perhaps become less bashful in coming forwards with answers or scapegoats….and perhaps the message becomes louder and easier to understand. For example, when times are good economic migrants are welcome and when times are bad they become a drain on the economy..the stealers of jobs and consumers of resources.
Difference is of course the weapon…notions of they are not like ‘us’…why aren’t they like ‘us’ the politicians will raise. And so, some, like Merkel, Szarkozy and Cameron, will shout that multiculturalism has failed, that the ones who are different are to blame; as indeed Cameron would even blame extremism and acts of terror on multiculturalism without ever mentioning the words colonialism, occupation or foreign policy within his debate.But of course this is the art of deflection after all.Yet, once the politicians have stoked the fires, asked questions and raised tensions what are the results?
But we are all ‘racist’. None of us free from the stereotypical perceptions that ideology has socialised within us to think of those who we do not identify with. We all hold irrational thoughts about ‘others’ and if we choose to identify ourselves as one ‘race’ as opposed to another we cannot expect otherwise.
If only there was a pill that could end racism…one single pill placed on the tips of all our tongues…wouldn’t that be lovely?
“I write all this from multiple positions. I write as an African, a black man living in America. I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism. I also write this as an American, enjoying the many privileges that the American passport affords and that residence in this country makes possible. I involve myself in this critique of privilege: my own privileges of class, gender, and sexuality are insufficiently examined. My cell phone was likely manufactured by poorly treated workers in a Chinese factory. The coltan in the phone can probably be traced to the conflict-riven Congo. I don’t fool myself that I am not implicated in these transnational networks of oppressive practices.
And I also write all this as a novelist and story-writer: I am sensitive to the power of narratives. When Jason Russell, narrator of the Kony 2012 video, showed his cheerful blonde toddler a photo of Joseph Kony as the embodiment of evil (a glowering dark man), and of his friend Jacob as the representative of helplessness (a sweet-faced African), I wondered how Russell’s little boy would develop a nuanced sense of the lives of others, particularly others of a different race from his own. How would that little boy come to understand that others have autonomy; that their right to life is not exclusive of a right to self-respect? In a different context, John Berger once wrote, “A singer may be innocent; never the song.”
