Johny Pitts: Home Is Not a Place Interview with Olivia Simone

In 2021, photographer Johny Pitts and poet Roger Robinson embarked on a journey around Britain’s coastline, documenting the everydayness of Black British communities. In capturing the inbetweeness of Black British life, Pitts and Robinson create a moving, sensory idea of home that exists beyond the tangible.

Here, Johny meets with founder and editor of Breadfruit, Olivia Simone, to discuss his exhibition Home Is Not A Place.

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You explain that this exhibition is “rooted in, but not restricted by, Blackness” and discuss the idea that multiculturalism is a part of Blackness. Could you elaborate on what that means to you and the place of multiculturalism in Black Britain?

I’m always interested in how the Black experience very often deals with the counterintuitive. People from outside the community have a monolithic idea of what Blackness is and sometimes the Black community has had to create a monolithic political identity in order to move forward, but it’s important not to forget all the solidarities that have been made within that. I see Blackness as a space of multiculturalism, and this is something that nobody really talks about. I was raised on anime and Hong Kong cinema with the Yemeni community – there were Jamaican kids, Somalian kids, Yemeni kids, and we were all kind of seen as the dregs of society and so we created our own culture. Growing up in Sheffield, I was around the cousin of legendary boxer, Prince Naseem Hamed, and I always found it really interesting when he’d win a fight because he’d speak in this mix of broad Yorkshire with African American Ebonics with Patois and then Praise Allah for the win – his post fight speeches encompass my culture completely. When you think of a crew like Wu Tang Clan and how they used Hong Kong martial art films in their Hip Hop, it shows that we’re always on the look out for the counterintuitive and that’s really what I wanted to explore. I wanted to investigate what I call ‘taking Blackness out of its comfort zone’ because we occasionally live in these tropes that are put on us, but actually within the community we’re so complex and beautiful and sometimes surreal and I wanted to capture a bit of that in the exhibition.

“I’m always interested in how the Black experience very often deals with the counterintuitive” 

You mention that the Black community has sometimes felt a need to create a monolithic political identity – do you ever think about how Black people, especially young people, can take a step back from these singular, rigid identities?

Yeah, it’s difficult now. In some ways there are loads of opportunities with access to the world via the internet and in other ways it can cause confirmation bias and we all end up living in our own internet bubbles; we have to find ways to really kick against that. I always try to consider things that can slip between the algorithms. I believe the way to do that is to really be in tune with the landscape around us and pay attention. That’s something that I did from a young age – I didn't even know I was doing it – I was just always interested in the corner shop and the feeling and mood of it and its different, random elements. I think Black life can be a bit like a mix tape. Especially growing up in the 90s, you kind of used whatever ingredients you had and you’d try and make it dope. It reminds me of this Erykah Badu lyric where she says, “my dress costs $4 but I made it fly” and I love that. That idea that whatever you have at your disposal you can make something out of it, which I suppose is where a lot of Black genius has come from. A lot of great Hip Hop came from people who had nothing and created something out of nothing. So making sure you’re in tune with what’s around you and never being embarrassed of where you’re from is important. To really look at it aesthetically and think of how amazing it is that it exists despite the worst odds. Especially in a city like London, where people are being priced out and everything’s so expensive… yet people are still surviving and creating and that to me is amazing. It’s genius.

So the title of the exhibition refers to home not being a physical place and, instead of a material place, I felt a great sense of movement in your photographs. It made me think how – and relating to what you just said about people being priced out and surviving – moving has been a real part of Blackness and Black lives in this country. Do you feel that we’ve had to make home less of a physical place because movement has played such a key role in our survival?

I think so – I think there’s a big problem with the legacy of Black ownership. Take the Skiddy Centre, for example – Linton Kwesi Johnson often talks about it – it was owned by a Trinidadian artist and then lost. Some of the physical spaces that were owned by the Black community never felt as set in stone as other communities, and so I think people get used to having to be a little bit flexible with their lives and just make the best out of a situation. That’s not something that you’d aim for – you want people to be able to afford houses but on the flip side, as philosopher Jean Paul Sartre says, ‘the winner loses and the loser wins.’ Sometimes, when you’re on the losing side it offers you opportunities for growth and building skills and strengths. Let’s say a person is from a family with loads of money and grew up in Hampstead, I actually wouldn’t change places with them, you know what I mean? I appreciate how nice that must be but I feel that life has given me more from being on the edges a little bit. Again, it’s not a goal but you gotta embrace it as part of the journey.

Going back to when you mentioned attention to detail, that’s something I also really notice in this exhibition. The beaded curtain, the VHS, the mix tapes… everything here feels so familiar. The whole space seems to capture an exact moment in time and feel equally timeless. What made you wanna create this living room installation?

It was important for me to think of the different visual language that I emerged from. Cause I didn't go to art school or anything like that a lot of the visual learning I did was in the home, in family albums; that kind of aesthetic. It was through the handmade designs of my sister’s mix tapes and I didn’t wanna lose sight of that. I wanted to elevate it in a sense, to really embrace and celebrate those kind of different visuals that I grew up with and try and bring them into the gallery space, to take over the gallery in a way. I mentioned earlier that Frantz Fanon quote where he explains that ‘each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover their mission, then fulfil it, or betray it,’ and I feel really happy to be in my late 30s and for this to be from my generation. I hope to try and transmit what I grew up with onto a younger generation so they have a sense of history and an alternative working class Black archive to delve into. Even though they might not have grown up with VHS tapes, to know that this is part of their history and to think about it is important. I’ve been reading this cultural theorist, Mark Fischer, and he said something really interesting about Channel 4. In the early 90s, my mum and dad and brother and sister made all these recordings of Channel 4 and on it you’d get a social realism movie then a documentary about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan an amazing Pakistani singer, then Hong Kong cinema and something about Tarkovsky, and Channel 4 went from that to rich people selling homes, and so we lost all of this culture. You can watch all these VHS tapes here in the gallery and I wanted to show how things can slip through the cracks – as a kid watching TV you could learn something and there was a great mix in all that you could watch. You have a documentary here about Black performers in Harlem next to Ken Loach and that kind of mad mix of ideas is so important and that’s what I wanted to transmit through this display. All these different ingredients can add to a really interesting and fulfilling cultural life.

That concept of having a cultural life full of diverse ideas and thought feels really present in the photographs as well – because you don’t include anyone’s names or professions everyone feels on the same level. It feels like the variety of perspectives and realities they bring, captured in the photographs, are of equal value and contribute to this rich cultural life that you speak of.

Yes – I’ve actually always been interested in trying to remove hierarchy in a certain way. This table here was actually made by my sister and it’s based upon some ideas from James Baldwin. Baldwin would just – and it became a bit of a problem at times – welcome anyone into his home. He’d have the local gigolo speaking with Miles Davis and Maya Angelou and so many others, yet there’d be this reduced hierarchy around his table. People were simply having discussions. I try and do something similar with the live events that I put on, where everyone’s on the same level, the audience participate, and we really tap into the genius of the room. What we have here, in the exhibition, is members of the Black community who teach at Yale, we have award winning musicians, former Lord Mayors, and they’re mixed in with the person who’s sweeping the street – by not naming the images you're able to look at all these contributions as equal. There’s this lyric – ‘scuse my language – by Mos Def that I always work from and he says, “there’s never no inbetween we’re either niggas or kings, we’re either bitches or queens”. I’m always looking for that inbetweenness, that everydayness, and trying to democratise and remove the hierarchies. Especially within Black photography, there’s a big tradition of celebrating ‘kings’ and I sort of wanna get away from that. For me, you don’t have to be a king to be in my pictures, you can be a regular person. To be honest, I’m actually against the monarchy as well so even the language that is used makes me wanna move away from this. I wanna go beyond showing people in their Sunday best and create an archive of everydayness where you’re beautiful enough without having to be a king or queen.

Yeah, I really feel that. As a young Black woman with social media I see a lot about Black excellence and Black girl magic and I see how it can be used as a way to rewrite how we perceive ourselves, but it can also be hard to live up to. It's clear how this exhibition pushes back against that and highlights that you don’t need to be this crazy amazing ‘king’ or ‘queen’ to be important and feel that your life is valued in this country.

That is exactly it. To just celebrate the everyday contribution of the Black community. Even aesthetically speaking, I was really keen to have images that were a little bit strange, and I wonder sometimes what the Black community makes of them. These photographs weren’t just about creating shallow depth of field portraits of people looking amazing; I guess I wanted it to be more poetic than that. I wanted to deal with failure. There’s a style in Black American photography tradition, which they call ‘the edge of failure’. People like Roy DeCarava would shoot at night in the Jazz clubs and their images would be full of camera shakes and mistakes and I love that. I really wanted that feel to translate in these images, these imperfect images. Every so often there’s a photo which I think is a great portrait but for the most part I’m looking for mistakes. When you look at my contact sheets, you can see that I often choose the one just next to the ‘best’ version. To me, the one that’s somewhat offbeat mirrors what I feel is the Black experience in Britain. This slightly off-kilter experience that isn't too neat or too clean.

"To me, the one that’s somewhat offbeat mirrors what I feel is the Black experience in Britain. This slightly off-kilter experience that isn't too neat or too clean." 

This off-kilter, unconventional experience – especially of home and belonging – is a theme often explored in James Baldwin’s work. Was it when you were going through your personal archives that you thought of Baldwin? What was the process that led you to title the book and exhibition after the Baldwin quote[1]?

Well, when I was writing my book Afropean, I went to James Baldwin’s house in the South of France, which is a bit of a ruin. To add to this, my mentor – Caryl Phillips – wrote a similar book to Afropean in the 80s and was friends with James Baldwin. Caryl was telling me about the discussions that they’d have in France and the people that would come and sit round the table together and talk about Black life. Baldwin’s one of a number of people who just gets it. Who created certain technologies or tricks to find a way to make life better during the struggle. This idea of having a welcome table that might try and encourage people to gather and discuss became a conceptual framework for us to work under. Even if it doesn’t work, we just wanted to put the idea out there and see how it landed. Somebody might come along and do it better and that’s great because we just wanted to celebrate some of these ideas and bring them to the community to explore. Of course, you’re tryna do the best you can but what’s really interesting was that when me and Roger were looking at The Street Flypaper of Life – a collaboration between Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, which partly inspired our work – we were like, this is great but there’s room for improvement and that’s actually quite nice. It’s almost like a generosity, and with this project there’ll definitely be room for improvement and someone else will come and do it. Our work is like a stepping-stone. We did what we could with the resources that we had and somebody will hopefully take these ideas and hone them. But I like the idea of not making things too definitive – not that we could’ve even if we wanted to. I think it’s good to leave space for interpretation and improvement.

[1] The show’s title comes from a quote by American writer James Baldwin – ‘perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition’.

I actually saw a video where you talk about “happy failure” and how you view Afropean and Home Is Not a Place as “happy failure.” Do you think that’s something that’s gonna carry on throughout your work?

I think it is. For me, happy failure is where a lot of interesting Black ideas come from. It’s encoded in Jazz. It’s encoded in Blues. It’s encoded in Hip Hop. That kind of failure is implicit in those art forms but actually within those cracks the light gets through. In those cracks is what makes it beautiful. It’s what captures and records an experience. That’s why I worry about the king and queen aesthetic in the Black community; it doesn’t leave any space for just… space. I feel it’s too perfect looking, you know. It’s not that there aren’t things we should all aspire to achieve, but I still think there’s space for a different way of recording the Black experience that feels like it really is from the experience rather than purely aspirational.

In the same video, you also speak about working with Roger Robinson and how you deeply enjoyed this collaboration. With home as the theme, I wonder did you feel a sense of home in collaborating with another Black creative?

Yeah, in a way. You know we had this little cocoon in our Mini Cooper. We travelled round the coast in this car and it was funny how it would veer from discussions about Derrida’s ideas of the archive to the latest updates in the Tupac murder investigation. It’d just go back and forth from high to low and that for me felt like home. First time we met, we hit it off. I actually met Roger in prison. We weren’t convicts, we were actually on this Black British writers’ tour and they asked if any of us wanted to give a poetry workshop in Folsom maximum security prison, and we were the only two that say yeah we’ll do it. So we went in and did this workshop and we were both profoundly affected by teaching these young, mostly Black, men. We could see ourselves in these men more than we were expecting and that really created a bond between us; I think we’ve always been interested in this world [art, culture, philosophy] but also what’s going on at the street level.

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Johny Pitts is a self taught photographer, writer and broadcaster from Sheffield, England. He is the founder of online journal Afropean.com and author of Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, which awarded him the Jhalak Prize, the Bread & Roses Award, the European Essay Prize, and the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Home Is Not A Place was developed through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship, a research and development opportunity for mid-career artists. Pitts has been documenting the Black experience in Europe for over ten years.

Roger Robinson is a British writer and educator who has taught and performed worldwide and is an experienced workshop leader and lecturer on poetry. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the Black-British writing canon. Robinson is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019 and The RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020. He received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East where he was also an associate artist. He is an alumni of The Complete Works.

Order a copy of Home Is Not A Place here.

Outage

When the internet was inconsistent at worst, people went outside to find a better connection, usually finding each other. Holidays were like cutting off the internet completely; everyone flooded the streets with cups and boredom, waiting to be filled. Like the worst and the best of us, the creatures came out at night.

On St. Patrick's Day evening, a man asked me if I wanted a sip of his witches' brew. My fireworks fizzled out. You get what you pay for, so I told him yes. One could expect a grand explosion when rubbing crystals together or when opening a beer can, but I found neither. On a state-mandated holiday, of all days?

The bartender with the soldier's cut winked at me as he sliced a yard of congealed orange off the top, and everything “good” – whatever wasn't the foam – sunk to the bottom. He hit the orange peel with the wrong point of the blade, causing it to split off from the cutting board, landing on the grimy tile and disappearing behind the veil of the bar top.

He told me he had another, but I told him the trick had lost its magic.

I usually get twist-off caps, but this time I wanted to write love letters in the condensation. I used to have a keychain that said "I love adoption" with a generic red heart that always seemed out of place with my keys. Maybe a smaller part of me wanted to capture the leftover warmth from the previous hand.

"Why aren't you wearing green?" he asked.

I swallowed the citrus with my spit, rounding out acetic acid into kidney stones.

"Don't want people to mistake me for a leprechaun," I smiled, but something was rising in my stomach.

When a man with a warm Budlite chimed in and asked if I had earned myself a pinch, I was no longer in the bar.

I was at daycare, and Andrew, a boy devoid of any green of his own, pinched me when I begged him not to. It was like the bee that stung my pinky. I let my guard down on the grass and was met with forces beyond my control. Nothing more, nothing less.

I asked for another one and chugged it, foam and all.

I went home alone that night and had a dream about a moth tattoo in the ditch of a girl's arm. We held hands, and I cried for her, for every second she couldn't. For her eyes were glued shut. She didn't tell me she was dead, but I knew she was. I buried her a shallow grave because she asked for resurrection. The best I could do was give my life to her. I buried her hands first. If she held on, neither of us would leave. So, I dug her crescent nails out of my palm and buried her head last.

When I woke up, I regretted my choice of a wave-patterned bedspread. I peeled back the ocean's cover and felt as if I was waking to a naked stranger hogging the sweat-colored sheets on Valentine's Day.

Somehow, knowing that I had found someone on this lonely holiday after all.

by Taya Boyles

I am jealous of my little sister and the childhood she’s got to have.

Her sister and she went into foster care when she was 13 and the sister, 10. She nicknamed her sister “Mon ombre” by the age of 7 since she’d follow her everywhere, imitating everything she did, said, as she saw something worthwhile in her to look up to, which she has yet to see for herself. Their first foster placement was like a dream, it felt as though everything they’d gone through was worth it for this chosen family they’d somehow been lucky to be given by the State. However, dreams only last so long and one has to wake up and realize that the family I thought would be my forever, could no longer bear to be around me after two years, as a result of my ever-evolving bulimia and self-harm. And thus began one of the most monumental periods of my/her life, one in which she/I was told that she could no longer stay with the people she got used to calling home for two entire years because they simply could no longer ‘handle her’. At the lowest point of her life, she was told she was no longer welcomed in what had then become her haven. When she thought things couldn’t get worse, they did: her little sister was still welcome to stay. All she heard was this: She was too broken for them to mend or merely upkeep. Had she been their biological child, they would bear with her and pull her through these dark times.... they simply would not let her go. However, she belonged to the State, she was just another broken black girl among thousands, nothing special, not worth their dirtying their hands for her. So, their interest in seeking her out of this dark tunnel she found yourself in waned quickly.

The next day, she had to learn from a letter that her sister’s choice was them- the ones they’d been living with for two years. The sister, ‘Mon ombre’, the only family she felt she had in this godforsaken earth, was leaving her too, for them. Reading the sister’s confessions, she found herself at her lowest point. Simultaneously being a witness in an ongoing court case she needed to testify in, she needed her sister, her shadow, more than anything now but she’d chosen them. Now she was being told that the family she got to know and love, as well as her own biological sister, deemed her unlovable and unworthy of their care. This shattered her and remoulded her whole being, in ways that she would never recover from. From the age of 16-17, she moved around more than half a dozen foster homes. Having lost everything worthwhile in her life, she acted up. She was unlovable, worthless, a piece of utter shit. Why bother opening-up to any of the families that tried to let her in? why exist? Why was she ever born? So, she smoked and drank and oh so much more. Anything that makes her feel whilst simultaneously forget, makes her burn into oblivion then numbness. Anything, literally anything to make the rolling of the Sisyphean rock up the mountain more bearable.

Now a finalist at Oxford University, studying Philosophy and French, she has a bright -albeit it being quite lonely- existence ahead of her. She has friends now, she smiles more, finds life quite worthwhile. Yet, recent news brought her back to her 16-year-old self, the one who thought so little of herself that all she ever wanted to do was disappear and find peace. She was told two days ago that her sister, was adopted. Whilst she has had to move around 16 different foster homes including, independent-living at the age of 17, with no Christmases and birthday presents, with no shoulders to cry on whilst going through her A-levels, her sister had the luck to be raised by a family who loved her, gave her presents at Christmas and birthdays, hugged her when she wept, drove her to sleepovers, cooked her homemade meals every night, gave her a normal childhood and now legally claimed her as their own. She is the representation of all the love and joy and childhood I could have had but never did. I am jealous of my little sister because she has and continues to have the childhood, I have always dreamed of having, prayed to God for, day and night teary-eyed, and yet never did and never will.

by Kay Kassanda

On the Grace of Strangers

(for Clifton)

I fell down the cracks trying to reach

you

off the ship where the breadfruit

bounced

on the waves as your dark

skin

braced for the chilblains and a

wisp

of a lass taught you how to smoke and gloat that the

skinheads

couldn't have your girl.

More than a

gas

fire's mottled bars kept you warm in

Yorkshire.

Fingers fifteen years away from

callouses

and manual labour, twenty-one

years

away from stripping cable for

copper

in your garage with your daughter whose skinny legs chased

sticks

down Bradford beck.

On the grace of

strangers

I saw you hide your eyes and keep smart with your mum, Rosa’s sewing

kit

six years away from your mother- in- law's button

tin and lard- baked apple pie.

Why so fast, catch your

collar

from the future, feel your 'tash and the drum of your

fingers

impatient for what's next.

What's next, the town

hall

has a museum for the plods who chased

you not them

down Lumb Lane, queer to pay to

view

the mothballed costumes of your antagonists who found out you could

sprint

dart, decoy back to a miner's terrace with your dear ones waiting and a

yard

full of rats.

by Emma Conally-Barklem

Guise

Look at this

whiteness/white-mess


You got yrsel into

Look at this


Spectre of brown skin


& white masks

You ghoul


yrsel a haunting


yrsel a boohoohoo


yrsel with a thin


voice with intonation

an insubstantial clipped voice

manicured to fit


Curry accent toned

Flat and tasteless


cos the past

Is another country


where yr blood


was of the land


where you walked

barefoot and yr

tongue ran free


in multiple dialects


& you were


the salt


of

the earth

until you weren’t


until the birds inside your body

lost flight, lost song


until you were caged

Ah, eee, om!


where you were


a ticking bomb,


a girlchild


who would only grow

to become

a liability


with a bomb


pussy, where you were


likely to have been


aborted if they had had


the money for the scan


Mind they told you that,


Mind they told you to


put that book down

cos you were only


good for marriage

only good to cook

only good to clean

only good to be on your knees

Mind they told you

at home

that you were wrong

Mind they told you

at school


that you were wrong

Mind they told you

at work

that you were wrong

Mind they told you

on the train


that you were wrong

Mind they told you

on the bus

that you were wrong

Mind they told you

at the dr’s surgery

that you were wrong

Mind they told you

at the dwp

that you were wrong

Mind they told you


on the tv and in the papers

that you were wrong


the wrong child


the wrong girl


the wrong woman


& that you could never be right

that you were wrong

the wrong caste

the wrong skin


the wrong body

the wrong voice


& that yr Queerness


could not exist

Mind how you told yesel


that you jad to be better than

that you had to try harder than

that to escape the mirrored hate

a coating of whiteness

a dip into the white/mess


might serve you better

that maybe you could be arundhati

or maybe you could be a preeti

or maybe you could be a suella


or maybe you could be a yasmine

or maybe you could be a tishani

anything, anything, anything but

the shame

and wrongness


of you.

by Deviji Jaan

You called me a cold hearted bitch

You called me a cold hearted bitch

And since you gave me that label

I’ve been finding myself playing that role

I guess it’s true what they say

What you put out in the world really does become your reality

Or as white people would say you “manifested” my destiny

But I’ve been called names all my life

Black girl

Mulatto

Bitch

Whore,

But I’m not any of them

I’m not your sweetheart

Your bae

You Whottie

Your homie

Shorty

Yeah

Knick knack patty wack niggah get the fuck on with that shit!

I learned a long time ago it’s not what they call you it’s what you answer to

I am a black woman!

The alpha and the Omega

Every person in this room came from my womb..

No matter how many white excavationists want to try to erase it..

The first feet on this earth were black ones

The first child that was born had kinky hair and a wide nose

The hips that bore it were wide like mine.

The tits that nursed it were large and had brown Ariolas

No matter how much you want to put that white woman you have on your arm on a pedestal

She doesn’t compare to me.

I am magical

I am ethereal

And if that offends you

I’m not sorry

Be grateful for the black woman

Be grateful for me

Because in every turn of the century we’ve saved the world without asking for a thank you.

But I thank you

Because I know the words I said tonight hurt someone

But you will come up to me after the show with smile on your face

You’ll Leave knowing that it hit that weird place in your brain that always tugs at you when a black woman get called beautiful

It hurts you

It bothers you

It pisses you the fuck off

So much so that your soul shivers

You’ll go back into your white clique and say

I hate that they have to go through that

But will ignore your contributions to my alienation

My otherness

You seem to forget my reality

The words you’ve said about me

The way you feel when I get the promotion you felt you had the right to

You forget when you called the cops on the little girl with nappy hair

Trying to earn money so she would have money to play with the same brand of dolls the white girls had

You said those things out of your mouth

Those words

Tried to break me

Tried to kill me

And even renamed me

But I don’t have white tears

Or the ability to act fragile.

Behind a page face and soft features

My jaw bone is strong

My lips are big

My nose is large

So I can’t hide from it

And I don’t want to

And that’s Society

And that’s the truth

But you heard from black lips

So it won’t be true until a thin white woman comes and says what I said

But with less rhythm

Less zeale

But what she said would have come from thin lips and soft voice

Completely plagiarizing

My story

My reality

My story

The authenticity of the black woman has always be challenged

Always been questioned

But to that I say

Well Ain’t I a woman?

Ain’t I a woman

Ain’t I a woman

Yes

I always imitated

Never duplicated

Yes I am Woman

Black woman

Metaphysically

Phenomenally

Me!

by Michelah Desnai

How Desi Us

They see us as

Taxi drivers, Cleaners, Takeaway cooks,

Corner shop owners, Bus drivers, Brick layers

Warehouse workers

I see us as honourable blue-collar hands

collecting calluses like badges

as a testament to the service

warm brown hands provide.

We are hospitality embodied

to the capacity of a cup that never spills

like a well that never stops

Zam Zam,

we continue to flow

we pick the ripest fruit off trees

to feed not just our kids but

every stranger that becomes a guest.

We engage in more than just small talk

and polite chit chat

we even talk about topics other

than the British weather

We leave our shoes by the door

put patheya in the pan

get the biscuits tin and pray there’s no

sewing equipment inside and

let go

a sigh of relief as we prepare

some sulunay to put on the table

before we leave, we force money into

the hands of our closest mehmaan’s

a secret handshake or as the kids call it the

money salaam.

Our goodbye’s last long enough

to hold up traffic

agitate our kids but

soon enough they’ll do the same as

our blue collar badges

are worn on their hearts

this is what the kids know

this is how desi us.

these are the honourable jobs

that blue collar hands use to paint

part of the Union Jack

by Zara Sehar

LOVE IN THE TIMES OF RESISTANCE

Loving you was never easy

I could see thousands of them standing before you, between us

But every midnight, I dreamt about you

You being with me, in me

I could still feel you in my veins

I’m waiting

Waiting for the world to turn red

Waiting for the wave of passion and consciousness

To penetrate into the factories of lust

I am waiting for the unison

Loving you was never easy

It takes heart to see your own blood

Flowing out from the veins where you reside

Perhaps, I wanted to set you free, flow out

So that you could see how much I’ve starved for you

How much I have craved for you, longed for you

I am waiting for your arrival

Loving you was never easy

You were destroying me, leaving me gasping

But I wanted all of it, wanted you to see all of it

The way I was unmaking and remaking myself

To become this stronger self

Whose empathy, love and resistance knows no boundaries

All the nights I’ve survived without you

You ought to give it back

I can’t wait for our victory

Loving you was never easy

The owners, landlords and bankers dehumanized me

Degraded me to the minimum value of my physical labour

Forced to weed money like religion

Suppressed all my possible emotions but pain and sorrow

Broke my spine with the weight of work and misery unknown

But still, they couldn’t shake my love for you

Now that I’ve confessed that

You ought to put an end to my waiting

Together we will fill each other’s voids, ease each other’s pain

Overthrow and demolish these villain structures

Which has kept us, and my like us apart all these ages

We will break the shackles of bondages

We will fracture the institution of profit

We will overthrow the crowns of oppressive system

Now that you’ve come, finally

Let’s spread our love

And paint the world, RED

by Anjali Chauhan

wilting

part i

Am I Daphne,


the prey that flees the shrike,

fingers to thorns


and limbs to boughs,


so when in the throes


of others’ scorn,


none can strike


(hard enough to hurt)


this marble tree?

Or

Akin to Persephone,


arms of rotting asphodels


fangs stained red, resigned to roles


of fate and folklore. All she knows


are spindly jonquils — a garden that grows

in vipers’ jaws and on Hadean coals


as she sleeps with a fawn’s skull


and the flowers are guillotined.

part ii

You surround me like liquid light

in glass familiar with the outside:

Fists, footfall, fondness, flotsam

flies, fury, eyes, blurry

behind my foliage and frames


Not one to know of close cascades


that turn a house of green to all


heliotropes, hydrangeas, gardenias

blossoming purples, pinks, and whites


For you, Hyacinthus, they grow and glow

though, erysimum, hiding in petals


and leaves like I, you’d never know.


For you, I’ll strike and scrape and pry


at the panels of this vase


‘til the reds in my tall fingers fly


How could I keep you to myself —


Skin like spring


Samson’s hair


Lips that bud


The cores of stars


in his coarse hands


boyish, beautiful, brilliant —


when you were never mine to love?


Yet, here we lie, notes of a nocturne

beneath the crust of the earth


where we see mirrors and rainbows

through panes doused and drowning in dew

and sun-bound strangers, how they stroll

above our bodies; our bodies.

by Indigo Jay

For those Koi-s that didn’t risk their life to become a Dragon

I wonder what happened to that Koi

who feared hardship so much that

he came back from the waterfalls.

His soulmate and also his friends had turned

into a dragon by now,

but he stared down through his life in water,

its comfort and its certainty all flashed by before his eyes.

When he was at the height to cross upstream,

incertitude overclouded his vision;

feeling suffocated by the impending danger

of being in Kaleidoscope of an unknown abstract future.

Though for the first time,

his fins were used at its full potential.

Be it not for the glorious cause

that people celebrated as Success.

It was by his own volition, a judgment made by

an individual that stands firm, in the end.

Today if I can meet him, I will say

“Let them laugh at you resolution.

You may not become a Dragon

but become more than a dragon by heart,

as you stayed behind with your own people.”

Still, I know I can’t find you in today’s world.

For those like you, stay unsustainable in their life.

They became cocooned by the innumerable

mortifications that made them vulnerable.

A vessel stayed at the end of the day

with nothing that could be called Life!

by Saptarshi Bhowmick

Employed by the unemployed

“I need the report by ten!”
He told me, with a stern voice.

But haven’t I sent it to him already, Placing it neatly by his coffee?

If only he could see, there it still lies, silently, all my effort.

by N.T. Anh