I've been in my writing cave and this is what I've learnt
Sharing musings in the heart of summer, summer, summer.
Family gathering under the trees. All smiling bar one boy at the front of the image. Circa 1955. Taken from Mack/Melgram Archive.
Hello You , how you doin’?
June is in full swing, with a mini heatwave here in the UK. I’m not complaining, but I’ll not lie, I’m worried if this is all part of our climate crisis. I’m not one to rush outside at the first sign of the sun, anyway. One, I don’t need to get a tan! And second living by the coast, the sun brings everyone down here. It can get rammed and unpleasant on so many fronts down when the sun is out. I much prefer to venture outside at the start or end of the days. Less crowds and less extreme temperatures.
So okay that’s enough of me situating myself. Let’s get to the meat of this Studio Note.
I’ve been deep inside my writing cave, as I enjoyed a commissioned chapter to complete around Black Motherhood. This has consumed my mind, heart and soul for the last 6 months, so I was mighty pleased to hit ‘send’ over the weekend and be able to free up some space to rest and reflect.
On reflection, from this experience what I have learnt about my writing practice and myself is that, I’m into taking risks and then worry about the consequences afterwards.
I submitted an abstract back in October 2022, to a call out from CFP DEMETER PRESS; The Mother Wave: Matricentric Feminism as Theory, Activism, and Practice. Edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Victoria Bailey, and Fiona Joy Green.
To be honest, I took a risk. I wasn't sure what I was going to write about, I just knew I needed to represent after feeling that ‘motherhood’ when written about or visualised does not include me, as a Black mother. Usually the status of motherhood is placed squarely on white middle class women’s shoulders and the rest of us who do not fit into this ideal, be that Black, Asian, disabled, working class, queer, gay, the list goes on, have to grin and bear it.
So I took a risk, submitted an abstract off the back on my Baltic commission of creating an archive around my matrilineage within the Northumberland countryside and held my breath. My abstract got accepted and then the panic set in. Now I’m going to have to deliver. Deadline 1 May 2023, plenty of time.
I mused around. Read here and there. Became even more entrenched in my belief that motherhood=whiteness and basically procrastinated. I think I’ve learnt that I work well to deadlines for other people. Outside commitments. I deliver no matter what the cost. But I’m jumping ahead.
Intentionally working on this chapter was at times a slog, and this wouldn’t have been until March 2023. Hey listen, before this, it might have looked like I was sitting on the sofa binge watching Walter Presents Scandi crime series, but let me tell you, it was all happening inside. The creative work was ruminating under wraps, in the quiet folds of my psyche and heart. I was turning backflips inside around ideas and concepts and structures as I put another ready salted crisp in my mouth and took another sip of red wine. Research and development time, baby!
I had an April retreat planned, to house and dog sit down south, so this was an ideal time to crack on undisturbed. To bring all the reading and snippets of notes together and create the whole. Things were going well, I was crunching the numbers; of pages of reading and note taking as well as in paragraphs adding into the chapter. And then I got an email stating the deadline had been extended until 10 June. Result. Foot off the gas, enjoy the rest of my time away without pressure. And keep on trucking! No. This is where the deadline didn’t help me, as the extension made me get complacent. Made me think I had everything under control and that I’d use this extra time to my advantage. Who was I kidding?
I started to pussy-foot around again. I allowed my doubts to creep in. I allowed my momentum, motivation and mission to blur and become compromised. And then two things happened to kick me right back into touch.
One, I had a presentation of my practice at the end of show event of the Baltic exhibition. I left things till last minute so that I had to rush my speech, meaning I made grave errors and limited my options to the point that my audience might not have known about my mistakes, but I did and I felt terrible about it. It marred the whole experience for me. So I thought this has happened for a reason. I took note applied this learning to the creation of my mothering chapter and vowed to not get to that panicked, rushed, grave errors kind of stage again.
Two, I watched Two Daughters, a BBC film about the murders of Bib Henry and Nicola Smallman, which centre’s around Venerable Mina Smith’s, their mother and the rest of their family. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that the murder of the sisters, Bibaa and Nicole in June 2020, was given this media attention. As it is only now, two years later that the British Metropolitan Police have finally apologised about the handling of this case in terms of neglect but also more damaging because their murdered bodies were photographed and disseminated by police officers who were there to protect these victims. This took away their dignity in death. However, I took issue with the angle of this presentation of a Black mother’s grief as if this is the only role she has to play in this tragedy. Repeatedly, we see Black women particularly Black mothers, after Black death as images of grief. “Mothers of the Movement’ imagery becomes the public face of a cause such as Black Lives Matter. Black mothers held in the vice like grip of grief and mourning, frozen as such, can obscure the systematic violence metered out to another Black son or daughter by the police, in the USA and UK. State sanctioned brutality and violence is concealed behind the image of a wailing Black woman. As a result, Black mothers only exist in the white imagination as always grieving therefore easily dismissed. Not seen as mothering, parenting their child making a difference, instead seen as a failure.
My understanding/ reflection on this depiction gave me the fuel I needed to carry on with my chapter and really attempt to articulate the issues I’ve around motherhood and mothering within western society. And I stress here, this is just my opinion, from my own experience. I’m not attempting to talk for/ about all Black mothers, Black women etc. I’m just writing about how I think/feel about it.
In the last month, I went long in terms of my writing in order to pull it back. The maximum the chapter could be was 6000 words. I wrote treble this amount. I went long to go short, to distill the words so they would be able to sing on my own terms. I was enjoying the process until I thought, let me just check out the formatting instructions.
Damn! MLA formatting, within 22 pages and only 2 pages for work cited. I was screwed. My abstract stated how I was working on a hybrid piece; prose, poetry, quotes, imagery, white space. There would be little room for experimentation within these strict parameters. I had to go back to step one and reconfigure, reimagine what this piece would look like/ be/saying/doing.
I was wrestling with the chapter but really I was wrestling with myself, trying to work out how I could stay true to myself at the same time as playing the game and making sure my completed chapter was accepted.
I’ve learned never to give up on a dream. 24/7 was spent on this chapter in the last two week, working out how this piece was going to hang together and make sense. And what sealed the deal was when it came to citing my sources, yes within the 2 page limit. I saw one or two books which I’ve referred to again and again. And this is not supposed to be the case. As an academic you are supposed to show how you have read far and wide, consulted this expert, and that. So at first I panicked that this isn’t illustrating my wider readings. But then the reality sunk in, there wasn't many references in relation to books, or articles on Black motherhood because there are not that many to draw upon. I can count them on one hand.
It is only within the last few years that we are rewriting the dominant narratives around mothering through standing on the shoulders of the Black feminists who came before us. Patricia Hill Collins, Combahee River Collective, Michele Wallace, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Claudia Jones, Olive Morris. I could name more.
We are now taking up space in numbers telling our stories. Unapologetically. This is why I submitted the abstract to write this chapter in a publication with ‘mother’ in the title because when I see ‘mother’ I still read it as (white) mother. And things are changing, slowly and I want to be part of this change. I’m grateful to have/take/risk the opportunity to be part of the change.
I’ve learned not to give up on my voice and what I have to say.
Now I need to learn how to continue to write for myself and not just outside commitments. I need to learn how to knock out the chapters for my Mixmoir so I can finish the damn thing for me, not anyone else. But I think that will be explored in another Studio Note, as this one has already gone on for far too long.
Thanks for reading this far. And if you like what you’ve read or have anything you’d like to say about it, comment, good or bad, hit reply and let’s start a conversation.
Until next time
She x