Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Where We’re From, Who We Are

How do our backgrounds – where we were born, where our parents and grandparents were born and where we live – shape our sense of ourselves and how we express that sense of self? Birkbeck creative writing lecturers Anthony Joseph and Liane Strauss explored these questions at two free events hosted by Islington Central Library as part of Islington’s Word2013 Festival.

Anthony Joseph’s inspiring writing workshop encouraged Islington residents to think about their ancestors by focusing on voices from the past and family ‘black sheep.’ A week later, workshop participants read their work alongside Birkbeck students at Liane Strauss’ exciting performance event.

Liane said “The theme of the Islington event: Where We’re From, Who We Are, fit right into themes we had been exploring on the course. On the evening, our creative writing students were joined by some of the participants on Anthony’s workshop. It was a wonderful mix of poems and poets, a great opportunity for potential students to meet current students and hear their work. A brilliant evening and a great success!”

WE WERE BORN ON A SUNDAY

1.
[Saltpond, Ghana 1681]

My name is Eresi Mebrabrabio
I’m tall like palm wine tree
My husband calls me Odo
Yes, Odo, for he loves me like the smooth
Arabi coffee I warm for him at break of day
But few know me.
I am Mami Wata.
I hide my wares in Egyaa number two
And sell them in Kormantse,
I come home with beads.

2.
[Jos, Nigeria, 1979]

Sister Esi Panyin; now she is a marvel to behold
Hair like crown of Frangipani tree; body
Tall like Araba; skin smooth like
Clay, Rayfield laterite; and eyes,
Eyes wide like Bush-Baby.
Many fear the lash of her tongue,
Bulala tongue that fells Baobab tree
Faster than a Kwado-frog catches flies.
But her smile, when it comes, is the cool, cool of
Rain after a season of punishing dry.

3.
[London, England, 2013]

Eresi I wanted to have your name
But mother said no,
I wanted to bear your tribal mark
But mother said no,
Sister Panyin did not care. She smoked
Her spliff and she laughed: “Let’s go to the
Niger Bend and bury bare feet in the dust!”
My name is Esi Kakraba and
That is how it was.

Juanita Cox Westmaas

Black Sheep

I am alone. Sitting in a room with my husband who no longer speaks to me,
And the two remaining children that I was allowed to have back
I am alone.

They scream for me externally and I scream for her internally
The one they took away from me.
I try to see her face, but it’s fading.
I try to hear her voice but its fading.
My now-babies scream louder.
‘Aren’t you going to see to them?’ my husband says.
It’s the first time he’s spoken to me today, yet he still doesn’t look at me.

I pick up the first baby and jiggle him on my knee.
I’ve forgotten how to be a mother.
I coo and sing until he’s settled, and pick up the second baby.
The only daughter I have left.

I try to see my child that was taken; the one I used to cradle so tightly.
The one whose hair had that sweet cotton candy smell.
The one who looked nothing like her father.

When I gave birth to her I was sick;
Not through sickness, but through knowing.
My husband held my hand through the birth, and told me that he loved me.
I just cried.
I knew when I saw her face that those dark eyes belonged to another man.

In the following weeks my husband cooed over me and her and bought us both presents.
He stayed up and read the now-babies bedtime stories before tucking them in,
And then he’d sit by her cot and he’d watch her.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ he’d say, ‘Just like her mother’.
Bile rose in my throat – I began to resent her.
She was a constant reminder of my mistakes, of my lies, of my shame.
Her eyes gave her away.
I knew that when she grew older, she would reveal our secret.

When my husband went to work, I looked at those eyes that would soon betray me.
I didn’t feel love nor hate, as I snaked the fingers of my right hand around her neck, cradling her head with my left.
Her skin felt so soft.
My heart danced as if it was on fire.
I had no choice.
I felt for her windpipe and started to squeeze.
‘What are you doing?’
He was at the door holding flowers.
He left work early as a surprise.
He caught me strangling my youngest child.
That was the beginning.

Kim Fraser

Land Rush

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This post was contributed by Sonia Rothwell, an alumna of Birkbeck’s MSc International Security and Global Governance. This event was part of a series of film-screenings leading up to Surplus: A Sypmosium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, which takes place on 21 June.

There is sometimes a danger when discussing Africa and big business in the same sentence to see commerce as the hawkish outsider taking advantage of fragile or indeed non-existent governance. Hugo Berkley’s film, “Land Rush”, about agribusiness, produced for the Why Poverty? strand on BBC Four last year, has a more ambiguous, cautiously optimistic slant. Could big business bring big bucks to Mali and turn some of its smallholders into sugar cane growing specialists?

In the fascinating Q and A session after the film screening, with Birkbeck’s Isobel Tomlinson, Berkley admitted he had a whole raft more material and this already hot topic would certainly bear more airings. The thrust of the story is that land poor rich nations such as Saudi Arabia are leasing fertile tracts from countries such as Mali to feed their own populations. The case studies Hugo Berkley has found represent the dilemma facing subsistence farmers whose own livelihoods and needs appear to be at odds with the ambitions and financial needs of their state. Some farmers appeared to back the project which was being developed by SOSUMAR (the Markala Sugar Company) while others complained of a land-grab. The balance of the film was fine: can development increase at the pace which Mali arguably needs without the involvement of the global private sector?

Tantalisingly, there was no conclusion to the story, the project which was to have brought sugar cane farming to Mali’s central region was delayed by bureaucracy and the outbreak of serious civil unrest: the investors moved elsewhere. And it is that same unrest which has exacerbated the food security situation recently with some NGOs estimating that one in five households in the North of the country is facing severe food shortages there. Could the food shortages trigger more long-term unrest, forcing families to migrate elsewhere, with all of the potentially unsettling consequences that suggests?

One has to question however, the decision to grow sugar cane. What is motivating nations like Ukraine to invest in these crops, is it to satisfy the appetites of domestic markets or is it to satisfy quotas on the production of bio-fuels (of which sugar cane is a source)? Another question which the film does not answer but which merits further discussion, is whether land in the world’s poorest countries ultimately is being used to help prop up global commodities corporations and if so, what can or should be done to regulate such trade?

The film is a curtain-raiser to Birkbeck’s upcoming event, Surplus: a Symposium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, a debate which promises to be as compelling as it is timely.

Was Picasso a Woman?

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This post was contributed by Janine Freeston, a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Screen Media.

On the warm summer evening of Friday June 7 the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Department of History of Art and Screen Media hosted Professor T.J. Clark’s lecture, Was Picasso a Woman?: Reflections on a Nude, Green leaves and Bust, to a packed theatre in celebration of the launch of his latest in a long line of esteemed publications, Picasso and Truth from Cubism to Guernica.

In a similar style to his 2006 book, The sight of Death: An experiment in Art Writing, in which Clark compares two paintings by Poussin, he set out to expose the myriad of complexities and revelations embedded within Picasso’s Nude, Green leaves and Bust, juxtaposing it to its partner image Nude on a Black Sofa. This would reflect the contents of his latest book and move beyond it through a hybrid analysis. The fascinating exploration of the two portraits was woven together with deftly crafted theoretical and textual threads forming the canvas upon which Clark rendered his interpretation of their resemblances, dissimilarity and equivalents. We were transported through Picasso’s galumphing nudes, lavish still lives to the monsters, freaks and phantoms which framed the 1932 paintings of Picasso’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Clark’s mediation twisted and turned from the brutal and shocking to pensive and sensual perspectives of proximity and containment, life, identity and sexuality, through the perceptive multiplicity of readings relating to the artist’s work. Citing the artist himself and a myriad of prominent commentators he identified connections and formed relationships between the artist and his environment and how it was perceived. As Clark quoted from Kahnweiler he orated with the energy and excitement of the original author’s response to Picasso’s paintings at the time of their production. His scrutiny of the elements within the work revealed layer upon layer of complexity, metaphor and provocation from the apperception of the blue face to elaborate sexual artifice, took the audience on a journey into and around the painting.

Picasso stated that artistically speaking “I am woman”, and Clark‘s examination of Picassos truths reveal the artists metaphysic. Presenting Picasso’s premise that depicting woman as an entity of desire could only be achieved by that depiction being as woman might desire it reveals conditions of seeing that impact the artist’s proximity and fragmentation. Clark examined the nature of eroticism in Picasso’s art and autobiography which emanated from personal experiences. Picasso’s axiom, that man was an instrument of nature which imposes its character on him, was reflected in one of his favourite quotes from Rimbaud “I is someone else”.

Clark’s meditations through his extended viewing of Nude, Green leaves and Bus, modelled potentials for art historians to enhance investigations in the same incisive, engaging, vibrant, fluency found in his books.

The Spirit of Enthusiastic Scholarship

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This post was contributed by Natalie Fong, an alumna of Birkbeck’s MA Victorian Studies.

As I approached the familiar light glowing from the corner beacon that is 30 Russell Square to attend the Shakespeare and the Senses seminar of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2013, I felt distinctly nostalgic. It’s nearly 10 years since I first started classes there for the MA in Victorian Studies (2004-2006). I remember the very first meeting in that very building, a room of people of all ages and walks of life, regarding each other excitedly but also nervously – what was to come? Who would complete the challenge of working and studying? I look back at the two years that I studied at Birkbeck with great fondness, as wonderful evenings in 30 Russell Square and Malet Street engaged in lively intellectual debate with clever and witty people with whom I remain firm friends.

Jessica Barrett has already written a comprehensive review of the Shakespeare and the Senses seminar, so I will merely add reflections as an alumna.

It was great to hear three equally engaging, connected yet distinct, papers on the senses (or lack thereof) in Shakespeare’s works:

Simon Smith detailing the use of sound in plays (music, clapping, references to music in Shakespeare’s plays), but also the effects of sounds from the theatre on their neighbours
Gillian Woods’ expounding of “seeing is believing” through an analysis of The Winter’s Tale, sight and morality (the fears that the theatre’s deception of sight leads to temptation)
Derek Dunne’s fascinating deconstruction of the deprivation of the senses in Titus Andronicus – how literal deprivation is also symbolic deprivation (e.g. the silencing of tongues equating to, as well as resulting from, the Roman court’s suppression of free speech)

It was a great privilege to once again be part of the Birkbeck experience, to spend an evening in the presence of inspiring intellectuals (here I pay brief homage to the late, great Dr Sally Ledger, who encouraged me to be a better student and, later, to channel her passion through my own teaching). Bouncing thoughts around during discussion time with people of different ages and cultures, appreciating how pooling our understandings of the talks opened up further intriguing possibilities for study, reminded me again of the fun times my friends and I used to have at twilight tutorials.

It is that we alumni hope Birkbeck can sustain, despite the current climate. Arts Week captured the best that Birkbeck has to offer those who want to receive a quality education while they work. Hopefully the success of Arts Week (judging by the blog posts) will speak clearly to the powers that be of the importance of championing part-time higher education.

As the great Bard himself wrote in The Winter’s Tale: “It is required that you do awake your faith.” Seeing really is believing!