White / Other

by Fran Lock

White/ Other is a strange hybrid beast - part poetry, part polemic, part sectarian graffiti - a long lyric essay that grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the position of the absent that is the white working-class "other" within neo-liberal culture. White/ Other is memoir remixed, cut up and spliced with passages of cultural analysis and moments of feral lyric riff to ask what it means to be politically reviled, socially abjected, and economically disenfranchised, alive at the sharp end of everything, language included.



'One of the unique joys of being a "white, other" is that you present an opportunity for nice, white middle-class people to comfortably indulge both their racism and their classism without ever having to admit to the existence of either. They don't see your class because you do not present to them like a "typical" working-class person according to the tropes they themselves invented, or because they do not believe the class system exists. They filter class out of their world-view in ways that remove the experience of class-based oppression from black and minority ethnic people, while refusing to acknowledge the roll racism plays in the perception and treatment of white working-class others...'

136 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2022

Reviews

[Bob Comparda · Rating 5 out of 5]

An attack on the middle and upper classes. Powerfully worded, boundary pushing, lyrical essays from a lower/working class white self described "pikey".

"...were is the future we are allowed to occupy? as ourselves, for ourselves, who cannot and will not become like them? all i want to say is that it's not your fault, and i will never stop raging against this fucking meat grinder as long as i live. when i say FUCK CAPITALISM i am telling you i love you. an all caps love you for the workers, for the poor, for my undocumented tribe..."

[Zak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterfully prescient and pushing boundaries, like most honest writers, poets, artists, and creative do!

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful mess of political rants, lyrical diatribes, and cultural polemics mixed into a series of prose poem/essays that cover class, language, race and grief. What it is like being a working-class ‘other’, socially and politically disenfranchised to the point where your artistic sensibility, indeed your very language, is smothered by an overwhelming middle-class culture. Smothered to the point of not even being seen as another culture just thinking that their middle class culture is culture. The need of the Working-classes to resist and desperately try to create their own artistic sensibility is usually dismissed as ignorance rather than intelligent choice. Lock riffs on her grievances, howling like a wild animal gnawing at its own leg to escape a trap. The writing is a haggard mix of styles; the non-linear, non-flow concoction of ideas and elucidations hampers the reader and can be quite a challenge to struggle through. Yet what she writes is vitally important and illuminating criticism. This book can be awkward but it is also exhilarating and it leaves no doubt that Fran Lock, even in prose, is one of the most intense and visceral minds writing today.

[Siobhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

White/Other is a collection that defies boundaries, made up of prose-poetry-manifesto-essay pieces that explore the treatment of those who are white working class "other" in society, combining personal and cultural essay fragments with discussions of the purpose and history of language and who is allowed what language.

Language is the thing that jumps out the most from the collection: repetition, fragmentation, and the importance and slippiness of meaning. The title itself sets this up, with a question that is returned to again and again: what does "white, other" truly mean in the categories of neoliberal society and how does that materially impact people's lives? The lyrical prose that makes up a lot of the collection plays with language as it asks which words are allowed and how much which words are used matters. At the same time, there's plenty of consideration of class and politics, because it isn't just systems of language that are questioned and attacked.

There's a lot in White/Other as it moves between topics and thoughts, an angry trove that uses poetry to ask what can be represented in poetry and whose voices can be heard. I enjoyed the fragmentary style that flows between ideas and the repetition and echoes that make powerful points about how people are perceived and represented.