Status Updates From Part of a Story That Starte...

I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth.
- Stuart Hall

Because on that day, in a beautiful and unspoken agreement, the men realised that sometimes the most beautiful thing you can do is turn rage into fireworks.

any person who believes that rights, written down, really mean that people are free will not see why it will always be necessary to go beyond that which is written in black-and-white.

Ever since I first taste words, none as succulent as England, served between the heat-damp pages of my schoolbooks, held up like a looking-glass to hide the corrugated shacks pressed hard against Jamaican hills.

Dem tell me / Dem tell me wha dem want to tell me / But now I checking out me own history / I carving out me identity

His standing joke is that he went shopping for groceries and ended up buying himself from the slave market of this world.
Something twists in my heart to hear him say it, that he has to buy his freedom.

In his 2019 book Back to Black, Professor Kehinde Andrews (founder of Europe's first Black Studies programme at Birmingham City University) commented that 'artists document the political moment; they do not create it'. Here he pinpointed the source of my awkwardness about Black poetry and art in general: we risk confusing the talk with the walk - when there is still a lot of walking to be done.