National Black Arts Alliance

BLACK by DESIGN, a 2-Tone Memoir – Pauline Black

(image from http://marcoonthebass)
ISBN-10:

184668790X  Serpent’s Tail (14 July 2011) RPP  £12.99

The immediate response on beginning the reading of this memoir is that Pauline Black is having an intimate conversation with me. The different facets of her personality seem so evident on the page in such a lively way, I could be forgiven for thinking that we’d just spent a couple of hours chatting.

I missed out on 2-Tone music but have now gained knowledge about what it was like to be a) a female vocalist in a ska band, b) a predominantly black ska band in a predominantly white industry, c) behind the scenes in the music industry, which is quite unglamorous. My lack of knowledge about the music did not hamper my enjoyment of the book.

This memoir is split into three sections and takes the reader on Pauline’s journey from childhood to the present day. Section one tells us about her childhood, section two is the band days and section three reveals how she searches for her birth parents.

She writes in a poetic, literary way that is refreshing for a memoir. Adopted by a white family, she tells us about her difficulties, but also about the love of her family. There is no pitying voice that can so often accompany the revelations that Pauline makes. She is matter of fact, stating it as it was without rancor. There are points when she could have easily descended to sensationalism as memoirs often do, but Pauline doesn’t go there.

She does, however, become fired up about her politics at times, both race and gender, and it’s refreshing to read. The first time it happened I wasn’t so sure, but it goes with the overall tone of the book and the whole sentiment of The Selecter. The difference between this memoir and others is that Pauline is on the whole measured about what she tells us. There is a large amount of hindsight added to the mix, which takes the emotional edge from the telling. This is what lends to the poetics of her writing.

We are taken on the journey of the rise to fame for The Selecter, the almost incidental way in which it happened. Pauline has done so much more in her career though, acting and presenting, both of which enabled her to stay true to her political standing.

If there is any criticism it would be that I wanted more details about her personal life with her husband Terry. I found I was trying to read behind the scenes about what was really happening between them. On second thoughts, this isn’t a criticism but a testament to the way in which she writes. There were times I forgot it was a memoir and read it as though it was a novel. I can recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good read whether they were into 2-Tone or not. It works well on a lot of levels and tells an excellent story in a refreshing manner.

Muli Amaye

Part 1 Tutor, Creative Writing
Lancaster University

Dialogue Amongst Civilizations
Art for Humanity 2011, 160pp, ISBN 978-0-620-46588-5 (approx £15-00)

Produced under the patronage of UNESCO, Dialogue Amongst Civilizations is a substantial anthology of poetry and artwork (drawings, paintings, photographic images) expressing and exploring the belief that ‘art and poetry inspire dignity, respect, pride and freedom of expression, imagination, recognition of the individual, creativity, excellence and human rights.’ It’s structured through interactions between poets (left hand page) and visual artists (right hand page) and works through the juxtaposition of the verbal and the visual. The poetry appears in its original language and many poems carry English and other translations. The contents are organised by country, though that’s a complicated and fluid concept (see below) and run alphabetically from South Africa to Zimbabwe. The artwork forms the core of the book, but there are other important elements including endorsements, explanations of curatorial concept, short essays, reviews, acknowledgements, artist profiles and statements.

In many ways this is a tricky enterprise, one that runs the risk of collective worthiness, that wears its heart on its sleeve following a positivistic assumption that humanity has a ‘general aversion to any form of racism or xenophobia’. I’m more inclined to the opinion that human beings are biologically programmed to detect difference (otherwise we’d live in an undifferentiated environment impossible to negotiate) through a wide spectrum of manifestations, including the difference of fellow human beings. Our humanity lies not in any built-in aversion to those differences, but in consciously resisting a sense of difference that is falsely ‘racial’, discriminatory and demeaning, so turning an acknowledgement of difference into a celebration of diversity, solidarity and mutual worth.

Remarkably, Dialogue amongst Civilizations does just that. The very subversive nature of the artwork itself (by which I mean poetry and visual art) largely resists coercion into any over-arching agenda and for me there was an immediate fascination between the visual and the verbal cultures represented here – between the need for translation in the linguistic medium and the untranslatable, visceral connection that visual art makes. In exploring these binaries of human communication, this book (or exhibition) creates a further paradoxical realisation – that we are both different and fundamentally the same, that we oscillate in our human relations between recognition, non-recognition or partial recognition. In short that transcultural relations are difficult, contingent, complex, and above all incredibly fruitful experiences in their potential to reveal our deeper human nature and to initiate and catalyze new forms of art and connection through it.

There are many striking images in the book – Berry Bickle’s beautiful and troubling image of a burning dress, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, from Zimbabwe; Theaster Gates’ untitled and surreal juxtaposition of a shovelful of nails and a splintered, inverted hole in floorboards that seems simultaneously to be a floor opening to the abyss and a ceiling admitting light. Both carry an undertone of unspoken violence, destruction, vulnerability; both reach beyond explanation and seem to exist as experiences that we mediate with trepidation, a sense of danger, precariousness, hope. The poems, too, spring surprises, and it is often in their image-making rather than their rhetoric that they strike the imagination most forcefully:

Put that hand on the right over my back
It’s a wave, a flock of white birds.
Their burning tails
Will liquefy the cloud’s belly.
‘Lighthouse’, Cedomir Sagric, Serbia and Montenegro

In many of the poems there is this same reaching for images of unification, ones that both recognise violent antecedents and seem to transcend them:

The wind is the space between the bullet and
The pistol’s firing pin,
The darkest of all winds.
But the space between you and me is a wind, too.
The wind is what joins us together,
The wind of many colours.
‘The Colours of the Wind’, Kirmen Uribe, Spain

When we search for artists and writers in the index (bizarrely not organised alphabetically), we discover that many are displaced from their original country of origin, so that our sense of national identity is an organisational principle is disrupted and replaced by a sense of community that is transnational, transcultural, artistic, ideological. This strikes at another key realisation: that what lies between humans, the elusive sixth ‘sense’ of identity, is not primarily about nation, ethnicity or skin colour, but resides in the consciousness that makes us human – in ideas and ideology, in belief and aspiration; above all in a sense of solidarity that is not given, but hard-won from often bitter and tragic experience of exclusion.

This is absorbing and intriguing book that manages to work in a number of dimensions, from handbook, to curatorial exhibition, to manifesto for humankind. To read the statements and biographies of contributing artists alone is to feel involved in a powerful sense of collaborative ideal, to sense how the individual finds meaning in human community, connectivity and endeavour. Some of the editing lets the book down in places: many translations (and their languages) are unattributed; the index of contributors is difficult to follow and cross-reference; the translations themselves are uncertain in places; and, ironically, the cover – a beige background with cartoon ‘speech balloons’ featuring biopsies from the artwork - looks as if it was adopted by committee as a compromise. Better to have used one of the many striking images in the book or commission a new one rather than fall before a misguided democratic ideal that actually subverts the force of the sampled artworks and looks remarkably uninspired.

Despite those reservations, there’s a refreshing sense of work-in-progress here that usurps any tendency to coffee table chic. If the production is a little rough around the edges, it’s because the book represents much more than a text: its an ongoing dialogic project imbued with urgency and the realisation that the forces that drive us apart are ones that we can take recognise, take responsibility for and resist through that most protean human faculty – the making of new art, which is the making of a new consciousness.

Graham Mort ‘is acknowledged as one of contemporary verse’s most accomplished practitioners’
Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature, Co-Convenor of Distance Learning MA and Director of PhD Programmme in Creative Writing Lancaster University