What Is Spoken Word Education?

This week I leave my position as Lead Educator on the Spoken Word Education MA Programme, it's been a great three years and it's been hard saying farewells to students and teachers. Here's a video of a few of the students I've worked with over the years at an all school showcase. Also look out for a series of blogposts on Spoken Word Education coming out on Apples & Snakes in the coming weeks.

On Race, Feminism, Education, Gentrification & Colonial Cocktails

“Students from gang-ridden areas of the East London borough of Hackney have been learning how performing poetry can help tackle life, one word at a time.”

After visiting the young poets I work with in Hackney, this is how the article, written last week by the Reuters journalist begins. (The journalist had good intentions, but skewed editors). Straight off, I’ll say the students I work with in Cardinal Pole are not themselves “in-gangs”, they are mixed-ability (in terms of literacy and predicted grades) and between the ages of 12 -17. They attend our after school Spoken Word poetry Club and are indeed, growing up in the marginal regions of Hackney, still, as one of the English teachers rightfully put, "our students are up to more than just rising against their circumstances."

“The Spoken Word Education Programme, founded by a former Chicago social worker, aims to help pupils in some of London's most deprived districts to articulate their feelings and have their voices heard despite an often difficult upbringing.”

Peter Kahn is not merely a “former social worker”, he’s an English teacher and community leader with over 25 years teaching experience.

"These kids are so disenfranchised," said Christian Foley, a poet and spoken-word educator at Cardinal Pole school. "The gang warfare arises from the fact you own nothing, and so you're going to fight over a lamppost because that's all you have."

Christian was in fact referring to a different working environment, not the students in Cardinal Pole. This is a clever spin, because what Christian was actually highlighting was the systematic failures in our government in welfare and education and how this ties to the future prospects of our young people. Also,(ironically, given the tone of this article), how harmful the negative reinforcement of stereotypes are for both, society and the individual within it. We don’t necessarily “give students a voice”, they already have one, we counter the argument that they don’t have anything worth saying. We recognise that whether they speak or not, other people (media, politicians etc) are already speaking for them.

“Hackney was one of London's four most dangerous boroughs in 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics. It also ranks in the bottom quarter of the capital's 32 boroughs for a range of indicators including low income, health and education, according to London's Poverty Profile, an independent data provider.”

When you say Hackney is “dangerous”, I think what should be asked is, dangerous for whom and why? Hackney is known as “the socialist borough”, due to its long history of anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations. Evident too, in the names of Hackney streets such as Sojourner Truth Close and Nelson Mandela House. Public figures such as James Baldwin, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Michael Jackson, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jesse Jackson, Angela Davis have all spoken and passed through Hackney. The Dalston C.L.R James library acknowledges a powerful Caribbean activist. In certain circles, this indeed, sounds dangerous.

"A Symbol Of Hackney's History Of Tackling Racism" - Anthony Kendall

“The spoken-word initiative began with Peter Kahn, who used poetry to help students in one of Chicago's most crime-plagued districts. He found that pupils who could not discuss their problems would open up when performing poetry they had written, helped by the art form's links to hip-hop music.”

Yes, Hip-Hop music but also, many of the students are aspiring actors, public speakers, physicists and attend an after school “Debate Club”, which they excel at.

"A Complicated Answer," an anthology produced by the Hackney pupils, covers experiences from witnessing a stabbing to losing a friend to cancer. There are several about fathers leaving their families.”

Yes, there are also poems about poetry, friendships and “what it’s like to play the piano”. The poems in “A Complicated Answer” are about bravery, not ghetto pathologies.

“the programme is backed by institutions including the Arts Council. Since its 2013 inception, Cardinal Pole has seen one student into Oxford University to study English literature; while others at the school, which is principally made up of ethnic minorities, have improved their English.”

Something cuts me here, it’s on the edge of saying “ethnic minority children are being civilised by the English language, and look, they now have the prospects of attending a prestigious but also, a racially problematic institution, Oxford University. Just the other day Oxford made headlines for serving “colonial comeback cocktails” in their Union bar. Is this really the golden measuring bar for academic success? I've known students from ethnic and working class backgrounds who became suicidal after attending Oxford and similarly acclaimed universities.

“Poetry is not a panacea, and those involved in the programme know it has its limits."You never give up, but sometimes it just takes time you don't have," Kahn said. "They may not make it to (age) 25."

This is Peter Kahn acknowledging a reality for some of his inner city students in Chicago, but equally relevant, is some of those students grow to feel isolated from an education system which glorifies fascist, sexist and racist literature, I’ve written about this in a previous blog post.

“Despite this, at Cardinal Pole there seems to be an irrepressible optimism among students. What is poetry, the educators ask Tian Sewell Morgan, one of their star students. She thinks for a few moments and answers: "Blood in words."”

Yes, blood in words, as in the blood (that stays in her body) is poetry, as opposed to the idea that poetry is something keeping blood inside her.

Articles like this in Reuters contribute to the conservative's attempt to justify the social cleansing of London and the racist fear-mongering of working class ethnic minorities. The disparity between rich and the poor in the UK is vast and easy to contest, words are powerful, but they aren't enough. 

In the East London schools I've worked in, I've seen students have schooling disrupted because their council homes have been sold to private investors. Many are moved to Kent, where Fracking was a possible cause of a recent earthquake. 

Careless language is a misused weapon, people often say, "you get what you deserve", but we live in a country which built an empire on slavery and the oppression of the poor. There are twelve million dead Africans in the Atlantic, responsible for the wealth and building of British colonies world wide. Without those mass burials, there is no "Great Britain". This is why Nationalism takes on a form of genocide denial, or genocide glorification. Decolonising your British identity is difficult and I've yet to have a discussion on it that didn't involve someone getting upset or defensive.

George Orwell differentiated patriotism as "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life" and Nationalism as a desire to colonise and "secure more power and more prestige, not for oneself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his (or her) own individuality.”

I was asked the other day why "I put up race related articles on facebook, why is race a struggle, isn't feminism a more pressing issue?", the idea that a struggle needs to struggle against each other has only led to inside bickering of people on the same side of the coin. In this area, I myself have used embarrassingly careless language on twitter which I made a public apology for.

C.L.R James, in a speech in Hackney in 1984 addressed an anti-racist rally by saying, "I want us to be aware that for a long time women have been at the very bottom of society", James asks, if education is how we defeat oppression and austerity, why is it that there are higher amounts of women graduating from universities and still so few in Congress, Parliament or positions of political policy influence? 

C.L.R James states "black people in particular have a lot of experience of being maintained in a position subordinate to the general level which is attainted by men and women who are not black." He goes on to say it would be hypocritical to claim a "fight for equal rights"as a racially exclusive battle. This from a man, born the same century slavery was dismantled in the Caribbean, where he was born (1886) and spent over seventy years as a historian and activist.

The Island That's Hard To Find In English is a poetry manuscript I have been working on for the past two years. I am currently travelling to all the colonial hotspots in the UK (Liverpool and London covered wildly) but recently I was in Bristol and learned the idea for the African slave trade was put into motion by the Mayor of Bristol, John Hawkins. I'm delving into this history and feeling how it re-aligns my sense of self as a British, Jamaican. America's first UK based Embassy was built in Bristol after a falling out during the trans Atlantic trading profits of Rum and Sugar from the Caribbean. 

This links directly into our current culture and conservative-led government with the passing of a law called "TTIP" which allows major corporations compensation for "loss of profits", tax payers are now insurers for multi-nationals (as if their off-shore tax havens weren't enough of an insult). When slavery was abolished, slave merchants, plantation and slave owners were also compensated for loss of profits. Unbelievably, this was paid for by the tax payer. These people were rewarded instead of punished (there was no human rights bill that would see to it otherwise). Charles Dickens mocked this in Little Dorrit, "Credit is a system, whereby a person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay". 

Human rights laws which would have seen the enslavement of Africans as unjust are now being undone by Michael Gove. When talking about colonialism, people in the UK often ask what it has to do with today? I find it incredible that anyone could go through the English education system without having such questions answered? Today is built on yesterday. 

Disclaimer

My thoughts here are by no means complete, it's merely an outpouring of thinking and feeling done while working in education, examining my privilege and positioning myself in a society, hung over after too many colonial cocktails.

Hackney Carnival in pictures

This man was run out of his caribbean shop on Boardway Market, his name is ironically 'Spirit' 

This child has a solution 

This woman is going into trading

This is determination

Who said Hackney was rubbish?

Dress this man in white and he is happy to be alive 

This man had no idea the carnival was on and he fitted right in...

More photos here

https://www.facebook.com/raymond.antrobus/media_set?set=a.10152375930511235.1073741831.510921234&type=1

Am I Born Again?

...and you were beautiful
innocent young though you were fat and clumsy
too but you were you and you treasured the nosegay - Gerald Stein

This morning my daily meditation took place on a bench under the sun in London Fields. I sat out of the shadows, facing a tree. I closed my eyes and focused my breath. Allowing myself to be present, feeling the bench planks hold my weight.

After twenty minutes of meditation I open my eyes to see a black boy, about ten years old, in a tuxedo suit, holding a leaflet that read "Are You Born Again?"

I sat still in a kind of semi-zen fuzz, the sunlight gathering the day into focus, "this is for you" said Tuxedo Boy, and I took it, and thanked him as he skipped away, happy to have something to offer the world. I was left alone with the leaflet’s question, Are You Born Again?

Well, firstly, I'm not religious, so my usual mind would be to ignore the leaflet and assume someone has told Tuxedo Boy to place the leaflet in front of my closed eyes and wait for them to open on a staged epiphany. But meditation pushes the mind beyond the horizon of assumptions, so I made space for the question... Am I Born Again? 

Answer

A few years ago my mum showed me my school report cards from primary school that read “Raymond finds it hard to focus. His reading and writing are below what’s expected of his age. He seems more interested in what’s happening outside the window than what’s in the classroom”.

I still recognise my "outside-the-window-thoughts", and it’s a shame for this to be picked up in a learning environment as a criticism. I was also partly deaf and this wasn’t picked up yet, but the signs weren't sounded out for traditional teachers. The truth is, I was in the wrong place for development because my teachers, instead of assessing their own practise, blamed me for not tuning into their classroom expectations.

When I think about myself as a child in that class, I don’t feel I have out-grown him completely. The person I am today is not “born again” if that means a death of a previous self has occurred. My growth as a person has all been gardened in the same bed of earth. Reading my report card, I feel proud that I was able to express something that is still aligned with my true self. Therefore, I am not "born again", rather, I have been born as I am, and have been taught to stay open to change, growth and transformation.

Spoke Present Hackney's Midnight Run With Inua Ellams, Alex Mills, Alex Patten and more...

Last month I was one of the artists that helped lead Inua Ellam's Midnight Run, below is some of what we got up to in our walk around Hackney. Alex Mills and a regular collaborator of mine, Alex Patten (from Autistic Pieces) features.

The Water Walk Midnight Run from Inua Ellams on Vimeo.

Hackney Kebab Shops & Questions For Gentrifers

1.

Conversation With Ali

I bought this Kebab shop in the Sixties, back when Lenny was about, cockney fella, a seven-foot tower block with a face like a truck. I was losing teeth on his knuckles for holding my face too high when he demanded stocks in my business for protection money. Do I miss my home being a place where my nose gets bollocked to the back of my throat? No. What you call “gentrification” I call “sleeping without a gun”. There is less blood to mop off my floor, less graffiti to scrub off my walls in the restrooms. One time Lenny brought a man to the shop, hacked off his penis and made him chew it, right in front of me. The worst thing I see in Hackney now are the haircuts. What happened to Lenny? Some guy rammed a pole through his brain and sorted out my luck.

 

2.

Questions For Gentrifiers

How many coffee shops do you need to open

to keep that entitled jitter in your walk?

Is it your business if people on council estates can’t afford

the air you breath?

Has the population of the towns you were born in increased or decreased?

Isn’t your fashion just an elitist attitude in uniform?

Does the term hipster offend you or is it a word that you claim?

Do you feel privileged or really cool in the presence of poverty?

London Riots (Hackney Cleaned and Boarded Up

London Riots (Hackney)

Daily Shotter!

I decided to take my camera out today and take at least one photo between each journey I made.

Here are the results -