“Black People are Not Allowed to Enter this Restaurant”

I am not a stranger to racism. Racism is a global experience for African people, and Coronavirus is intensifying that reality. I am an African woman currently residing in the United States. I was confused when I heard the slogan,“We are in this together.” Who is this “we” the mainstream media is talking about? In the U.S., because of systemic racism, African-Americans die at a higher rate from the virus.

You would think China would be more empathetic since it was the first nation to be impacted by the pandemic. On the contrary, Chinese citizens singled out African immigrants by attacking their businesses, barring them from public services and evicting them from rented apartments. African women, who depend on demeaning jobs mostly as domestic workers, are humiliated and often deported from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

With no evidence, these countries blame Africans for spreading the virus. As my village elders in the Yotti/Bali community of Northern Nigeria put it, “when a person is drowning, he or she would hold onto even a straw.” Blaming Africans gives racists a sense of comfort in a time of uncertainty. And because anti-Blackness is normalized globally, racists have no fear in dehumanizing Black people. Africa has been good to the world, yet the world does not reciprocate. The world can learn from Africans about ubuntu (the philosophy that teaches about community). A true community looks out for its members--and also looks after strangers--in times of crisis. When Europeans were searching for greener pastures and natural resources in order to build their infrastructure, they came to Africa. Unfortunately, many of them repaid the continent by forcibly colonizing and enslaving Africans. This maafa (a Swahili term for great suffering) did not prevent Africans from being kind to foreigners, especially refugees. In my region of West Africa, we opened our borders to Lebanese refugees fleeing violence in their home country, making it possible for Lebanese to thrive on African soil. In fact, African hospitality goes back to ancient times. It is said that Ethiopia provided shelter for the Prophet Muhammad and his disciples when they escaped persecution in their homeland of Mecca. To avoid the wrath of King Herod of Judea, Jesus and his parents are reported as having fled to another part of Africa--Egypt.

Africans provide a concrete model for how to treat vulnerable members of a collective. Being in community entails a commitment which means letting go of some comfort in order to make room for others. The racist attacks that Africans are experiencing during the pandemic tells us we are not in this fight together. Perhaps someday we may get there and see Blacks of whatever background as equal members of the human family.

Yoknyam Dabale

When This Tree Blossoms

Two years ago, the artistic project Performing the Future (devised by Frank Abbott and myself) considered public space with no agenda and how we might think about risk and environmental change. Now these issues have deepened, becoming confusingly, tragically real. We are left trying to respond to the impact of the global pandemic, to find ways in our current anguish to think about Spring and the future.

Because of the global and national lockdown resulting from Covid-19, the Future Machine was unable to appear in Nottingham’s Christ Church Gardens when the cherry trees blossom. For the past two years, members of the community have celebrated this re-awakening in early April.

In spite of this, some people in Nottingham continue to track and follow the tree. All videos and documentation are here: http://christchurchgardens.whenthefuturecomes.net/

Information about previous years’ blossom celebration is here.

Let us hope that Springs of the future will see us gathering in joy and renewal under April’s blossoms, to bask in the wonders of the cherry tree returning to fruition.

Update by Rachel Jacobs, Ph.D.

A Blessed Plot

'In the great bee crisis, it is impossible not to see the metaphor.’

Boris Johnson

As usual the flowers were complaining

About their blooming lot –

In Winter it was always raining,

The Summers were too hot,

The hedge too high;

The shrubbery and rose-beds needed weeding,

The edges cutting back,

The mossy lawn required reseeding,

The black-flies were too black,

The soil too dry.

But nothing bugged these flowers like the spectre

Of swarms of honey-bees

Who helped themselves to English nectar

And never once said please.

‘Those striped marauders!’

‘It’s time we told the bees that we don’t need ’em!’

And so they took a poll

And talked about the blossoming of freedom

Once they’d won back control

Of their own borders.

Next morning when the honey-bees clocked on

The flowers hid their faces,

Until the busy bees had gone

To find more friendly places

Than this sad grot.

Which now is left a bolted, blighted spot

Of rust and smut and weed,

A wilderness of inky blot,

A garden gone to seed

And left to rot.

Moral

The earth’s the fruit of all our labours

While Eve still spins and Adam delves,

And those who do not like their neighbours

Must learn to go and fuck themselves.

Andy Croft

(from The Sailors of Ulm, Shoestring Press, forthcoming 2020)

Andy Croft runs the T-junction international poetry festival, the Ripon poetry festival and Smokestack Books (www.smokestack-books.co.uk). His latest collection, The Sailors of Ulm is due from Shoestring Press in March.