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Provenance
Olde England – New England
On Becoming Strangers

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Pig Bones & Saints’ Bones

I STARTED DOING THEATRE AS A LONELY TEENAGER, having been the narrator in a primary school play before that, in The Mahabarata. I remember Rama and Sita were separated and their friend, Hanuman, the Monkey King, made a huge jump to join them up. I woke up in the middle of narrating and didn’t know where I was, the lights were shining in my eyes, the big audience was there in the dark and I kept talking what I was talking, but I didn’t know was it the beginning of the story or the end. At fifteen, I did it again to socialise myself – when I couldn’t do Hawaii Five-Oh on my own any more, Columbo, Kojak, whatever was on television Friday nights back in the ‘Seventies – I joined the Old Vic Youth Theatre in London.

The Old Vic is a theatre run by the Hollywood actor, Kevin Spacey, right now. It was once run by Laurence Olivier, who started the National Theatre there. Back in the ’Seventies, the Inner London Educational Authority (ILEA) used it to run a youth theatre that put on Romeo & Juliet, the O Level set text. It was a charmed circle: ILEA pays for a youth theatre to put on the play, ILEA pays to bus in the school kids doing it for their exams, ILEA decides it’s Romeo & Juliet for and by the kids. The two thousand seats are packed out, every night. I’m playing Capulet, Juliet’s dad.

I’d never seen two thousand teenage girls giggle. It’s infectious. It looked like someone booked in only girls’ schools in that spirit of segregating boys & girls in their education. On the first night, it’s true, we had a Romeo who was a bit effete, so when he says “Oh, Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate”, they all fall about laughing. You don’t mind, especially if you think you should have been Romeo, and who among the boys in the cast wasn’t jealous? But once two thousand girls have got their teeth into you – in your pretension, with your stockings on, with their teachers there, pretending it’s Shakespeare, and not a play about teenage sex – they’re not going to let you go, they’re going to shake you to death.

It’s pandaemonium now in the wings, people don’t want to go on stage, they have to be pushed on, so they end up looking like they’ve just been pushed on and they’re not ready to be there. But remember now, I’m the girl’s dad. I have sisters who are teenagers, and I see how my dad reacts to them growing up and going out with boys – the unreasonable, jealous, anxious, violent, irrational possessiveness of our dad. So I come out and they giggle at me in my stockings, but that’s the scene in which I get to beat up and drag Juliet by her hair across the room and tell them that I know why they’re giggling. I know it’s nervous, and that right now I am that man that someone has to kill before they can be free. The silence that falls while I glare at Mrs Capulet, daring her to say anything, the silence of two thousand teenage girls, is a terrible thing. It’s embarrassingly public; it’s complicit in thousands of fetid domestic sexual struggles between mothers and fathers and daughters. It’s powerful; but I’m the one with the power, I’m the monster, I’m the one that’s going to be killed, sometime, down along the line, by this audience, as I can feel it, hear it, assessing how to stop me, in the end, devouring the maiden.

Of course, that’s not how it ends. Juliet’s death, that’s almost accidental. And I’m not to blame. But I remember thinking, theatre will be the death of me. Unless I can do a quick change and say, after all, I’m not that character you just saw up on stage, that was a mask, I’ve just taken it off and had a shower and your daughters – no harm done, eh?

Rather, let me introduce myself as a writer. I began writing in primary school. We had this Daily Diary we had to do, which I remember because my parents went on recalling how I’d go on and on about my Daily Diary whenever they’d ask what I’d done that day at school. I was writing in school about what happened at home, and then speaking at home about what was happening through this writing I was doing at school. Writing gave me a voice (I’m the fourth child of six children) to speak and be heard, to understand, to interpret. Whenever one of my older brothers beat me up, I couldn’t make my strangled, bloated, beaten-up sobs stop long enough to get out my version of what had happened so he could be taken back to the orphanage, or the dump, the deep-most pits of hell, wherever they’d got him from, and dropped. So what better than pen and paper? Or, later, when it’s my father who threatens the stable, rational, hopeful order of the universe, how better to reflect that than through the parlour games of writing for theatre?

That’s, in one sense, the Provenance of my work – in my teens and in primary school – taking Provenance, that is, as biography, as my formation, my psycho-social DNA, where I’m coming from. There’s the implication, of course, that by taking two points and plotting between them, it could also give you an indication of where I’m going. But I don’t see my life as a straight line. I could hit both those points on a time-line with a parabola; or perhaps with a circle I could go on living them forever. Like a lot of poets my work happens in a day-dreamy chronological reverse, remembering or re-collecting experience in the past. I could go on all day about it.

But instead of that, sitting down to ask, What’s the Provenance of my work?, I decided to hunt around, do a straw poll of curators, art historians, clever people I know – with jobs – and ask them, What’s Provenance? Well, says one, it’s the history of the ownership of moveable objects. People don’t, for example, speak of the Provenance of a building as they do of paintings, say, or furniture. It’s about stuff you’ve got to track. If it moves, if it’s got legs, it’s got Provenance.

It can move very fast, says another. That’s because it’s 95% market manipulation – it shouldn’t be, there’s lots you want to know about where something came from, who owned it – but it is. You’ve got a Raphael copy, Madonna of the Pinks – there’s lots of them – worth, what, a couple of hundred thousand? Someone says, no, that’s … the real thing, writes it up, gets it hung on the wall of the National Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum goes after it for £35 million. Its Provenance – its history as the real painting – is entirely modern and very expensive. It’s basically that critic and that gallery saying it is what they say it is, and it’s worth it. But other people agree with them, and although the £22 million finally paid has been called “a record price for a fake”, it’s not unlikely the Duke of Northumberland might have been sitting all this time on a Raphael without needing to pin it down in his tax bill.

But how do you prove it? I’m wondering. How do you prove something’s the real thing? Taste? Well, you can have the lucky find, the skilled eye and judgment of experts and connoisseurs, a Leonardo da Vinci left in the leaves of an unopened book that was overlooked – there’s lots of them, too – but nothing quite beats an empirical history of who owned an object, approved it and passed it down to its present owners and value. The market wants to know that what it buys – its authenticity and value – is stable and won’t collapse. Provenance is a price-support operation. In addition to providing a pedigree, it might also say something interesting about who owned it. An important collector or gallery can add status and value. Keep your eye on the money.

But why, I want to ask, does my OED say the word only comes into English from the French in the late eighteenth century? Ah, says a third, there might be two reasons for that. In the eighteenth century, people went on the Grand Tour to Europe looking for the remains of classical culture – Greece and Rome – and they brought home fakes mocked up in some back alley off the Grand Canal. How good was their French? Did they have Italian? These modern languages, not Latin or Greek. The travelling orphans of classical Empire, they got ripped off trying to buy the material culture of their dreams. You’d want to know, was it really something Caesar touched? Or it might be the Revolutionary sales. Oh, the Revolutionary sales? Yes. Remember, in 1793 and ’94, there were important auctions by the State in Paris of goods confiscated from the monarchy and aristocracy. The English aristocracy did a roaring trade through agents in Paris buying up the Royal collections. Which is why a great deal of seventeenth and eighteenth century French loot has been held in English collections. If it came from the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, it had a collectable provenant, or Provenance: it was royal furniture. On which count, Provenance came into being between the guillotine and the gavel. Going, going, gone?

Cut, says the lady who’s been knitting a frown quietly in the corner. All this about the money is nonsense. Go to a museum, think about it. Once a museum’s got something valuable in its collection it’s not going to be sold. It doesn’t have a price. It’s priceless. You’re looking at the history of an object, what it tells us about where, when, why, how it was made, what it meant and how it comes down to us.

I think about that. Why do I like hanging around museums? Perhaps I like this idea of Provenance released from history – the history of its place in the market – into being the history of an object under glass. But I can’t help worrying, in these smash and grab days, how firmly a museum gets to hold onto an object like that, frozen in place. So what about Baghdad? I ask. The looted Museum of Antiquities? Aren’t those things flooding the marketplace? They can’t be sold openly. They have no Provenance, they could be fake or stolen. You’re on your own with the Black Market.

But lots of things have been bought and sold, I come back, that the Nazis looted, and we haven’t got to the bottom of what the Soviets took. After a while isn’t all theft absolved by history? Forgotten? Finders keepers …?

It’s true we live with fakes, she says, with breaks in the history of objects. Fractures along the rim of things we know existed but can’t completely be sure have re-emerged. Something lost or stolen can be found. Stealing is ingrained in human history; for objects it becomes part of the story. You can unearth something lost that’s been buried. Sometimes that’s how it gets preserved. And besides, in time the fakes can become obvious. A fake from the ’twenties won’t look the same as one from the ’fifties. A clue, some element of style, invisible to people at the time, does after a while become apparent. And some fakes are really good. They can be interesting in themselves. One of the ways is how not only the objects are faked but how they get fake Provenances to go with them. Such and such a collection was known to have such and such an object which was lost. It was known to have existed, is unlikely to meet itself coming back from the auctioneers, is credible enough to pass muster – and all subsequent buyers want to back up its story.

Now that, for me, is where it gets interesting. When you get buy-in. If you do that with an art object, that’s fraud. But in my line it’s fiction. I love fakes. Fake etymologies, fake Provenance, making it up. I’m on the side of the forgers. For reasons I’m sure entirely personal to me, I love lying to power. Though I felt some pang lying to the Queen when I met her. I suppose I didn’t feel she had any power. “What were you doing in West Africa?” Oh, studying mortuary rituals. Where did that come from? Actually I was strolling around with some travelling theatres in Nigeria, and I suppose I didn’t want her to think of me as a sturdy beggar. Or perhaps that is what I was doing. My father – a Nigerian – had just died. I went and got some money from the Queen to go and study theatre in Nigeria, and perhaps to mourn him, certainly to walk his land, and, I suppose, if I think about it, to figure out how, finally, to bury him … I digress. I was speaking of fragility and fraudulence in the Provenance of things – in relation to my writing and my work in the theatre. It’s my job, as I see it, to convince you that this … pig’s bone … is more than that. Theatre is unlike Fine Art in that respect; it relies on your willing suspension of disbelief, even the evidence of your own eyes. You can see it’s a pig’s bone, boiled in France, smuggled through customs only this morning. I’m not hiding it. Now pardon my French, but if I say to you, would you kindly think of this as the relic of a saint, what skin is it off your nose? If in the end, you, too, make an imaginative leap and come to think of it as holy? It was a life. But I leave it up to you.

It’s about time now to break off. I can’t concentrate on a lecture for too long. So I’m going to show you some slides of some crosses. No rush. Give you plenty of time to reflect. Then I’ll come back to this point about the Provenance of my work in the passing off of pig-bones as saints’ bones.

This first one is Spanish, made around 1060 for the King of Castile. It’s ivory. The outline of the cross you see is how it’s displayed. The original cross would have been ivory. I like it because you can see a rationale for the shape of the cross in the human figure. And ivory is bone.

This one is Byzantine, around 950 AD. It’s in Germany, in Limburg-an-der-Lahn, near the Rhine. The wood you can see is a fragment of the True Cross. It’s the kind of thing that prompted Erasmus to wonder how many forests could be assembled from fragments of the True Cross. But that would be one hell of a wood to take a walk in, wouldn’t it? While we’re on the subject, let me say there have been 13 recorded foreskins of the infant Christ in Italy alone. Sometimes, really, less is more. But there’s also the miracle of the many.

This last one is in the Aachen Treasury, where the Holy Roman Emperors were crowned and Charlemagne was buried. It belonged to Otto III, from about 1000 AD, as his processional cross. The cameo you can see is a contemporary portrait of the Roman Emperor Augustus, so it’s a thousand years earlier, from about the time of Christ. Apparently Otto saw himself as having a dual Provenance, from Roman Empire and Christianity, in some sense descended from both of them.

This is the back of it, with the Corpus engraved.

And here’s a painted Malevich cross from 1915. I’ll just leave it there.

I have a dual Provenance, or descent. As a poet – the person behind both the diarist and the playwright – I would locate the Provenance of my work in my relation to words, to language. What language? Well, English, of course. But the Provenance is a bit more complicated than that. There’s my father from West Africa, so I grew up in a house with people speaking Yoruba, a tonal language – like Chinese – in which in order to speak you have to sing, and you can’t be tone deaf when you listen. And then there’s my mum, Irish from rough old Limerick – Stab City, so called, because that’s how they talk, in-out with a quick jab and you have to be quick to catch it. I joke, of course. What I mean is that under her English ran an underground tributary which is the Irish language – not just the brogue, which I couldn’t hear and my friends could, but direct grammatical transpositions and figures of speech from the Irish that made her speaking so unlike what you heard out in the street. There seemed to be so much more going on in the language at the level of its structure, its DNA – think of those Irish writers, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Under my mother’s tongue, then, I found poetry. And under my father’s, music.

From these different parental relations to English – my mother’s brogue which I couldn’t hear, and my father’s Yoruba which I couldn’t understand – there’s not only a dual Provenance for my English but also a break, a discontinuity. Most people, to listen to me, my brothers and sisters, wouldn’t think of us as Irish or, to look at us, immediately understand that it was our mother who taught us how to love. So let me focus, as something that might be of interest to you – you might even be wondering about it – on my relation to my father’s culture in West Africa. I don’t know anything about it. He wouldn’t tell me. Except that I know off my own bat most people get to be familiar with it through Voodoo. It’s not unusual, I have to say. It’s what happens with secret societies controlled by a gerontocracy. The old guys keep you in your place by not letting you in on the secret. You have to steal it, like fire – find your own way to knowledge. You have to use your own guile, your own head – your oriki as it’s called – and batter your way in through the maze of secrets. So, as I say, I grew early in the habit of lying to power.

Dad, I’d say, why didn’t you teach me Yoruba? “Because I didn’t think you’d need it here.” I was gob-smacked. How could he cut me off like that?

Or again. Dad, why didn’t you tell me about any of this stuff I’m finding out about Yoruba culture? “Because you’d go and put it in a book and everyone would know it was me who told you.”

Dad, how can you be a Christian and be a devil-worshipper at the same time? “Go ask your mother.” And, she being a fierce Catholic, I didn’t.

For a while I was outraged at what I thought was the outright theft of my inheritance. I wouldn’t be dispossessed in that way. I’d go out and get my patrimony without him. I would source myself from him whether he liked it or not. Until I found myself one day, on stage, speaking strangely with my father’s voice … So I backed off and thought about it. What does it mean to have this multiple Provenance? I’m suddenly lost.

Have you ever wondered what it means to meet the Devil at the crossroads? That Robert Johnston thing, in Voodoo from Haiti, up through jazz in New Orleans and into the blues? Where the blues guitarist goes down to the crossroads to make his Faustian pact with the Devil to play the blues as no man should? You can see that the crossroads is the unknown, you don’t know where the paths lead, indeterminacy, choice, unhinging the fixed order of things, of the moral universe. If you see the Devil as a transgressor, who breaks and crosses boundaries, you can see that’s what a cross enacts. That’s what it’s like for me, with my Irish catholicity, and my Yoruba culture, in which Eshu, Elegba – or in Haiti, Papa-Labas – is god of the crossroads, of chance, of interpretation and danger, the devil, the deceiver.

Let me remind you, I started this talk with one or two autobiographical fragments attempting to source a Provenance for my work as an artist in theatre and writing. I then fictionalised my enquiry into the nature of Provenance with various art historians and curators. Always bearing in mind that the unreliable narrator is not new to fiction, I found my way to breaks, discontinuities, thefts, fragments and forgeries. I have to say that’s what it feels like to me, as a human being, to enquire into the Provenance of what I do. My unannounced guide in all of this is a very English version of Eshu, the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who freely admits that he’s hawking pardons and absolutions from Rome along with pigs’ bones he leaves it up to your imagination to give a Provenance as holy relics. But I, he says, “must think/ Upon some honest thing while that I drink.”

Being, as I say, a fictionalist, I too embrace forgery as an imaginative leap across boundaries and breaks, because I must. The boiled bones of Provenance for my work are something I invent. So let me play you a short clip from a play I made called Eshu’s Faust, which took place in Jesus College Chapel in Cambridge, at the crossroads of a cruciform nave and transept. Excuse the video quality … but it gives you an idea.

A rather transgressive place to conjure the Devil, I suppose, a thousand year-old English chapel. But I did it with the support of the Christians in the College who felt it challenged and awoke the sacred nature of the space. The secular intellectuals, who usually had nothing to do with this residual adjunct to their academic institution, were outraged at the blasphemy, I kid you not, and changed the College constitution to block any further outrage getting past them into their Chapel. Too late. It was then doubly inscribed as having passed beyond them into the constitution and into the walls, into the history of the place which has seen play performances since at least the 17th century. I always hated the way those Colleges had ‘private’ signs up for their courtyards and colonnades and immaculate lawns. It looked like you’d be treading on strange, tribal territory to try to get in. I was definitely going to trespass there. And Eshu is the great enabler. The dancer you saw was Kofi Koko, a Beninois Voudun dancer, with Peter Badejo, a Yoruba dancer based here in Britain, as Faust. On the first night we discovered that Kofi had been dancing barefoot over broken glass, and Peter fell and badly bruised his arm on the stone floor. So the next night we sacrificed a white cockerel in secret and bled it into the stone, because you cannot go anywhere without sacrificing to Eshu.

Many people were magnetised by the vulnerable, broken-looking body of Kofi as a version of the crucified Christ, who as you saw there retreated through the rood screen back towards the altar. I had by that time become conscious of wanting to practice an aesthetic of trespass – as is hardly avoidable for a black writer approaching the English stage, it has such a history without you. So in many ways the trespass is also back over history - not only the history of the Chapel but also of English theatre, in this case Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on which Eshu’s Faust is an act of trespass. The trespass amounted in my mind to a revisionist challenge to a history that excluded me, to origins and identities – a Provenance – I absolutely intended to steal.

This talk was first given as the inaugural lecture on the subject of Provenance for the Transmission: Speaking & Listening series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in collaboration with Site Gallery and the Showroom Cinema. Delivered October 2004 at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, and published in Transmission: Speaking & Listening, Vol. 4 by Site Gallery, 2005.

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A Dance in the Street

I WANT TO THANK YOU FOR INVITING ME TO WITNESS THE ISPA CONFERENCE. I learnt a lot. I felt people thoughtful, reflective – beyond the presence of mind needed to fill their spaces. Everyone you touched, it seemed a spring of thought and experience welled up in them. There was a seriousness, of purpose – or, as the English poet, Philip Larkin, would say – a hunger to think again, and perhaps a sense of responsibility to bring home the reality of change to their audiences. I couldn’t begin to summarise it. It was the session I missed. But I imagine you were there.

I’ve still got to talk for 40 minutes – something uplifting. So I thought, if you’d indulge me, I’d do that English thing and talk about the weather… It’s a blue, cold sky today – which I hope persuades you it’s not always Sherlock Holmes weather we have in London, cold wet streets and dark too early. We had a fantastic autumn this year. It was the hottest summer on record. The last time I remember that happening was the long, hot summer of ’76 – which changed our culture. Pubs and cafés dragged tables and chairs outside because it was too hot to be inside – and the pavements started to look like Paris. We’d just joined the European Economic Community, as it was then called, in 1973 and it seemed we were going to be living like Europeans after all. But mostly I remember the way that summer changed our perception of public space, how it gave us back the street.

For some years the Notting Hill Carnival – now the biggest street festival in Europe – had been building to a point of tension with the police and local residents. Black people had reached a critical mass in the country by that time, and the Carnival made it visible. The August Bank Holiday was never going to be the same again. Battles broke out in the streets between mainly – but not only – black young people and the police. Aggressive policing of this young, black population and the abuse of stop-and-search powers exploded into the kind of riot we don’t like to see in this country but occasionally do.

This is where I put my hand up. I was there. Bottles, bricks, broken paving stones flying through the air. People hid under cars, or in telephone boxes. The streets are packed for the Carnival – panic. You can’t all fit in the telephone box. There was a roar that surged along the crowds and broke over you. I was 15, and I saw my society being torn up under my feet and going over my head into ranks of the police. My brother saw a bottle hit a policeman on the face, and a brick hit him on the other cheek. My sister was under the car. The police were using dustbin lids as shields. People were being cut by flying glass – with fights and fires everywhere. This wasn’t Soweto,1976, it was here.

It was so bad everybody backed off. I got home and saw it again on the television. My parents couldn’t believe it, so I didn’t say anything. One by one we all got home intact, but it was years before we found out from each other we’d all been there. So it was my secret as I watched my society repair itself… Headlines, angst, arguments, commissions of inquiry, recommendations, re-building relationships, black policemen – the whole panoply of English crisis management. Sporadically, it flares up again, but basically that summer marked a sea-change in our attitude to rights of way, assembly and protest. We took back the streets as a place to be ourselves. And acceptance of Carnival – steel bands and dancing policemen on the Bank Holiday television news – became an emblem of our openness as a society to change.

What I’m saying is that something happened here in the 1970s that created this London of cultural fusions. A knock-on, perhaps, from civil rights and Vietnam protests in America, a reaction to the nuclear spectre of the Cold War, the chill of the OPEC oil crisis fuelling global recession – such a lot going on – but our antidote to all this was a love-in: a Carnival – a re-invention of civil society as anti-racist, inclusive and pro the values of pragmatism and tolerance underpinning our social order in the face of economic hardship and social unrest. The 1970s saw the growth of a street culture of festivals, markets, public demonstrations and performance that enabled us to see ourselves across boundaries of class, culture and race as Londoners. Everybody who’s here can be found anywhere on the street – there are no no-go areas I’m aware of. We still have the (Public Order) Riot Act, but the point is to avoid reading it.

I made a play about this change, unsurprisingly called The Long, Hot Summer of ’76. It won a prize and I took the money to go and look at Mexico – another place of cultural fusions. I noticed on the back of one of the bank notes there it celebrated La Fusion de dos culturas beneath a picture of a Castilian knight on horseback piercing the body an Aztec eagle warrior with his lance. Unfortunately, the eagle warrior had his stave through the throat of the knight and the whole scene was reeling over backwards as the horse collapsed. That’s to say we can’t take these things for granted.

That play was a radio play. I got the BBC to broadcast it over the weekend of the Notting Hill Carnival, so it played as a kind of live broadcast of events happening outside on the street - homage to the Martians coming and Orson Welles in The War of the Worlds. Usually I listen to a radio play, I’m doing the washing up, I’m on my own, and I don’t think about who else might be listening, I’m not asked to. But I wanted to work at that blurring of public and private space that happens in Carnival – you’re inside listening to the radio about people partying out of windows and spilling out of doors, music blaring out of speakers, crowds on the streets. A play about that Carnival going on in London. You can hear the sounds and imagine other people being out there in the middle of it – and other people inside listening along with you, having doubts about it. You might go to the bathroom, or switch off, but there it is, still going on – a public event.

That seems to me to be the thing about Carnival – it has no boundaries, it moves, you’re free to go in and out as you please – and though there are costumes and musical floats, things to eat and drink and smoke, things going on, it’s really about you, centred in you and people around you. It’s an experience of who you’re sharing the space with, and how you connect with them. It’s your chance to dance in the street for a change. In public, at the end of summer.

The Fall

But as I say, it’s been a great autumn. The weather’s changing. We’re not used to it. The climate’s changing. We had this great heat, then a sudden drop in temperature which trapped the tannin in the leaves as the trees closed off against the cold. The temperatures rose again and levelled off into a long, warm autumn, but it was that tannin in the leaves that gave us autumn colours we only usually see in films set in New England like The Dead Poets Society – that great sweep of red across North America, like the maple leaf in the Canadian flag. In all the great London Parks – Hampstead, Richmond, Hyde Park – England looked like New England. As I kicked through the leaves, the Fall never seemed so vivid, so right a way to describe the autumn.

For me – here – I always heard Milton, William Blake and the Bible in that word for autumn, the Puritan founders of the early New England colonies looking into the mirror of the North American forests at our fallen nature. But no – things fall with a loveliness that makes me want to live in New England. I want to talk for a moment about that co-incidence of seeing my autumn through an American Fall – seeing old England through an idea of New England – because it involves a doubling in the idea of place, a temporary fusion of this England and New England.

In France, différence is a way of making meaning, of being creative. You’ve got one England, fine. You’ve got two, everything changes. The old England changes because you begin to see its differences from the new one. The new one changes because it’s another thing and begins to operate independently. It’s difference that makes new things, new meanings. In Britain, we call that discrimination – the class-system has made us connoisseurs in discriminating one thing from another, noticing the small differences and distinctions – in accent, in appearance. This goes to the heart of our discriminatory culture – how we operate to make sense of things, to appreciate some and to shut others out. But, like the French, we also work with metaphor, which is a different way to make meaning and analyse the world: think of two things yoked by violence together to make a third. Cultural fusion is a metaphor. You have cultures. You have welders with acetylene torches. You have fusion.

As a poet I know that metaphor is the life-blood of art. As a person I know a live artistic culture keeps us from going off the rails. We manage our society – our diversity – through integrating our differences in endlessly evolving metaphors of cultural fusion and confusion: we make art the language of our social cohesion. When an English person looks at America, they see, as I imagine Americans probably don’t, how English the language, the culture and occasionally the autumn are. They hold the sense of a special relationship with it. We also discriminate against it. Both things are at work – difference, and metaphors of belonging. We don’t see necessarily that Americans don’t believe they can be fused with being English or Anglo-Saxon. We incorporate them into our sense of who we want to be and where we need to go. America is an art-work in the minds of the English – a fusion of New England falls, deep rivers and the smell of tobacco farms: everything we lost. Hollywood, Florida, Silicon Valley, Chicago grain futures: everything we want. And some things we don’t. On/Off. A kind of switching.

Passover

Now I’m English, which is a very interesting place to be – I’m both inside and outside. Sometimes I’m only half English, half Irish and half Nigerian. Other times, I’m wholly Nigerian, wholly Irish or wholly English. It’s far more fluid than a fusion. As a black Englishman, I make common cause with people from the Caribbean, and with part of my family being French I’m a good European. It’s not uncommon. We’re on the move in this society. Net immigration is running at about a quarter of a million people a year. We don’t always see eye to eye about who we are and where we’re going – the English among us, the Welsh, the Scottish or the Northern Irish. We constantly shift among our identities as metaphors of belonging – being British, being Muslim, being English, being Nigerian. Scottish collusion in the enterprise of British Empire, translates now as self-conscious anti-racism in the current mood to distinguish themselves from the English. But when we come together it’s often some canny combination of the commercial and inclusive.

How does this fluid situation sit with metaphors of cultural fusion? Well, it’s good. It’s better than it used to be. By now there are four generations of my family in this country. Parents, us, grandchildren, their children. We’ve gone through an accelerated journey. We’re the new English. We take on that colouring and camouflage. It’s a chameleon thing. On the one hand, we have the masks and costumes of Carnival as a big paradigm of our cultural fusions. In for a penny, in for a pound – everybody joins in, even the policemen. Great costumes. It’s a place, a way of moving, or better still, a performance – where you can be yourself; that mediates between you and your society, you and the collective, to defuse conflict. That dance in the streets that operates like a safety valve. On the other hand, there’s that switching that goes on, between discrimination and identifying with, fusing and separating in how far we make common cause with each other’s interests, culture and outlook – linguists call it code switching, between speaking and not speaking the same language.

Let me give an example of this, quite removed. I have a German friend, a playwright. But from East Germany. After the Berlin Wall’s come down and re-unification, he’s telling me his child’s coming home from school with a history lesson on the GDR, the old East German state. That was the state my friend grew up and was educated in. He’s history. Then again, he’s gone with a group of German writers to Israel on an official exchange. He meets the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, and he’s very impressed. I tell you what, says Amos Oz, if you’re looking for a way to commemorate the Holocaust in Berlin, why not find every building where you know there were Jewish people living and put up a plaque to remember them. We have a system of blue plaques in London, put up by English Heritage, to commemorate famous dead people, but restricted to who English Heritage thinks is famous. You can imagine the scale of the undertaking in Berlin. Oh, well, I say, Amos Oz is angry at you… What do you mean? It’s a very good idea!… Well, I say, he’s talking about Passover. What’s that? It’s Easter, you know, Good Friday, when the Angel of Death passes over. I don’t understand. So I explain, because suddenly we realise the Judeo-Christian language of Passover isn’t something they taught you with Marxism-Leninism in the old GDR. He didn’t know that you mark all the doors where Jewish people are living so that the Angel of Death passes over them and kills the first-born in all of the other houses. Just to show, we don’t always speak the same language.

A slight coda to that story. Probably because my friend was so unsettled by it. He put it to me that he wasn’t brought up feeling guilty about the Holocaust. For the East Germans, they were the Socialists, who were persecuted by the Nazis. Their wall was the Anti-Fascist Wall. The problem was drüben – over there – the others. But for the West Germans, they had de-Nazification, they based themselves on the new federal, democratic constitution; the problem lay with those others – unreconstructed totalitarians over there in the East. With re-unification, when the Wall came down, there were no others left to blame. With a unified German state they were all back in the mainstream, the painful legacy of German history. It had been the greatest shock for him as one of the silent winners at the end of the Cold War that he could no longer switch off. The cultural fusion of East and West in his generation is not complete, but now they have a shared history. They’re re-building a relationship.

The Bridge and the Tunnel

I crossed a bridge once in Berlin and froze – it was too cold to go on, and just as far to go back. So I froze. With a Siberian wind coming down off the canal, the strangest, most dissident thought popped into my head. What if the Germans had won? What if National Socialism had become the order of Europe? Perhaps I wouldn’t now be asking, What is cultural fusion? I’d be someone else, and asking something like, What is national culture?

When I was contacted by the organisers for the ISPA conference and asked to come and talk here, I had a quick look at the website and the schedule of events. Two things popped into my head. First I had this image of people coming to do business and looking over their shoulders into the shop window of Harrods. Christmas shopping. My experience of international events is that in times of boom people go out and spend. They buy in shows, ready-made, off-the-peg cultural goods, because they can afford it. Tastes vary, production and supply can cater for that. But what happens in the business cycle when markets contract? When all that splendid opulence becomes so much window-dressing and inside the shops are empty? One response, of course, is to invest. It’s a hallmark of our acceptance of the Lord Mayor’s love bridge (I had to check with people that he really did say that, and yes, it seems he did) – embracing each other – as a model for growth that we invest in relationships to develop work – that we invest in each other. It’s the hallmark, for example, of The Fence project set up by Writernet here to form a network of European playwrights – to talk amongst ourselves: our project is each other.

The second thing that struck me was reading about the traditional, oak-beamed hospitality of the Lord Mayor’s reception and visits to the Globe theatre intercut with samples of cutting-edge work. I began to situate The World in London: Cultural Fusions within two pictures of post-war Britain... As usual. Perfidious Albion, two-timing Brits. Where one thing stands, another stands there too… On the one hand, an idea of heritage in which England is time-rich, traditional, unchanging and Shakespearian; on the other, an equally saleable idea of Britain as a bridge across the Atlantic and as a tunnel to Europe – less a place of fusions than transitions, movement, transformation. Out of a 19th century, Liberal vision of London – the port city – as the capital of virtual, commercial empire, we were now becoming exactly that. Opening ourselves as a world city to the crossings, interaction and diffusion of global culture. We’re well placed – off-shore, stable, forward thinking, diverse. Right time zone. With experience of staying awake as the sun goes around the world.

Of course, the British Empire no longer controls the world. But that’s not the point. In the virtual world of information technology no one does. People come in and out in the movement and exchange of ideas, goods and services. The point, as I’m sure everyone knows, is to be strategically located within those networks that are growing our future into the 21st century. There’s no monopoly on the uses of networks if other people are thinking faster than us about the future.

Networks

So what do I observe about the potential for growth within the ISPA as a network? A network operating, as I understand it, since 1949? Standing for Internationalism, relevance, pluralism, connectedness, these are good aims. Theatre, I was always told, is what happens in the audience – the relationship between the audience and the stage. Relationships matter. Being here, face to face, is evidence of an interest among us in networks and the relationships they foster. Networks stand in place of an audience – to broker the relationship of our societies to the arts, to our creativity.

I’ve met people here who tune buildings. St. Luke’s as a venue for the London Symphony Orchestra was constructed out of a relationship to the living community around it and the dead who were hollowed out of the crypt to allow the volume needed for the sound to resonate. Someone spoke whose motto for building audiences struck a very clear chord: Invite, Welcome, Respect. Or again, EINO: Everyone in, no one out. There was someone who described the moment you discover your mortality, needing to make sense of the world beyond yourself. There were also people who recognise limits to the viability of building spiritual bridges of communication, but do a good job trying to build them – across the generational, religious, national and cultural conflicts we all know from our own societies. It took them two goes to do that Millennium footbridge outside the Tate Modern, to stop it bouncing and throwing people off into the river. They were connecting art to the City of London, to business. But they were also connecting art to St. Paul’s Cathedral. This is the point I would like to leave with you. We’re throwing ourselves on each other’s mercy. Because we must. On the eve of war, September 1939, the English poet, WH Auden, a refugee in New York, wrote: We must love one another, or die. No Messiah, no messianic talent or idea, I think, will arise to save us. We must do it ourselves. And there is now so much to do.

This talk was first given as the end keynote speech for The World in London: Cultural Fusions conference of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), December 2003

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IT’S NOT MY PURPOSE TO LOSE YOU DURING THE COURSE OF THIS SHORT TALK ON BECOMING A MIGRANT-REFUGEE-ASYLUM SEEKER, but sometimes I have to. You can follow me, but remember: I’m running.

I. From where I stand

My father went from Koranic school to an Anglican school (grammar schools at that time in colonial Nigeria were all run by the Anglican church) by the simple stratagem of adopting the identity of an Anglican neighbour’s son who had died.

You object? Both fathers were still educating their sons (you might think in terms of establishing a commemorative scholarship). Christian or Muslim, both were Yoruba farmers wanting their children to get on in a world beyond their own immediate knowledge and circumstances. You do what you can. Don’t you?

So my father bore the name of his dead age-mate, held it high and did well. But of course, between the rationalist epistemology of his Christian education (coherent in confession, responsible for sin) and himself there would always be a certain non-Cartesian space for thought and action. I think, therefore we are.

My grandfather was a cocoa farmer. My father joined the Nigerian Farmers’ Union and, in order to prepare for Nigerian economic independence, went in the immediate post-war period to study industrial architecture – building chocolate factories – in West Germany.

Obviously his party – representing traditional landed interests in an agricultural society – lost out in a struggle to take over the machinery of state control from the British. There was a new politics of oil and administrative power. As if to show him the severity of his defeat, his union grant was cut off and he was stranded among the post-war Germans.

Still a ‘British Protected Person’, he presented himself in Liverpool as a student of printing. Printing was a closed shop in England at the time, so he never practised. He settled down in South London among a new, largely Caribbean immigrant population – almost invisible except for his tribal scars – and educated us at Anglican schools.

So here I am, a British writer.

II. Now you see me, now you don’t

What prompted me to tell that story about my father was that the Irish immigration system recently woke up to the possibility that West Africans – like Travellers – move around and operate several identities at once. The state thinks that’s fraud; they think that’s necessary. Perhaps sometimes it is.

My mother was Irish. An economic migrant at a time when the dirty word was Irish. I looked at my father again through her eyes, and wondered. Do we ever really know?

‘Asylum-seekers really economic migrants.’ ‘Kosovo Albanians discovered to be Albanians [sic].’ ‘Passports destroyed to prevent deportation.’ You know the headlines, for and against. ‘They’re pouring in!’ ‘Go, buddy, go!’ ‘Shoot them in the water!’

When as a migrant you go through the force-field of legal – and public – interrogation of refugee status, your motives and identity are at issue in a way that subjects them both to certain sea-change. Not always for the first time, you become both agent and victim - misrepresenting yourself and being misrepresented. Forget your (bloody) passport, if you have one, you are now the subject (and object) of misrepresentation.

Switch position and imagine, as a refugee, you present yourself at our ports and border controls. What story are you going to tell? You’ve got to be word-perfect because there are rules about what you do and don’t say, and you’d better look the part because you’re going to have to prove it – scars and all. Who are you? What are your motives? Your resources?

It’s poor theatre, for big stakes, in which you’re going to have to align yourself – whatever your truth – with the interests and approval of your audience. Like an actor drowning in applause or silence, whoever you were, you are no longer. An orphan, an entertainment, a victim, a lover, a demonstration of bad faith or leverage on some other hidden truth, you become news – or like the drowned, no news at all.

Borders have their own logic. Some violence is always done by them to identity in movement – reconfigured at each border as a different story about the world, changing as the contents of its bones are picked in whispers. And we behind our borders do that violence.

To represent migrant-refugee-asylum seekers – as an artist, lawyer, Home Office official, writer or journalist – is, necessarily, to misrepresent them. It strikes me as inevitable: here those people live lives that are changed, for which there can as yet be no representation. They are still coming into being.

III. Apotheosis and betrayal

For movement as an experience of the change, proliferation and misrepresentation of identities, let me turn to an example from Wales.

At the recent 50th Venice Biennale of international art, Wales was represented for the first time as a distinct presence from the British pavilion in line with political moves towards greater devolution around the creation of a Welsh Assembly.

Cerith Wyn Evans’ World War Two searchlight flashed over the Grand Canal its computer-generated Morse code rendition of a famous Welsh language poem about looking across to Ireland (I do like looking at Ireland).

During the course of a public discussion in one of the great Venetian palaces, a Welsh writer criticised the exhibition for misrepresenting artistic activity in Wales. Either the artists were Welsh but living abroad, or foreign and living in Wales.

It is, of course, invidious to have to choose one or even a handful of artists to carry the burden of representing the whole of Wales, but that’s how the ‘national pavilion’ structure of the Biennale would have it.

It struck me, however, that the task of moving Wales onto the stage of Venice would necessarily involve both an apotheosis – for the chosen artists, for the newly distinct identity of Wales – and a betrayal.

Not above seeing red when I hear an ethnic or cultural nationalist, I advised that writer to be a bit more Christian about it. There’s Jesus about to go on up to higher things and all the disciples are grumbling they feel betrayed – He’s going to Venice, what about us?

But, being a clever guy, Jesus comes up with a solution for them. The multiplication of pavilions, of places, of possibilities, metaphors, artistic practices, languages, peoples. It’s a bit hallucinogenic to find yourself quoting scripture at art critics in a public place, but on the off-chance of unnerving a certain brand of Welsh Chapel nationalism that’s what I did: Let not your heart be troubled … In my Father’s house are many mansions … I go to prepare a place for you. (John 14: 1,2).

Love is the key, he argues, when you scatter like sparks from the forge of Christian fellowship. You can light lots of fires. There’s more than one venue. More than one Venice. More than one vision. More than one Wales. More than one Jerusalem. And more than one fire.

IV. A country about the size of Wales

Not to be too Pentecostal about it, let me say that during that same discussion in Venice, the subject of the Israeli pavilion came up. Apparently the Israelis had wanted to include some form of Palestinian representation, but neither side could secure the necessary assurances about the safety of such a collaboration. So it was just an Israeli pavilion. The Palestinians were scattered about the Gardens of Venice on billboards plastered with borrowed passports.

It will not come as a surprise to anybody that the apotheosis of the Israelis involves the betrayal of the Palestinians. Indeed, the term in Hebrew to describe the movement of the Jewish peoples into Israel and, more specifically, up to Jerusalem is aliyah, or ascent. You go up from sea level at Tel Aviv into the mountains to reach Jerusalem.

But when you get there, you find two Jerusalems – not just East and West, Palestinian and Israeli, but two time zones.

Again it’s a personal story, but it brought the proliferation of Jerusalems home. Waking on the morning of my first visit I went and asked for the time at the hotel reception desk for a meeting I had at ten o’clock. Was it an Israeli or a Palestinian I was meeting?

That wasn’t what I was asking. But, frankly, I was meeting people from both sides on behalf of a European Union consortium of cultural representatives to canvas opinion on the possibility of a cultural dimension to the Oslo peace process. On arrival, I’d been handed two separate itineraries, both covering the time from my arrival to departure, and was asked to keep them separate.

So, feeling cagey, I gave some vague response about not wanting to be late. The reception staff – Christian Arab Israelis – decided not to take a punt on who I might be and came clean.

There was an hour’s difference between Israelis and Palestinians so it was up to me whether it was eight o’clock or nine o’clock. Palestinians and Israelis live by different clocks, in a country about the size of Wales.

And I had to choose. So I chose – I don’t wear a watch – both.

V. A temporary visa

That’s not the only difference operating to divide people. Among Palestinians themselves there have been successive waves of refugees pushed out over the years by the expansion and entrenchment of Israel.

On a subsequent trip to attend the one and only Palestinian Writers’ Union conference to be held in the Occupied Territories (supported by the Norwegians during the Oslo peace process), I met a range of Palestinian writers and intellectuals.

There is no right of return for Palestinians. The political class had secured a return only for themselves as part of Oslo, not for the other exiles. The apotheosis of one class of Palestinians was the betrayal of another. The writers were on short visas to attend the conference.

Some fled Palestine in 1948, at the time of the Palestinian Nakbar, or Disaster, when the state of Israel was formed. Some were refugees from the Six Day War in 1967. Others were displaced by the 1973 Yom Kippur war, or during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, or were simply deported by the Israelis.

Few left willingly, because, as one person put it to me, If you leave your land, you lose it. And all were back for a few short weeks, each with a sense of Palestine frozen in time. Among those writers there were many Palestines.

They were not there for the peace process, but to smell the earth again and take cuttings of plants they remembered to clip into 1950s handbags before they would have to go – this time, perhaps, forever.

VI. A homeland in the language

Let me spend some time dwelling on the implications for global refugee society of this notorious impasse and turn-off.

There have been many generations since 1948, but it’s only one lifetime. Although people remember and make connections with Palestine in different ways, what connects Palestinians is a preoccupation with the land.

Broadly speaking, there are three Palestinian constituencies in relation to land. Those that live in Israel proper – once Palestine – as Arab Israelis, those in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and those that live outside of Palestine in refugee camps or as part of both a successful and beleaguered diaspora.

As you might expect to find at a crossroads of trade, crusade and Empire, they are, like the Israelis, ethnically and in matters of religion very diverse.

From peasant farmers (like our vines, the more the Israelis cut us, the stronger we grow back) to psychiatrists (lost in the fun-house of the political process) there is every kind of Palestinian poet.

Recent history has exacerbated the differences. One poet can argue that before 1948 Palestinian writers looked at more than the land – they looked at the horizon – and they tripped. Another can raise the possibility of finding a homeland in the language.

Palestinians live their struggle for a homeland in multi-lateral exchanges occupying every position between stubborn peasant territoriality and the sophistication of a highly-mobile cosmopolitan diaspora.

They are everywhere, and nowhere.

VII. Human geography

Blocked and obstructed as access to a homeland is, Palestinians have become adept at thinking their way round barriers – if only by opposing a more human geography to the political geography of road blocks, crack-downs and sieges.

You find your way round the chequered, crowded chess-board of territorial aggressions because as people you have to.

According to the US-based Palestinian critic, Edward Said, the direct line between two Palestinians will always offend somebody, transgress someone’s political interests or ideological borders.

One American-Palestinian poet observed that with a mother from Kansas she sometimes felt she lived in the hyphen of her identity. Another writer objected: No, you live in the Haifa your father came from, but you cannot get there.

From a conversation in a taxi stopped at a road block, I understood from the other passengers that however you think of getting home – and you have to begin that journey – fear is not an option. If you have to get there, you go.

VIII. Desire paths

The struggle for land is not part of my experience, but I do recognise emotional, ethical and political elements of a conflict between being rooted in place and being able to move. And I recognise the importance of language – including art works – to represent and negotiate that conflict.

Personally, the son of migrants, I feel rooted in my relationships with people – and recognise that belonging can belong to the movements of people as well as place.

I make it a personal practice to go anywhere I can to keep open the ‘routes’ of that belonging – my connections to people, openness to change. That’s where I pitch the tent of my identity. Sometimes I have to take it down in a hurry.

I look at Africa, at Europe – and keep several passports just in case. I, too, live in the shadow of the concentration camps, the fear of a minority, the optimism of the human capacity for change. I also am overwhelmed by the luggage of history, and looking for a garden.

It’s a pity so few people recognise, as one Palestinian poet put it to me, The Jews are us; they’ve come home. After so long, the pity is, neither of us can see it. You don’t have to accept that, but you can recognise it as an opening. There’s still a long way to go.

Where a muddy track opens up across a stretch of grass because that and not the built walkway is the way people want to go, it’s known as a desire path.

I always liked that term for its recognition of human purpose in a metaphor for the logic of movement. Let’s look at two more dealing with the vision of what a more plural world being brought about by the movement of peoples might look like: the melting pot and the salad bowl

IX. The melting pot or the salad bowl?

The melting pot as applied to people is an alchemical metaphor for the fusing of metals for a golden result. I came across it in a song that proposed stirring the world’s people together for a hundred years or more in order to turn out coffee-coloured people like myself. Actually I’m toffee-coloured, so there’s got to be milk in the mix. For me, it’s always been about food.

And after all, we shouldn’t be eating ourselves. Culinary metaphors for the creolisation, assimilation or jumble of peoples and cultures were, presumably, intended to convey associations with a pleasurable choice of dishes, with conviviality. The problem with the melting pot idea of a multi-cultural America is, according to the British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, it didn’t happen.

There can be no compulsion in matters of assimilation. As far as I know, Jewish religious thought has never welcomed it. And as someone advised as a young man to change my name to sound less foreign, neither have I. Rubbing along well together, however, is different. The salad bowl. I only just heard this phrase and I’m still perplexed by it.

It seems to me a further example of attempts to objectify what are personal and subjective experiences of our aspirations and our relationships in a way that makes them both indigestible. The fact that recently another writer was trying to understand my thinking about cultural diversity in terms of a salad tells me that it matters what images, what metaphors, what language does.

X. Strangers in disguise

I have an image. Too domestic, perhaps, to mean much in the great sweep of world events – the explosion of human populations and the beggaring of belief in how we treat them.

One day a tramp knocked on the door, smelling of drink and a rough life, and asked to use the toilet. As I understand was the custom in Ireland, my mother opened the door to let him in. While he was there, she gathered us together. Be good to strangers, she said, because they might be angels in disguise.

Someone asked, What about talking to strange men? I can see her now, biting her lip on that one.

And then my father came home. And as his custom was, we fed him.

First published in Strangers to Ourselves by Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, 2003.

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