We’ve reached a strange impasse when a generation that shuns organised religion claims to be more spiritual than ever. When it believes enlightenment will come via lunchtime vinyasa flow—if only the west African churches next door could keep their 'massive ghetto blasters and screaming' down.
I think that I am nonbinary. I’m not sure exactly what this could mean. If gender is the way one is read and received, I don’t know who I could be if I only had to read and receive myself. I think that I might be nonbinary, because I only feel fully at ease around the queer, trans and gender non-conforming.
Following the news cycles’ unremitting misery, I’ve started to imagine a utopia where women don’t have to constantly engage in dialogue about their experience of oppression. It’s a world where women meeting for the first time bond over their favourite books rather than their respective brushes with sexual assault.
I won’t be replying to a series of individual questions in this column, rather writing about themes that I see recurring—the most common being straight men asking how to 'fuck good'. And I'm never going to deal with that. It has been dealt with. Please leave me alone.
Edouard Glissant opens Poetics of Relation in the belly of the boat. In its horrors. ‘For the Africans who lived through the experience of deportation to the Americas,’ he begins, ‘confronting the unknown with neither preparation nor challenge was no doubt petrifying.’
The most significant long-term affairs in my life have been with cities. Growing up, we are taught, through fairytales and romantic narratives, that life’s for sharing with someone else, but in 2017, society is in flux.
London is a struggle if you’re broke. London if you’re a broke immigrant, however, is unfathomably cruel. The Grenfell Tower fire is the most painful manifestation of this the capital has ever seen.
A few months ago, I awoke in the middle of the night to discover that my right arm was numb. This happened on four consecutive nights, by which point I was panicking, pleading with my body—not tonight. It didn’t cooperate. Why was this happening?
For the first time in decades, the British public have a clearly defined choice to make, one which involves a Labour party that is putting forward unashamedly left-of-centre policies. If we lived in a well-functioning democracy this would already have been common knowledge.
I am falling deeper, becoming more remote. I sense more haze, more flowers, more bees and then visions of the accident surface. The stench of diesel and red wine penetrates my nostrils. I see broken glass everywhere, and a fractured window open to the sky.
