1. Fantastic Quote.

Adam posts our HOME write up on Linkedin.

https://homemcr.org/whats-on/linda-brogan-my-mum-is-white-exorcising-half-caste-ghosts-8n1s

An academic and clinical anthropologist based in Scotland, who brings an ethnographer's curiosity to psychotherapy and mental health, Dr Salma Siddique, replies:

“What profound and necessary work you’re embarking upon! Your collaboration with #LindaBrogan [linkedin.com] promises to create that vital “safe space” where, as Baldwin reminds us, “the victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat” (1963, p. 17). This artistic intervention embodies what #Cixous [linkedin.com] calls “l’écriture féminine” - not merely feminine writing, but a revolutionary practice that “will tear her away from the superegoised structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty” (1976, p. 875).Your decision to reclaim “#half [linkedin.com]-caste” as both archaeological tool and mirror reflects #Fanon [linkedin.com]’s understanding that “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” (1967, p. 229). This resonates with #Said [linkedin.com]’s insight that “the Orient was almost a European invention” (1978, p. 1) - here you’re inverting that #colonial [linkedin.com] gaze, making visible the invented categories that fragment mixed-race identities.

The gallery walls becoming palimpsests of lived experience - mind maps growing into forests - creates what you beautifully term #psychologicalsafety [linkedin.com] through artistic expression. This aligns with #Fassin [linkedin.com]’s conception of “moral sentiments” as embodied experiences that “are not only cognitive operations but also bodily sensations” (2012, p. 3). Your project makes visceral the psychological landscapes of mixed-race existence. #Adorno [linkedin.com]’s aesthetic theory finds perfect expression here: “Art’s utopia, the counterfactual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes by the name of mourning” (1997, p. 196). Your exorcism isn’t erasure but integration - what #Cixous [linkedin.com] might call “writing the body” back into wholeness. As Fanon observed, “the Negro is not. Any more than the white man” until we transcend these colonial categories (1967, p. 231). The “forest of lived experience” you’re cultivating echoes Said’s understanding that “#exile [linkedin.com] is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (2000, p. 173) - yet through art, exile becomes homecoming. #Baldwin [linkedin.com]’s conviction that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” (1962, p. 8) finds #embodiment [linkedin.com] in Linda’s expanding #mindmaps [linkedin.com].

HOME Manchester becomes truly home through this radical act of creative #witness [linkedin.com] and #healingjustice [linkedin.com]”

Thank you for making my day.

Salma Siddique

www.bricolage.scot

2. From Posh — Fuck Only Takes Me 20 years

I am thrilled. I read it many times. Sometimes understanding things. Sometimes understanding it from a different stance. I love posh things. 1996. My daughter and her dad take the piss out of me for buying cheese cos of the packaging. It does fucking stink. And swordfish, at the Sainsbury's counter, when Sainsbury's is Sainsbury's and not Kwik Save. As I have got more comfortable in my skin I love more direct things.

2015. My mum is white: is a sentence I write during an Art’s Council England bid. When I am pickled in the world of polarisation. And don’t know it. When I don’t know how not to talk whiteface. When I think whiteface is the only language I have if I want anyone to take me seriously.

Fuck that. It ends in an Art’s Council meeting when I swear every other word cos I’m overexcited and I’m in the zone. And I am loving their faces staring at me like — did she swear, did she actually swear —and I’m thinking — yes, motherfuckers I actually did just fucking swear.

There is a huge journey I make in between those two paragraphs. It begins when I write the sentence my mum is white.

3. A Black Actress and a White Actress

Here we go. 2015. I am writing a duologue for 2 actresses, for the Royal Court — yes, name dropping. A black actress, and a white actress, will enact my story as monologues. And the play will happen inside the audience because I know the audience will afford different empathy to the actresses even though it is different chapters of the same story. And then I write the classic line: it will also show both sides of me — my mum is white.

I sit still. But no one will believe me. I sit still.  To the world I am black. Except in the Reno where it is a badge of honour to be half-caste. The Reno, our Moss Side cellar club, closes in 1986. 96, 2006, 2016. 30 years later I dig the Reno up. I plan it that night. There is a crack in the wall. A magical cave entrance. Like my favourite Mandy character: Vanya, I pass through the crack. 2017, we party beside the excavated Reno, looking like Rome.

4. The Reno’s Significance to Manchester

It is still performative. I love posh things. Beautiful things. Clever things. I’ve never really been into music. Or smoking weed. I did smoke weed. But I’m not a connoisseur. I'm an A* kinda girl. I like to think. I like to see what is beneath something.

Factory International gets me in. Because of the Reno’s significance to Manchester. I write back, I dug up the Reno because of its significance to me. I don’t want to play the part they have lined up for me. But I definitely want them on my CV.

I don’t know whether it is having an Irish mother, who loves a good old IRA song when full of Guinness, or coming from Moss Side, but I never seem to do anything without a sword fight. Where the point is at their throat. Or at mine. That happens too. But that spurs me on. The 2010 exile sword pointing at my back is the impetus to write the Royal Court play I never finish.

• The Factory International sword fight goes on for 2 years.

• Much whiteface.

• Many battles.

• 6 shoulder-to-shoulder comrades

• Much slashing of whiteface.

• Much fear: have I gone too far.

• Much you have left me no choice but to go further.

• Much digging deeper beneath the surface of what I am entitled to perform.

5. I Am Born Free

Then one day I am standing on the bottom step of a plane, and I think, incredibly, I want to be a mistress in the ruins of the big house. I want a ballgown. My mum is white. They fucked themselves up. My mum is white. That means I am born free. The child takes the status of its mum. The thought is enormous. Like digging up the Reno. It opens a cave I enter. I am Vanya again. Her trope is to touch the fountain of youth before she turns back into a 400 years old hag. I touch it just in time. There are 5 months to go before my commission must be realised.

6. The Pickle Resets: again, I disown that my mum is white

I am sat in HOME. I’m doing a mind-map about my ball gown. These would look fantastic on HOME’S walls. I immediately email HOME’s gallery producer, Clarissa, to tell her I want to draw on HOME’s walls. I look for a non-white psychologist. Non-white is the important word here. I am disassociating from my reality again. It’s Adam who uses the word half-caste. It’s Adam who reminds me about the journey I am on. That he wants to join. That we should narrow the search and investigate the ghosts that enter a half-caste nursery, as we were both known.  

7. The 8 Pillars of Caste

My disassociation is because I am ghost in the ruins of the 8 pillars Isabel Wilkerson identifies: as she unearths that caste is 3000 years old. Brahmins worship God. Dalits shovel shit. Jim Crow adopts it. Public white sinks are generous. Black sinks barely cling to the wall.

1. Divine Will and Laws of Nature.

According to God and the bible I should never have been born.

2. Heritability.

My life can't amount to shit cos there’s fuck all for me to inherit.

3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

My Goddamn parents shouldn’t have had sex in the first place.

4. Purity versus Pollution

My very birth fucks me mum up and makes her impure for all time.

3.     Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

My Goddamn parents shouldn’t have had sex in the first place.

4. Purity versus Pollution

My very birth fucked me mum up and made her impure for all time.

5. Occupational Hierarchy

There’s a ceiling on what I can earn. I think I’ve internalised this. Besides the posts they will let me occupy.

6. Dehumanisation and Stigma

I say to Adam the other day: I think besides anyone doing this to us, I think a mixed-race person secretly and unwittingly does this to themselves caused by the 8 pillars.  

7. Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

So, your average black guy — and this is still happening in my lifetime — I’m born in 1959 — is lynched for doing some shit to a white woman. Leer. Whistle. Sweep passed her so he smells her delicate fragrance. It could all be in her head. Or the husband’s head. And the next thing you know the village is having a picnic. And he’s the hog roast. And there’s postcards for posterity. Good God, man. And my dad is flagrantly shagging a white woman — and she genuinely loves him — they love each other.  And they push me about on Sundays even though people spit in my pram.

8. Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority   

• Somewhere deep in me that I don’t ever tell anyone, I believe this.

• I am trained to believe this.  

• My mum believes this when she calls him and us black bastards.

• He believes it when he doffs his cap to the neighbours.

• I sword fight with it when I refuse to speak whiteface.

• I swear.

• I won’t allow anyone to even place a candlestick on my table unless, unless . . . At the moment, it is unless you know what I’m talking about. You give me the space to say what I’m talking about.

• But actually, that is still up to me. I have to know why I’m saying it.

8. Back to Salma

It is interesting, now, if you fancy, to read Salma Siddique’s quote again.