3 performances

Yellow bird,
Up high in banana tree
Yellow bird
You sit all alone like me

Did your lady friend
Leave the nest again
That is very sad
Make me feel so bad

You can fly away
In the sky away
You more lucky than me
(old Caribbean folk song)

_______________________

It’s a thread, not of silk or nylon but thread of cotton — or rope that burns and cuts, No slices…and I can’t stop it touching all my thoughts or what I feel — it drives me through, and on and back before I can move anywhere — it’s always a part of it all.
(Helen Cammock)

_______________________

From time to time one would like to stop. To state reality is a wearing task. But when one has taken it into one’s head to try to express existence, one runs the risk of only finding the non-existent.
(Franz Fanon, Skins, Black White Mask p137)

_______________________

Yellow bird
Up high in banana tree
Yellow bird
You sit all alone like me

Better fly away
In the sky away
Picker coming soon
Pick from night to noon

Black on yellow too
Like banana too
They might pick you someday
(old Caribbean folk song)

_______________________

And what if what we get to see and hear isn’t layered — isn’t complex, isn’t comprehensive — what if certain people get to choose who exists comprehensively, historically — who is important — existent — even great?

And the choices made by these choosers we must appreciate will often (I won’t say always) mirror their perceptions of greatness because this maintains and justifies their rightful place as choosers.

And sometimes people we don’t expect slip through — push through — are allowed passage, and they are then used to justify the legitimacy of the choosing…But there are so many we know — who are rendered non-existent; when you dig you find, when you push you might learn, but this digging and pushing means they are non-existent in history and therefore their value is not contagious from one generation to the next.
(Helen Cammock)

_______________________

Looks like what drives me crazy
Don’t have no effect on you —
But I’m gonna keep on at it
Til it drives you crazy too
(Langston Hughes, Evil, p45

Just with the battle of Jericho
Jericho, Jericho
Just with the battle of Jericho
And the walls came tumbling down

And the voices of the women ring in my head
And I follow them down the alleys
Rain in their hair
The streets in their hands

And I sit and I listen
As the peace bridge springs with cable and steel
Waterside to Cityside

But I read it wrong
And I thought it said skies
And with that word change
I heard a whole other story from Collette Bryce

I stepped from my skies and stumbled in, like childhood,
knee deep, waist deep, chest deep, falling
for the sake of being caught
in its grip.

It was crisp and strangely dry and I thought: I could drop
here and sleep in my own shape, happily,
as the hare fits
to its form.

I could lie undiscovered like a fossil in a rock
until a hammer’s gentle knock might
split it open; warm
and safe.
(Collette Bryce)

You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that all us folks
Are just second class fools (Nina Simone — Backlash Blues)

You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action (Malcolm X)

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon;
(William Shakespeare — quoted many times by Tory party MP’s)

AND the battle went on
And the depths had to be found

Do you know what it is to find out you exist

She’ll walk in the room
The ceiling falls
The carpets bloom (Andy White)

And you said that women contained the brutality
Because communities under threat lose their humanity

And I agree

And then I say that communities who always believe there is a threat
…that someone will take away what they have…have no humanity
Because they only see the human in themselves

You give me second class houses
And second class schools
Do you think that all us folks
Are just second class fools (Nina Simone — Backlash Blues)

And it is clear that in the colonial countries
the peasants alone are revolutionary,
for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to
discover that only violence pays.
For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms;
colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.
(Frantz Fanon)

And there’s a battle to be had when everyone is subjugated
That the run of relativity
Splits and divides
And the view through the curtains is impaired

So sing to me the Parting Glass

And I can’t stop listening to those words
And they roll around and around

And all the harm that e’er I’ve done
Alas, it was to none but me

And the voices sing
And they own my ears
And I tremble at the sound of the pipes and the strings
And then I remember where I am and I read the headlines
The tag lines

And all I’ve done for want of wit
To memory now I can’t recall

Face at the window
Ghost
No
spectre of threat,

And Sunday came crashing in
An agreement on a Friday

but tell me what about the days in between?

And you said Bernadette; We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.

And I hear you whispering between the pages of the newly reclaimed respect for you Audre that

Your silence will not protect you (Audre Lorde)

So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. (Bernadette devlin)