Bloc Billboard: Désirée Reynolds

17 February - 6 June 2022

Free & Open to All

My mother could not give me the space to dream, she dares not in the face of her own diminishing and a death that she wears like a favourite coat.

So I went to find a way for her to loosen her grip.

Looking into the archive became an act of retrieval and reimagining and a radical reimagination. I started out with a certain set of outcomes only to have to change them, which is at the heart of any practice. You have to prepare to let go of what you thought you were going to see, the constant motion of adjusting your eyes. Dig Where You Stand became an exhibition, articles, poetry, a zine with still yet more to come.

I saw the face of a little Back girl in a 1901 clip of workers leaving a Sheffield factory and she hung onto me, like one of my own but she wasn’t the first. Kai Akosua Mansah, she was born here, in 1902, a year after the little Black girl at the factory gates. Her parents were a part of a travelling mock Ashanti village. She lived but four days. No one recorded how her mother Yatso must’ve felt. She’s buried in Sheffield General Cemetery in an unmarked, communal grave. Like grass seed. I wrote a story about her because she too hung on and I couldn’t move past the show, the pretend village that whiteness paid to have a look at and walk through, this, an already out-of-date myth, because what we can imagine is already at odds with what is already gone. She still wasn’t the first. I’m not sure who told me about John Archer, the Black mayor of Battersea in 1913. It could’ve been a librarian or my slightly drunk Dad. I had no idea what a mayor was and somehow, to the adults around me, it was said with a sense of pride, a revelation, because it was a secret in plain sight. But really, it starts as it always starts for a child of diaspora. Where is my home? Being brought up in London, Clapham I spent beautiful solitary hours in Lavender Hill reference library pretending to study for exams but reading Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Books were my plane tickets. But still a gnawing absence persisted. Street scholars were my best hope, park philosophers, ‘roun the kitchen table’ academics, Brixton dons whose voices carried through the market and told us of, ‘the rise of African Empires, the sacking of those empires, libraries of ancient stone’, the Book Liberator sent to prison for trying to preserve a stolen heritage and all sentences started with ‘Wha! You neva know…’.

No I didn’t but someone did.

As with most history, it is the story of collision, loss, pain and anguish, too hard to look at, way harder to not look at for me and I scouted around for like minded outrage. I came to the archive and I couldn’t yet see this visible and hidden thing. But I could feel it. I was looking at specific articulations of Black being. It was there, but as with all of this it’s part of the story, the rest elsewhere, attached to something else or not attached at all. Here in the archive, a place of violence and a form of a specific gender harm and that is has and always has been erasure. The stories like puzzles that have to be stitched, woven together by my need to see them. An unreliable lens.

Family Errands.

Utter

Lists of longing

My own voice conflicts with my intention

Political is the breath I’m using

Pretty pearls around her neck

for people to pick what I’ve left in amongst the trees,

insurmountable tales to cross with each other’s remembrances.

My mother held me upside down and waited for all the stuff to fall out of my pockets

Pearls, tissues, coins, bits of book on the backs of envelopes

And what of the woman?

Full lipped and circle eyed

The bump of a sting

Full against itself

It doesn’t matter what happens after.

The mass of a people

If there is such a thing

Rolling through the landmines laylines

Trying not to be as vain glorious as it feels

Pressed against what’s left

A pencil and a writer

And the noise of the structured silence

Into avoidable holes.

A non body trauma

A gap in a space generational

Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy and Aunty

Freewheeling ancestral memory.

Fuller lipped passed on to gather common grasses

Peel at the ships and the waves

As bright and Black as a Black body can allow

In our collective hearts

To love hard

I was on a family errand in the archives, like not forgetting the milk on the way back from school or to take some soup to Auntie whose cough refused to leave, it was a generational errand. When told as a child to look for something I had to find it. The act of looking and not finding? I might as well move out of my house.

‘Don’t come back til you find it.’

‘If I have to come and look for it and I find it, then it’s me an you.’

We are used to looking yielding but I always knew, from those kitchen philosophers, that this wasn’t that case. I didn’t like what I would find but I didn’t have to and straight away I knew that how I felt about it and why I felt about it might be mine alone. We are our unvoiced feelings. I somehow pied pipered my way through the archives and for some reason, one by one these children came peeking out to look at what I was doing, not for them but for me.

1 man, 79 ships, 33,575+

A man commissioned 79 ships, that we know of, to go to continent of Africa and collect, like so much grass seed, people he thought weren’t people. I struggled to work out how to look at this violence, whilst keeping myself intact and at the same time look at this violence. It had to be through number, because the sheer weight of one mans legacy shows us the world. 33,575+, an estimated number of the people he saw as profit. In this archive resides a tiny diary of his every day, his dinners, trips to family and the emptiness of it has its own unique sound to me. There is nothing in there about how he made his money. And it’s that, that tells us everything. Erasure takes many forms. It’s the cold hard industry of it all, the log books, the inventory, the dairies, the lists, the brutal everyday documentation that provides us the most devastation. 1 man. 79 ships. See the unseen.

I wanted to locate it all in the streets that I continue to walk on and in the life that I walk in. It should be that simple. Home is where the words are so I’m donating some of mine to this particular cause.

I showed my mum, a social worker of 30 years, the silent film of the workers leaving the factory. She covered her mouth when she saw her, ever so slightly loosening her grip, she was quiet for a minute absorbed in watching the people and then she said,

‘Wah, you didn’t see dat Black man walking over there too?’

Thanks to mum.

Bloc Projects are delighted to host a part of Désirée Reynolds’ project Dig Where I Stand in our first billboard commission of 2022.

Invited by Sheffield Archives to be their writer in residence, Désirée has spent the last year amongst documents, photographs and registries looking for traces of Black lives and histories in the Steel City.

Our billboard is one of a number of places where Désirée will go public with her findings. She has produced a visual montage of her research, which lives alongside the audio piece I dug where I stood, a recording of a prose poem written especially for this commission. Listen to it using the link above and/or read the text included on this page.

Special thanks to Jamie Patterson (visual design) and Cole Morris (sound engineering).

Désirée Reynolds is a writer, editor and creative writing workshop facilitator living in Sheffield. She started her writing career as a freelance journalist for the Jamaica Gleaner and the Village Voice. Her stories are in numerous anthologies and her first novel ‘Seduce’ was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013 to much acclaim. Committed to anti-racism and intersectionality, she draws on her experiences of these to make creative work.  In 2020, she published two short stories with Dead Ink and Bloomsbury and Arachne Press. Désirée was the guest curator of the Black Women Write Now strand of 2020’s Off The Shelf Festival of Words and was longlisted for the BBC short story prize 2021.