Ghosts and Washing Lines - 09/04/2020

The Fall - Jessie Brennan

These pieces were written during the lockdowns of 2020 and originally published via TinyLetter. 

In the poem, Chemical, Jay Bernard speaks of 'ghosts of the now-gone', a competing sense of presence and absence, a binary that Roger Robinson echoes in The Missing, 'they are the city of the missing [...] We, now, the city of the stayed'.

When I look at the council estates destroyed under the wheels of "redevelopment", some obliterated such as the Heygate and some slowly picked apart like Robin Hood Gardens, I think of the missing, of the 'now-gone'. I once stood in the middle of Robin Hood Gardens atop a seesaw in an empty playground; the view in the near distance was of the heart of capital, the City of London, and with this view between my teeth, I breathed in the two wings of the estate pointing east and west, shivering at the sense of emptiness. It was Saturday lunchtime, and it was deathly quiet, the only signs of life the clothes strung from washing lines that criss-crossed the balconies; I thought of the lives shipped out from estates like this to far-flung boroughs, suburbia and beyond. Lots of families from East London are shipped out to Harlow, the New Town where I was born.

Council estates have always been about space. They were about creating places in ballooning cities, where humanity can dwell and foster. But the dream of communities created with 'streets in the sky' has been left to rot and wither, Thatcherism's mantra of there's no such thing as society turning collective thinking around these estates from utopian opportunities, to 'sink estates' and 'problem areas'. So, rather than their decay being a symptom of a fatal theoretical flaw, they have been left to fall into disrepair and unsafe condition.

Residents have not taken the theft of their homes lying down, campaigns have burgeoned and been fought (such as residents on the New Era and Cressingham Gardens estates), but fighting for your life is tiring and all-encompassing (I've written a novel that no one is seemingly interested in, about this exact thing) and property developers have patience rooted in cash reserves and the grit for legal battle after legal battle. The work of artist Jessie Brennan and particularly her work Regeneration!, captures the humanity behind the concrete, the lives lived beyond the reputations of council estates, and residents are given the space to tell their own stories.

As Nathalie Olah put in her recent brilliant piece for Prospect magazine about the spatial component to the Coronavirus pandemic, capitalist thinking reduces our view to 'individual conquest and opportunity', or as seen in my previous mailing, Sam Riviere remarks that capital is now the index of all meaning. This is a fight of occupation, literally occupying space, but also of the mind. As Lynsey Hanley so aptly puts it in a recent article (read her book Estates, it's amazing): 'Space – how it’s apportioned, how it’s governed, how it’s made available to some and denied to others – is always political'.

Jay Bernard's Surge and Roger Robinson's A Portable Paradise are two of my favourite collections published recently. Surge excavates the New Cross fire of 1981 - a tragedy written out of British history, but Bernard brings to life the indifference of the state to the suffering of the black community - 'I said it in such a whisper [...] I could have put the ground to sleep' they say in Proof. The echoes of the 'New Cross massacre' really hits home in Robinson's poems, the opening poem is dedicated to 'the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster', and in The Portrait Museum, we feel how the lives lived in council flats and houses are seen as disposable by the powerful - 'Many with posters refuse the first day of mourning; as days went on, the wind blew most of them away'.

Both collections are incredibly powerful reckonings with history and an attempt to expand communal consciousness, and both collections fight for this space in our history and who gets to tell that history. So, enjoy a poem from each.

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.