Journal
Window is a journal Maria Amidu started in January 2016, it is a repository for her random musings on significant and insignificant things
alternative biog
What to say about myself? I am a visual artist and writer currently doing a PhD, although I prefer to say I am a researcher, it is easier, less pressure because half the time when people ask me: so what’s it about, I am tempted to say who the heck knows?! Doing this kind of degree is a wonderfully bewildering experience and most of the time it is impossible to give a straightforward answer. A friend once asked me: what’s your passion, and it took me a while to respond because I was thinking it needed to be a thing, like music or food, but my true passion is people. I am fascinated by the relational, how we communicate and connect – well and badly – and the impact our words and actions have on each other, especially our words. Two years into my research made me realise everything I have ever been interested in is all about the voice – the part of us we use to express out into the world what is going on inside. Other things I like: singing, especially collectively, no surprise there; reading, no surprise there either (books raised me and raise me still); and yoga (breathing consciously so often underrated).
Colour
Minority ethnic, nope; BAME, hell no; Black, reductive; Brown, yep my skin is definitely this. Of colour... I’m coining Colourful, it’s positive, and because none of this should have ever happened in the first place. So does that mean to be white is to be colourless... Labels. They are a murky business!
life after May 2020
Recently, someone asked me to complete a survey about my racist experiences in the arts, sigh. Them: I just wanted to flag this survey, which closes on the 28 July. It's coming from a genuine place. Hopefully you've already clocked it. Me: I did see the survey, I made the decision not to complete it for these reasons: I have too many racist experiences to mention over my years in the arts (and in the world), which are often too painful to recount; and in all honesty I’ve been filling in these kinds of forms for years and I’ve now reached saturation point. What I would find more helpful and progressive is if people completed a survey to recount incidences where they expressed racist attitudes or acted on racist assumptions. I totally understand the survey is coming from a good place and I sincerely hope it helps yield the vital social transformation so many of us are longing to witness and experience. Them: Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on this survey. Would you be okay if I fed those back anonymously to CVAN - particularly your second point? I suspect a lot of people feel as turned off as you do about another survey like this. Me: I would say that people are more than turned off, people are exhausted and fragile, and do not want to be re-traumatised. We have, without doubt, moved beyond the point of colourful people recounting our racist experiences. It’s time to have conversations about accountability, we’ve said and done enough. You can share my points with CVAN and I’m happy to be cited – it’ll make things easier for me if people know where I stand on this issue.
Sault
Sault’s Untitled (Black Is) is an incantation made from the traumas of being despised and vilified for having brown skin. It describes and mirrors precisely the emotional tornado that comes from living in a world where people feel entitled to hate you for no reason, and act on that hate in subtle and overt ways, the cognitive dissonance of this daily assault and the courage it takes to carrying on living through it. This is why brown people are so good at music, sometimes it is the only medicine. Miracles literally saved me from disintegrating, not just because of the melody and lyric but because it comes after all the outpouring in the tracks before it, just at the point in the narrative when your despair is about to destroy you. Genius!
refrain
Needed to put these two reoccurring thoughts somewhere:Who gets to define a good life... Is it just the haves constantly telling the have nots where they have gone ‘wrong’... And I’ve been wondering about this term common sense... Is it yet another way of privileging conventional thinking over the imagination...
paying attention...
...so, I don't normally care too much about these things but a friend said the other day that I should: that I need to own my off the cuff phrase "busybeingequal" before someone else claims it... so I'm paying attention and making it known (again here) that is was actually me who said it :-)I have bought some domain names and am registering it as a trademark, very grown up!(someone has snuck in a bought busybeingequal.black but I guess I shouldn't be too bothered because not having to use 'black' is the whole point of the bloody thing!)
#"busybeingequal" (MA)
deleting "the third question" (EJ) from our psyches, and "removing the need to ask for permission" (LGC) from the "mean" (S) - possibly/probably both definitions - of society