The book to read about Jamaican immigration to Britain in the late fifties and early sixties is Small Island by Andrea Levy. In Bristol, a slave trade city, the story of black immigration is one in which hope, fear, romance, rejection, racism, resilience and more recently assimilation have all played a part.
From the early 1960s Bristol had a community of around 3,000 residents of West Indian origin, some of whom had served in the British military during World War II. Since those early days when wording on ‘flat for rent’ signs would read ‘No Blacks, Irish or dogs’ there has been a long hard road to travel for those pioneering immigrants who looked to the ‘Mother Country’ for a new opportunity in life. Their children have had no less a journey, having to deal with a dual identity with their Jamaican and British roots, and continued racism.
Dr Edson Burton, a writer, historian and programmer and Miles Chambers, writer, artist and broadcaster met at the Bristol Black Writers Group at the Kuumba project in St Paul’s. Curried Goat… is an exuberant and poignant piece drawn from their collective experiences of being second generation black in Britain. In a series of intimate cameos that include roots, family, love, sex and death, preconceptions about black attitudes and role models are dissected with sassy and sharp observation.
Directed by Nancy Medina, both writers have made the absolute most of their ability to communicate through poetry, story telling, even movement. Burton and Chambers are a great double act. Little and large physically, they bounced personal insights and memories off each other at a pace that caught the audience’s imagination from the off. There was enormous range in the material. Chambers delivered a passionate cri-de-coeur, “I want to be treated normal, I want to chill with you.” And pointedly, “What was the first thing you saw when you first looked at me?” He later gave a heartfelt address to the passing of a friend’s dad. Edson then stepped in with a very clever piece about taking on the look of a Rastafarian ‘lover man’ to impress a girlfriend, only for her to leave looking for a guy, “Who knew what he wanted to be.”
There were tales of ‘power (Friday) nights’, of journeys back to Jamaica, threats of violence from teddy boys, of friendships made across racial and cultural divides, and local context in memory of the Bristol bus boycott of 1963 that led to the first UK Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968. And there were hilarious moments when Chambers shouted out in patois for Edson to then translate into perfectly clipped Queen’s English.
In the words of Edson, “As I writer I have been used to supplying the words while actors suffer the angst. Being on the other side has been a voyage of discovery… I learnt much about myself – about old insecurities… about my stubbornness, about my playfulness.”
Burton and Chambers’ Curried Goat and Fish Fingers is what you’d expect from the title, an idiosyncratic blending of cultures. But it’s also a joyful and watchful journey inside black Britain, presented with great wit and intellect by two extremely talented writers to watch out for. ★★★★★ Simon Bishop 28th February 2016
Following shortly after the performance of Curried Goat and Fish Fingers, Check the Label, written and performed by Eno Mfon, is a piece that confronts the pressure that many black women feel under to change their looks, including the colour of their skin, in order to fit in with western culture. Check the Label is an unflinching examination of girls and young women who suffer painful side effects as they employ questionable chemical concoctions to ‘relax’ their hair into straight styles, and lighten their skin with bleach in order to buy into stereotypical models of Caucasian beauty.
Mfon is a writer currently studying English and Drama at the University of Bristol. Originally through the form of spoken word poetry, Check the Label was first performed at the Bristol Old Vic’s Ferment Fortnight before being developed into the show it is today. With the help of Director Tanuja Amarasuriya, Mfon employs every inch of the performance area to engage the audience, sometimes using back-projected film clips of black American women discussing their distressing experiments with lightening ingredients, and television advertisements extolling the virtues of hair products.
The underlying message of Mfon’s piece is really one of our collective and simple desire for acceptability. That women already have enormous pressures on them to conform to image stereotypes is well documented. That black women have yet another layer of image acceptability to cope with is not. The play almost works as a journalistic drama, arguably running slightly too long for a single theme. But Mfon’s ebullient energy and her devices for engaging the audience were always inventive and, like Curried Goat… before her she enjoyed prolonged applause from a mixed race audience. A nerve had been touched. ★★★☆☆ Simon Bishop 28th February 2016
