During my nights I swim sharply in harsh waters, drenched and shivering to these bones.
When I can, when my Self allows me, I peer at stars suspended above leaping sea horses effervescing in front of their chasing waves, as I try to dream of you. *** If, as we proceed through life, there is freedom to be grasped, where do we look and to what or to whom do we listen?
I came to understand that most of those around my younger life accepted conventional attitudes, opinions, ideologies, belief systems, propaganda, news broadcasts that imposed strict and narrow tolerance upon their imaginations, forcing them to accept the status quo and if not, if troublesome they, we would be poorly graded, sent to the head teacher, reported to our parents, and as time moved on, to be silently excluded from jobs, privileges, awards and praise.
It was as if the stem brains of our oppressors called upon themselves to impose upon us, me, a form of exile based in intolerant rejection of differences and exclusions of those they thought rebellious, to grasp control of our wages, our consciousness, and in particular our obedience to them and our docility to all.
I can swim and dream only because I have grasped some personal freedom from the surrounding sea of conformity. I have eluded being amongst the many who, with great determination, live a life avoiding seeing or hearing the cries of others, and avoiding the nightly echoes of their own crimes.
The Reduction of All Things into Materialism Photograph: Robert Golden
In the processes of early capitalism, acquisition of wealth was more important than any other necessity of life. Their oppression of others was to them a necessity and as they hid from the reality of their evil actions, they repressed themselves. This self-repression is written all over Protestantism and still all over the underlying ideas that govern at least northern European and American day-by-day life.
The middle classes of Anglo-American and European societies have justified their rape of our earth, of other’s lands, wealth and cultures using religious myths, moralising cant and even distorted uses of Darwin.
It is no wonder that psychologists refer to this as the ‘creation of a collective unconsciousness’ in which solemnity, piety and order are used to construct a living hell of socially accepted commonplace banality used to oppress and isolate each of us from our others.
For those untrained in critical thinking this pernicious conformity forces many to live a double life of knowing while pretending not to know.
For those who have claimed some freedom for themselves I am sure that amongst the many causes they may have in their lives, one of the outstanding, vital and humane characteristics is to protect the weak, ill and poor from being crushed by the powerful and the wealthy. That describes what should be the inner working of a Democracy. When we pay taxes in a just Democracy it is a gift of readjustment, attempting to make a fairer society.
It is for those who have claimed some freedom and for socially conscious journalists, civil and human rights lawyers and all poets to continually reveal the unique relationships between our lives and our needs for political freedoms and economic equality, and for us to recognise the beauty that blossoms in the environs of freedom. ***
I could not love without being free, and therefore I can remember this: that we were in the Aegean again, searching for the man who could give us knowledge.
The inter-islands ferry cut the waters known so well by the pilot and his captain. The rocks and the shallows were like their relatives, the ones you know well but wish to avoid. It was as you lent against the guard rope at the prow, appearing determined, your hair flowing behind you, your skirt giving way to the wind, that I saw for that moment you were again a vision of Athena, perhaps not as the goddess of war but the goddess of knowledge and music.
Tina on a Beach, Portugal Photograph: Robert Golden
I could not have loved without being free and I, we cannot be free without embracing democracy.
NEWS ABOUT MY COMING EXHIBITION
SEARCHING FOR THE MOTHERLAND
The Empire Windrush generation and their community, 25 years on
Robert Golden: photographer Shaniqua Benjamin: poet
These photographs were made throughout the 1970s, beginning about 25 years after the arrival of the original Empire Windrush generation. The older people in the pictures, some of whom are amongst the original group, can be seen responding to social, cultural and economic conditions, perhaps as any group of migrants or strangers in a strange land have forever responded.
In their home islands the UK dispossessed them of their freedoms and their economic survival; in the UK they were dispossessed through rejection, arbitrary racism, harassment by the public, police, bureaucrats, landlords and politicians, and condemned as ‘Other’.
They had imagined a life in a cold, distant land being better for them and their children than living in what was too often an economic and cultural dead-end on the island domains left impoverished once the value of tobacco, sugarcane and cotton dropped and the strategic value of the islands no longer existed for the British Empire.
*** Their children were even more harassed, finding less solace in the church and in the hostile population of the so-called Motherland. ‘So-called’ because in mythologies, Mothers embraces their children and cares for them. She is of the earth and nurtures the children physically and cares for their souls.
The Empire generation’s children, suffering
discrimination, harassment and with fewer opportunities, with their potential and abilities ignored because of skin pigmentation, remained exiles in England, cast out from their mother’s embrace. Some revolted, finding a voice in race and class based ideologies.
Others turned their backs as best they could on the dominant culture and attempted to forge their own way, some in desperation were tragically criminalized, but others, against the odds, succeeded culturally, educationally and professionally *** How did I, a young white foreign photojournalist become accepted? Previously I played a part in the American Civil Rights Movement and in the anti-Vietnam War struggles. When I moved to London from New York I became engaged in the Right To Work Campaigns and the anti-Nazi campaigns as a photographer/designer and as a participant. In brief and for reasons of my own history, upbringing, self-education and my studying history, not only did I find racism and nationalism emotionally unacceptable, but intellectually hollow and morally repugnant. I found people I met in the black communities, warm, friendly and accepting. ••• These pictures are about creating image equivalents to my underlying always evolving story: that too many human beings are in struggle against economic, bureaucratic and political bullies, and that many of those in struggle possess dignity and untold strengths, even as they are forced to carry unacceptable burdens, they do so with grace and modesty; both worthy of embracing, celebrating and admiring.
