SOMETHING LESS THAN FACTUAL
Balancing documentary with creative invention.
The following is based on a Speech given by me
to the Southwest Multicultural Network
in honour of Black History Month
on October 26th 2024.
First I thanked Tina Ellen Lee
for explaining a bit of my background
as no doubt people might have been wondering why this white guy
with a foreign accent was addressing them
about Black History Month in the UK.
As it was, I spoke about multiculturalism
and referred to my exhibition,
LOOKING FOR THE MOTHERLAND,
which was then being shown
just around the corner from where I was speaking,
in the Shire Hall Museum, Dorchester,
about the black Post Empire-Windrush generations
in London.
I also thanked Mona Elkotory
and the trustees of the Southwest Multicultural Network
for the invitation and the honour to share a few words with the audience
while celebrating Black History Month.
I said:
The night after I was invited to speak,
I asked myself ‘why me
when there are so many good people around
showing others that peaceful multiculturalism
is not only a beautiful dream,
but like art
it is also a beautiful gift of culture and self-enrichment.
With that I thought:
I’ll be with you remembering the black artists, intellectuals, scholars
and just as important,
everyone else
as teacher, nurses and plumbers,
black, white, yellow, red and brown
who also share a common decency
and an open heartedness
with and for all our brothers and sisters.
The centre of this idea is that consciously or not
we may share common values* and I suspect many of us here
1/ accept that freedom
is more important than the possession of power;
2/ that a truly blind and affordable legal system
is an essential component of political fairness,
providing safety rails for the weak, poor, needy
and those treated unfairly in our society;
3/ that the needs of our souls are more important
than our needs for material trinkets;
4/ that recognising our importance as producers**
is more significant than recognising our roles as consumers;
5/ that understanding who we are
by connecting to our own family and communal history
is in many cases more healing
than investigating ourselves through psychology;
6/ and more contentiously, I , and perhaps many of you
believe that policies and politics based in kindness
are more important than those based in profit margins.
When younger,
I asked myself,
‘do I voluntarily listen to the cries of the poor and the wretched,
to those injured emotionally or physically
by war or injured by prejudice, unfairness and injustice,
or do I forget them
until somehow they or others (as artists)
make a noise about their existence?
And I told myself,
if this is so, I must and can become a voice for the voiceless
though my photographic and film stories.
In other words,
living a life which embraces those beautiful things within multiculturalism
is living a life which I hoped would be filled with humanity
in which we inhabit one common moral world.
That is the beating heart of our shared humanity.
And I offered to the audience:
“that’s why we are in this room together tonight.”
Thank you
That in essence was my short speech.
I followed it with a showing of this short ad
I made for the museum to use as publicity.
Afterwards there was a discussion between the audience and me.
It was surprising to recognise that most of the questions
were about my life as introduced by Tina.
The audience had a greater response to being told a story of someone’s life (mine)
than in the more intellectual discussion I offered.
This goes to the root of communications
in that biographies, stories of people’s lives
are of far greater interest,
(perhaps only in the Anglo- American world)
than discussions rooted in ideas.
A NOTE TO LEARN FROM
The masterful Spanish film-maker,
Pedro Almodovar wrote of his mother reading aloud
letters she had written for illiterate fellow villagers.
He realised that as she read aloud she changed the texts,
enhancing them with something less then facts,
and he saw how fondly the villagers received
the slightly fictionalised version.
From that he learned
“how reality needs fiction in order to be more complete,
more pleasurable,
more bearable.”
from THE LAST DREAM by Perdo Almodovar, quoted in an article in The European by Charlie Connelly.
NOTES
*Eight core values:
honesty, compassion, respect, responsibility, fairness, trust, integrity, community,
“Values are individual beliefs
that motivate people to act one way or another.
They serve as a guide for human behaviour.
Generally, people are predisposed to adopt the values that they are raised with.
People also tend to believe that those values are “right”
because they are the values of their particular culture.
Ethical decision-making often involves weighing values against each other
and choosing which values to elevate.
Conflicts can result when people have different values,
leading to a clash of preferences and priorities.”
McCombs School of Business – The University of Texas at Austin
**Our making, participating in supporting our community defines how we contribute/ share/ give back