love and rage for David Oluwale - murdered by police, Leeds, 1969 It’s 50 years since David, a Nigerian British man, was chased to his death by drowning in the River Aire in central Leeds. I learnt about David from Stuart Hodkinson when I first moved to Leeds and his story has shaped my understanding of this place I’ve called home for seven-and-a-half years.
The piece below was published in ‘Remembering Oluwale’ (Valley Press, 2016). It wasn’t written directly about David but he is part of it, part of the people seen as, and made into, rubbish and surplus in this city - in the present as well as the past. In a way it was the end of the beginning of my attempts to write about these things, and much more.
Promises (for David Oluwale)
Security
I watch myself feeling my way around the city wall. I finger the cracks in the stone until my fingers are the cracks, and I walk, as I walk, two fingers, two thumbs, a mouth, a head, a back, two feet, this mouth that we must take bread through, this same mouth. A mouth, a head, a back, two feet, as the sun comes round. The cracks change with light, water expands as it becomes ice. The place is incidental, then. I am alone, ice pools spread, I am thought in pool, I am still outside the city, I am asleep, and so I surround and am surrounded. Facing the terror, the throat attack which is only a moment, not a policy, not a good deal of time. A motorway or a wall is worse than a bomb. I am pitiful. Exposure to difficulty has made my hands a little rough. There is snow in the cracks in the wall. How far? For a garden, there has to be an idea, a thought of blooming, power, labour. If paradise is a garden, who waters it? That same mouth. My tread rakes earth. I journey.
Social Justice
In the court waiting area, where there are no windows, a woman shows another a black and white photo. And there’s the leg... just there – at once I am floating, the gabbling becomes water, and I am unfixed in my own ocean, with my child, and a terrible refusal for it to be subjected to this, this being forced to pay rent, money extorted from the threat of eviction. I was in the room with another woman, older, and her friend, a younger woman, and the duty solicitor. He went out and she began to cry, again, weary and familiar, grinning into tears. He came back in, springy, efficient. Don’t cry, he said, don’t cry, it’s good news. The council solicitor has agreed to a suspension and for you to pay £3.60 a week. And you might be eligible for a temporary payment to cover your rent. It’s good news, the best possible outcome really! Mind those tears now. As if she had not been crying for ten months. My child can be a person from whom money is extorted – this is my fury beginning - but in no country that I can imagine my child living in (my child now) will anyone be prosecuted for letting themselves go hungry. Pay the rent. My child, who is a woman, eats so little that her periods stop. Pay up. And the judge delivers the best possible outcome of an extorted £3.60 a week, that’s sensible, you can pay that can’t you. Can’t you, says the solicitor and there’s a small nod, Yes your honour, the tenant is agreeable to that. The judge knows his children will never have their rent extorted and a mind that lives on its nerves and severings like that, a womb on ice; he knows the law inside out, as well as they know grief and perhaps a little better, and he knows that he and his dear ones are always inside and that local government is to tough choices as he is to the safety of his ocean, his lake, his home. But how can they demand that the child never be left, she can’t even leave the house, not even to pop out to get bread... she can’t be a mum like that.
Work
In the photographs of the Workhouse, which is also additionally named the Infirmary, perhaps because the two buildings sit side by side, sharing an internal wall, there are a group of men who are known as inmates, or so it’s written here, or patients, as it’s written elsewhere. They work to make the crops grow, or to make themselves better, or a more complete man, or in order that they may eat, or in order that the workhouse can grow and take in more people to be cured, restored to work again, that the city stays in order, that the city can be cured. I sit with them, I am the man with the city’s disorder, I am the woman in the crumpled skirt. People are awful surplus, old men with not even a belt to hold up their trousers, so they must use stolen rope, with not a voice to speak of them, not even to record the crime, not two pieces of paper that agree on what to call them. They are the shape the state needs. Almost. For belonging. Either they aren’t sure what to call you or, waste matter, they think that you must have several names. Certain sicknesses for certain times. Are you still sick, they ask each month, and then every six months, tell us how. Can you wash yourself, what work are you able to do then? You’re not prone, but we don’t know what to do with you, because, you see, you won’t tell us what to do with yourself. We haven’t invented the workhouse yet. Here we are in our past unpoliced, unpolicied state. Apply a sticking plaster to the surplus until something more robust can be constructed. Something with an inside, an outside, and a shared wall.
Progress
Often there are so many fences, it’s surprising not to see one. Out of the gate I go, space winds me. Security fences anticipate attack, rebellion, preformed riots, training exercises. I’ve trodden fields claggy with the knowledge that the fence could not be climbed and I was on the side where I could be caught. Your whole street does not work in the factory. This street was built for the works. That space at the top of the hill where nothing has been built and something has been demolished. Housing infrastructure is no longer dictated by industrial infrastructure; development is about ‘regional growth’ and we’re segmented, market delineated, an A2 or a C3 shopper. Everything about us is known even though there is so much to know, a city for people so various would either be a single palace or a various mess. Everything about us is used to plan the shops we frequent to buoy The Economy up, the shops that sometimes close without warning so when you go to buy cheap stationery, you trip instead over a grey chasm lying like a joke among the moving shoppers.
An Important Man says he is mystified by that fact that the expansion of jobs in the US and Europe has not resulted in higher wages. Capital is a great mystery, and that mystery of these cities of the North, their fragmentation, their porous suffering. The failure, the inability, the impossibility of planning. The collapse of local government, and the decline of civic architecture; ‘good works’ have gone the way of ‘the works’ at the top of the street, where the space is. I have stood at the top of a gasometer and looked out onto the huge plain, of factories, canals, of woods and houses, half in smog and half in green. I have wondered what was this all made for? And why is it still here? Down by the empty mills, it mostly feels like a mistake, a chewed field, a nightmare of someone who woke up in the morning, in any year you’d care to name, who woke and cried and asked God for another dream.
