The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
As you can see, I’m making my process central to my newsletter. I’m gonna use my 8-station mind-maps to create my image from now on. Unless I wanna use a picture, I love. And I’m gonna follow 12-words to create my newsletter.
- Title.
- Object I see.
- 12 things I associate with my object.
- 20 mins to write, use object, plus 12-associations under my title.
Title: ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.’ Audre Lord.
(But they keep fucking trying, and we keep fucking helping them.)
Object: Cotton
12 associations
- Science and Industry Museum
- The Reno
- The Reno Excavation
- The October sun
- Trying to make use of it
- Trying to harvest it
- Not being grateful any more
- Not giving permission any more
- Not understanding leaving it behind
- Not being understood
- You had to be there
- The Reno was not resistance it was just fucking great
I have to make money. That makes me grateful when the phone rings and someone wants to employ me. As I start writing I realise that this is the same problem the person accidentally wielding the master's tools has. They are employed by the master.
There is no reparation that happens in an institution, in an English institution, that does, that is not laced, butter spread, pickled, covered in white fragility.
First let me say something about my book, our book, if you have been using the chapters to write your memoir. We are gonna leave it alone for 90 days. We’re not gonna think about it. We’re not gonna look at it. But we are gonna enjoy what it has done to us.
So here I am freshly anointed by blowing my cover all over the place. Getting from chapter to chapter was amazing. Excited about reading it back when the time is right. But this time is also as important. Cos writing it has done something to me. So, it most definitely has done something to you too.
Let’s start in the logical place. I have to, I want to, start making money from/with my skills. I’ve got fucking great skills. But one of ‘em isn’t as valued as the other skills. Bull-shit detector.
So, a representative of the Science and Industry Museum emails me. They want to highlight the Reno project. Fantastic. Money. ‘Feel free as long as I make money out of it.’ Yeah. For the first time ever, I am paid for a meeting. Great start. I have a daily rate to pull together things they want to use to show the resistance to the oppression.
‘You do know the Guardian is built on the enslavement of ...’
‘No surprises there.’
‘They want to do a … As an act of reparation...’
I’m listening. And I’m not listening.
‘We weren’t allowed to go to their clubs. So, we built clubs of our own.’
That’s a fucking lie. It’s a lie. We did not consciously or unconsciously think them bastards won’t let us in their clubs so let’s make a club of our own. No. Phil, an African, wants to make money so he opens a club in Moss Side. A club that begins, when Roland West, Trinidadian, owns it, as a kind of supper club that goes with his age, and his golfing. Live acts. The leading families from Moss Side go there. It has nothing to do with white saviour syndrome. Nothing to do with reparations. Nothing to do with the Arts Council. Nothing to do with feeling sorry for black people. It has everything to do with commerce. It has everything to do with commerce. It has everything to do with commerce. That’s it. Notice no speech marks. Cos I'm just thinking this.
So, the person who is talking to me is actually flooded with feeling good about the Science and Industry/Guardian project. And what I want to say seems cruel, to their face. But they are not gonna listen cos when I say, ‘We need to walk away from this now. We need to think of ourselves in a different light.’
‘We’ve got lots of workshops that will do this.’
It’s here Audre Lorde’s fantastic title, sentence, manifesto, enters my head. But I don’t say it. Cos at this point I am still interested in the money.
But when I leave the call, the doubt sets in. I did not excavate the Reno to have it loaded on the back of a cart and made into a circus. A freak show. Out of context. I did not excavate the Reno with any English institutions in mind. In fact, none are invited on purpose.
I have to try from a different angle to get you to understand what I mean. How the fuck do enslaved people swallow so wholeheartedly Jesus, the bible, the church, when the people selling it to them are the actual fucking devil? I have never understood this. They are not even allowed in the churches at the time.
How the fuck, or why the fuck, are the great musicians travelling through sundown towns where they can die, they can’t eat in restaurants, they can’t sleep in hotels, they have to enter the back door to go onstage to put on the gig for the people who will burn them alive on another day?
I don’t know how to unpack what I am trying to say. But I don’t have to. This is all I have to know. I will be writing sorry I have changed my mind. We dug up the Reno in beautiful October sun. It is sacred. It is sacred to us who went there. It is hallowed ground. It belongs to us. You cannot repurpose it to pay your mortgage. For the master to pay their mortgages off your back. It belongs to us. You cannot harvest it. You cannot make use of it. It belongs to us. We weren’t grateful in 1976. And I’m not grateful now. It belongs to us. I am not giving permission. I am never giving permission ever again for it to be used by an institution as a master’s tool. It is our tool. It belongs to us.
The Reno was not resistance it was just fucking great. You had to be there. In the club. And at the excavation. You wanna talk about Manchester and cotton talk about the sun beating down on their backs. Nah, man, I can’t be bothered going there. Fuck it. We are not yet understanding leaving it behind because somehow, they still have hold of the pulpit, and their sermon is… And their sermon is… ‘Once we were your perpetrators, now we are your angels.’
I don’t give a fuck what it is. Me, nor something marvellous I did, and the marvellous people who help me do it, are part of their sermon. That is all I have to know. The Reno excavation is our sermon. Period.
Last last line. I might pick this up next week to unpack what I am trying to say. No one would contact Cornelia Parker and ask her can they use a piece of exploded wood to demonstrate jack-shit. Well, the Reno memoirs, excavation, and Whitworth installation are as complete an artistic moment as that.
Documented on its own website. https://thereno.live/ and YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4i6_3d1beBmwKYDVYGX9CQ Sorry YouTube link won't work. You'll have to copy and paste it.