In conversation with Linda Brogan: The Reno, Guerrilla gardening and cherry blossom

 Excerpts of conversation with Linda Brogan - an intergenerational exchange, focusing on institutional battles, decolonisation, slavery and trauma.

 

Beginning as a short interview about Brogan’s recent Reno exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, our Zoom discussion sprawled into a few hours of debate and discourse- an intergenerational exchange as activists and creatives. Much of the discussion focused on identity and how it has influenced our practice. Linda Brogan is a playwright and artist, recently in the spotlight for her curation of this show. The Reno exhibition used interviews and images to examine the lives of those from Moss Side in Manchester, who frequented the Reno nightclub. It was a safe haven for those of mixed-race descent, labelled ‘half caste’ by locals in the area.  Brogan was a fellow club-goer, who is herself half Irish and half Jamaican. In our long conversations I enjoyed her quick wit, warm laugh and Mancunian sensibility.

 

 

On black lives maters- not just a discussion of today but of our country’s history:

 

Brogan: I think it’s [the murder of black people by the police] just the way that life is at the moment. If you go back to colonialism, that's just expected… that the white man is worth more and therefore he has more. And everybody is more upset if he dies.

 

These ideas go back to the Raj in India, back to China, they date back to all the other places that we colonised and especially back to slavery. Because unless they [the white man] could persuade themselves that a black man was a mule, their own humanity wouldn't have allowed them to do those things to another human being.

 

So that is part of Floyd’s murder. That you could kneel on somebody’s neck when they are begging for life, means that person has no value to you. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change those thoughts.

 

 

Our black lives matter and of identity.

 

Brogan: If you say you’re black, immediately people bring up identity. Why is our native identity looked at? Why do we need identity?

 

Mendel: Part of the problem is that we focus on individuals, on one person being killed or on one policeman murdering, but we don’t address the societal systems and structures that enable these scenarios. How do we have that conversation, without it being difficult and without turning people away from supporting a movement?

 

Brogan:  Sometimes I think that we shouldn’t focus on the problem at all, we should focus on the solutions. In the same way that addressing mental health should be not just about showing symptoms in the head, but about getting the mind to work properly.

 

 You have coping mechanisms and you have skills to form a functioning process and you’ve had good food so your brain actually works.  I think instead of focusing on what happens afterwards we should focus on putting those things right, like mental health being a part of schooling.

 

 

On poverty and mental health:

 

Brogan:  I think [treating these issues] should just become normal…There shouldn’t be children living in slums in Mumbai, for instance. These are not isolated problems. Everybody should be able to live at a certain level that is good for their body, mind, mental health and self-esteem. I think if everybody had that, it would wipe out a lot of ideas about black people, about who can just do menial jobs, and so on.

 

There’s this thing I’ve heard of, it’s so idealistic, but where everyone gets paid the same money.

 

Mendel: Universal basic income?

 

Brogan: Yeah, Universal Basic Income. Now whoever you are, if you want to be a doctor you can be a doctor. What’s your passion as a kid, did you want to be an archaeologist? Did you want to be a cleaner? Some people love cleaning…

 

 

On how to have an open discussion, build community

 

Mendel: Do you have any advice on how to maintain a positive open discussion and not shut people down?

 

Brogan: Well I don’t at the minute because people have got huge egos, haven’t they? They want to be heard and to be heard to have said.

 

Instead, what you need is a project. So, for example, I think they should put free school meals in all schools, because I think it’s good for the brain, and I think the meals should use organic vegetables. So, I think of a school that could implement that and I discuss it with them. I can have discussions with schools that have already implemented something like that. Then I could talk to a group in California who did this fantastic guerrilla farming… and then used it to build something that works. Once there is proof that it worked, we could have another conversation.

 

All of this will take a long time. I think to have a discussion you invite the argument.

 

Mendel: So you can’t just have an idealistic discussion, you need to ground it in reality. It’s a practical discussion- you need something to be working towards.

 

Brogan: The next phase, which I’ve never tried, which I imagine would be harder, is to get real authority involved, to begin to implement ideas in a way that’s about caring, not box ticking.

 

 

On institutional battles:

 

Mendel: Then you end up with the next problem, the battle with the institutions, like you had with the Reno exhibition. You spoke about how you successfully achieved what you wanted, without your project being diluted.

 

So how do we [activists] replicate the success of the Reno, of true undiluted stories?

 

Brogan: It’s about individual relations I think, between people you trust, because in order to get to be friends with the artistic director [of the Whitworth] I had to be really ruthless and cut down the woman who was in my way. It felt like a sword fight…

 

 You have to be a dove when you need to be a dove and a snake when you need to be a snake.

 

Mendel: You made it clear that the Whitworth wanted to tell one story about the Reno, about people from Moss Side, about mixed-race people in Manchester in Britain, a story of suffering and racism and violence, and that’s part of the story, but not the point of the exhibition, because its stories are about people’s lives, these mosaics.

 

 

On institutions themselves:

 

Mendel: It’s a question of these ‘woke’ institutions like the Whitworth, the so-called liberal institutions, which are meant to be politically correct, but by inherently being an institution, they want to tell the sad story but not necessarily the whole story. What’s your view on that, because you fought against that at the Whitworth?

 

[This battle was in regard to the Whitworth wanting, as part of the Reno exhibition, to have a timeline about the racist suffering in Manchester, which Brogan termed an inauthentic part of the Reno exhibition, due to it telling only part of the story.]

 

Brogan: I think, the problem is how these institutions were created in the first place. You know why? There are two types. The first type, Mr Whitworth, was a poor, self-made man who wanted to leave something to his community.

 

The second type are those really rich people who want to leave something behind, so they can have wings in heaven. They want to be seen as a beautiful person.

 

I think both types are patronising, they begin with patronisation. The people who work in these institutions, they are do-goody people who believe they are doing what people needed.

 

We then need to investigate the origins of these institutions honestly. I doubt very much that when these institutions were first made that a real working-class person ever went in them. You know, a real working-class person of the 1880s, with no dole, no NHS and consumption: I doubt they would have been through those doors.

 

 I think that problem applies to the present.  If we look to the past, the problems, why they work, how they work, the solution will be found.

 

Mendel: So, it’s the institutions themselves. Institutions want to tell this one story that gets repeated a lot. That narrative is problematic, because it provides a negative slant rather than the more holistic honest picture.

 

Brogan: Because it is patronising. In the first instance, I mean in the 1880s, they would patronise people working in the mills, in the same way they did about us. They would go ‘let’s go get some poor people, they can bring some cotton with them, some cloth, and show how they get up at 5 in the morning and show that they only have one meal a day’. That’s the story they think they know, but they don’t want to look at the real story because the surface story makes them rich and makes their clothes.

 

They can’t go ‘on the 26^th of April I met my wife and she was wearing a beautiful pair of slippers that her mother had brought her, I loved her from that day, we’ve got three children, one who died of tuberculosis.’ They couldn’t tell those real stories, from their environments. Because as I’m seeing it now, they only give you five minutes.

 

The institutions show us high culture, like Lucian Freud and Elizabeth Price, and then they give us our five minutes, get us to doth our caps and tell the story they want to hear about our horrible poor lives. So that they can go to heaven, and we get five minutes relief from our horrible lives, and they’ll go back to being cultured.

 

So, it’s not their real lives. It’s the stories how those from above want to hear it.

 

 

On slavery, the voiceless and decolonisation:

  

 

Brogan: Have you heard of Fredrick Douglass?

 

Mendel: Yes, an activist, one of the old radical ones, an anti-racist.

 

Brogan: He was also an ex-slave. Douglass had escaped slavery, he’d jumped across swamps and ran across fields and done whatever he could to get away from these people, but now he’s become an activist, which is the first thing you said, so he’s parted his hair like a white man, but he’s still got an afro because it won’t go proper and they haven’t got fucking hair relaxers yet. So when he becomes an activist they ventriloquize him - he speaks English, he’s not speaking his slave language, I don’t even know what that is.

 

Mendel: Talking to you specifically about decolonisation, I want your opinion on a discussion that occurred during a workshop I was running as part of the Steve Biko exhibition, discussing the theme of decolonisation. A woman from the Ahmed Iqbal Race Relations Centre got up to speak and objected to the term, stating that she is half-Jamaican half-white, and that ‘you can’t decolonise me’.

 

Brogan: For me it’s about the after-effects. It’s not about what happened, you can’t do anything about that, it’s more about trying to understand what grew from that event. Like how Fredrick Douglass wore a frock coat and had parted hair. It’s little sentences like that and looking at what that means. That means his voice was never his own.

 

When you look at slave narratives, there are some fantastic ones, but they were so oppressed. People who had been enslaved probably couldn’t read or write, so someone’s writing the narrative down for them. They’re talking oppressed, they are not saying what they feel, they are still talking as if some white person madly had the right to do that to them.

 

It’s not as explicit as I’m saying it - they don’t feel entitled to life, they don’t even know what to do with their freedom.

 

 

Generational trauma and family:

 

Brogan: They’ve done these experiments where they get a mouse to smell cherry blossom, and electric shock them at the same time, and the mouse gets frightened of the smell of cherry blossom even without the electric shock. Six generations down the line, the mice are still afraid of cherry blossom. I’m only four generations from slavery. My Dad’s grandma was a slave. Great grandma, grandma, dad, me. That’s what ticking in me that makes me not feel entitled to things.

 

 

[Postmemory, how trauma affects family, far beyond living memory, must be examined if we can truly move beyond the oppressive structures of our society, be they formed in slavery, colonisation or the holocaust.]

Written by Elias Mendel