The Baby Mother's Tale (a Radio 4 documentary)

A lecturer and teacher of mine recently told me about a radio show that she heard on radio 4 called 'The Baby Mother's Tale'. This fascinating 28 minute documentary explores the stories of (first to third generation) Afro-Caribbean mothers living in Birmingham, UK and their reflections on parenting and conjugal dynamics within their communities. 

Whilst the blurb rightly highlights that 'the voices of these women are almost never heard', the show did remind me of Jamaican Sociologist/Author Olive Senior's path-breaking book, Working Miracles, which documents many similar such stories throughout Caribbean island contexts. In many ways Rebecca Lloyd Evans' radio-short traces the continuity of the familial patterns Senior documents into a metropolitan diasporic frame.   

The Baby Mother Tale interrogates the popular tropes of 'baby mother' (mother of a man's child), 'wifey' (main woman) and 'side chick' ('outside' woman) as various patriarchal categories that the women have to reckon with on an everyday basis as they negotiate relationships with their far from perfect 'child-fathers'. 

The show sketches a candid picture of maternal resilience and roving marginal men. Yet, there's an interesting moment in documentary where a younger man challenges the practices of his elder peers, forcefully provoking them to admit to their paternal shortcomings. Another poignant moment is when one of the young mothers visits her granny to discuss the history of the phenomenon, with her granny revealing the continuity between the 'other woman' of her generation and the 'side chick' of today. 

Available From The BBC Radio 4 Website Here!

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Illustrating Intimacy: A Fathermen Special Edition from Stella Phipps

In this special edition, Fathermen proudly presents the work of burgeoning Glasgow-based artist Stella Phipps. 

The illustrations that feature here, are part of a collaborative project between Stella and Adom that seeks to illuminate new interpretive angles on the themes of paternal visibilities and the mundane - yet under-recognised - caring kin-practices of Caribbean men.

(Some text will follow - first from artist, then ethnographer - to offer a contextual backdrop to subjects and project).

© Stella Phipps

© Stella Phipps

© Stella Phipps

Of her images Stella writes:

"These portraits depict the unique bond between father and child, suggesting shared memories and experiences. Here, the fathers are caring for and nurturing their children, a vital part of each-others lives; based on my own childhood experiences and close relationship to my dad.

For me, Fathermen celebrates the diverse responsibilities that come with fatherhood in Dominica and beyond. It opens up engaging conversations about more equal forms of parenting and challenges stereotypes of 'absent' or uncommitted fathers in society"

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Adom:

The figure of the father has a troubled place in the Caribbean imagination. Notions of paternal absence abound in popular discourses that repeat throughout the Antilles. Yet it seems that the image of the feckless father is so deeply embedded a notion in the Caribbean that quotidian acts of kining -so mundane and so unremarkably everyday that they seem beyond comment - are rendered invisible. Walking children to daycare, 'looking at' (minding) a toddler with a watchful eye whilst fixing a bicycle, bathing a sick child in the curative Caribbean sea or simply posé (resting), sitting and watching TV at home 'wid de kids' - are all examples of the unexamined ground of fathering and male kin-care in Dominica (and elsewhere). Many Caribbean men are in complex ways perceived by children and 'child-mothers' to be absented from their offspring's lives. Yet, this well recognized reality conceals another subtly vivid reality that deserves acknowledgement. Stella's illustrations are an ode to these subtle everyday intimacies between men and their young kin. We witness bodies in close contact - maybe brothers, fathers, uncles or simply neighbors - holding, embracing, feeding or stood with kin. The images convey moments that might be occasioned or routine , a snapshot of a summer with a returning father who resides 'overs' (overseas), perhaps, or being fed by a cohabiting father during his day off work. 

As illustrative interpretations of photographs, these images are the interwoven with the artist's fatherly memories and as such communicate a very fundamental and immediate human quality that traverses bounds of difference.This enables tthe bodies/subjects featured to stand apart from the caucophony of voices that malign and over-determine fathering in the Antilles. For a moment here Stella's drawings bring about a semblance of serenity, an incubated co-being, a silent kinship beyond parental frictions and disjunctures. Images of laboring bodies or protective, providing and disciplining hands might offer a more familiar picture of the embodied practice of Caribbean fathering, consistent with normative ideas about paternal duty and care in the region. Yet these less common images of bodily closeness offer a possibility of seeing men's affective relations with children as something ordinary and habitual. 

The drawings presented here are part of an emerging visual ethnographic project set to be exhibited in Scotland in early 2015 on the themes outlined above. It will present a composition of photography, quotations (from Dominican men/fathers), audiovisual installations featuring everyday kinship activities and, of course, more of Stella's illustrations.

We are currently locating the right space for such an exhibition; one that might offer a diverse public access to the project. If you have an exhibition space in mind or are interested in promoting / supporting this project, please leave your contact email in the comments box at the foot of this post.

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On the artist:

Stella Phipps is an artist and illustrator based in Glasgow. She recently graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and is currently involved in community arts projects with Impact Arts.

Stella's art emerges from personal experience, people and places, the surrealities of dreams, wild landscapes, folktales and the sea.  

For more of her work, please visit her website at stellaphipps.com or stellaphipps.tumblr.com.  

Fruitvale Station: Kinship and the Catastrophic in the Life/Death of an Afro-American Man

[Militarized Police and Protester in Ferguson, Missouri Last Week]

Last Sunday night, as protests over the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown continued into another night in Ferguson, Missouri (US), I sat to watch Fruitvale Station (2013) a dramatized depiction of the life/death of another unarmed black male fatally shot by police in an American city (San Francisco). 

Fruitvale Station is the intimately told story of 22 year-old Oscar Grant's final day of life, before his killing by Bay Area Transport Police on a New Year’s morning metro platform. The film has a realist, almost experiential quality to it offering a close-grained view into Oscar’s partially-fictionalized interior word. Whilst the film's director undoubtedly endeavoured toward verisimilitude and achieves an honest presentation of the contested terminal encounter, the story is not so much about the particular circumstances of the killing as it is about Oscar's familial life, his transitioning masculine self and what the devastation of his murder means for his girlfriend, their young daughter and his grieving mother (an all too familiar image of a black mother grieving a dead son; see for example Michael Brown's mother). And equally, the substance of the film is ,indeed, what it reveals of the violence that America visits upon its black citizenry – in this case young black males. 

[Oscar and his daughter 'T' in Ryan Coogler's Film Fruitvale Station (2013)

Fruitvale is a person-centred tragedy about intimacy, kinship, brutality and humanity. In its presentation of these themes it illustrates a beautifully nuanced picture of youthful black fatherhood and masculine being, as well as more generally reminding viewers of the enduring perilousness and devaluation of poor black lives in America. Cornel West (2009) terms this condition of violent denial (of equality, opportunity and full humanity) the ‘Catastrophic’. Evidenced by disproportionate un/underemployment, de facto segregation, overincarceration, poor schools, housing and healthcare (amongst other things), the catastrophic is the continuous racialized blighting of poor black America by the dominant social order (state, ruling classes and popular culture). In Oscar’s story we witness the catastrophic writ-small, channelled, magnified, complicated by the personal, the everyday struggles of an individual man.Spanning approximately 24 hours between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Morning of 2009/10, interspersed with flashbacks to stints of incarceration, we follow the protagonist's individual movement through his daily life. The film offers an over-the-shoulder insight into his affective interaction and play with his daughter, and his frictive yet loving romantic relationship with his girlfriend.We see moments of vulnerability as he conceals from her and his mother the financial insecurity of losing his supermarket job, along with his resigned return to dealing weed. 

We observe Oscar's mild and easy way with friends, kin and strangers, as well as adversarial flares during prison fights and the metro brawl shortly before his death. And we observe the mutually expressive filial bond between him and his mother: from texting her "happy birthday" in the early hours of New Year's Eve at the start of the film; to spending the day dutifully running errands for her birthday party; to his memories of their intense argument in prison and the anguish of her telling him she will no longer visit him there (see video clip, right).

Interestingly, Oscar’s story echoes in many ways the transitional story of Scratchie D, a Dominican man whose redemptive journey I have been documenting in my thesis and an ethnographic film project I recently finished filming. Scratchie’s moral reorientation from a life of  crack cocaine smoking and dealing, ‘touching people thing’ (i.e. theft) and incarceration between Guadeloupe and Dominica; to his marriage, becoming a father/grandfather and securing stable employment, all signal the realisation of the kind of transition Oscar was just beginning to embark on. Interestingly, Scratchie identified kin relations to his mother and, later, his daughters as a key motivator for his transformative endeavours. It is evident that the same is true of Oscar grant's personal journey. The special love between mother and son and the associated maternal pain of repeatedly having to visit an incarcerated childis common to both Scratchie and Oscar’s stories. Indeed, in an interview for the documentary Scratchie’s mother narrated to me a story not entirely dissimilar to the scene above in its thrust and effect (see unedited clip below).

Oscar is a young man engaged in processes of becoming. He is struggling towards maturity - a sense of personal and familial stability -  in spite of the vagarious and catastrophic conditions of his existence. Therefore, although the fundamental tragedy of the film is the very fact of Oscar’s killing by state force - a repeating and increasingly routine American phenomenon (that of the 'accidental' police killing of poor black men with impunity) - an added tragic dimension of the tale is that the viewer gets the feeling that the new years day of Oscar's death paradoxically signaled the beginning of the rest of his life. The magic of film is that although the viewer is aware that his death is inevitable and impending, one can’t help but be optimistic for his unfolding future. The contradictions of optimism and the ominous, as well as the hope of a shared familiy future and the violent disjuncture of death, all feed the intensity of the film’s most poignant scene.

Oscar dies from multiple gunshot wounds at the end of the film, a fate shared with a growing list of black men killed at the hands of police in America – of which Michael Brown is one of the most recent (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-often-are-unarmed-black-men-shot-down-police?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark ). Fruitvale Station provides provocative viewing, helping us to think through recent events in Missouri and the realities of black male being in America, whilst staving off the lure or reductive tropes. As one reviewer wrote of film's the director,

His main intention — and his great achievement... is to make Oscar a fully human presence, to pay him the respect of acknowledging his complexities and contradictions. The radicalism of “Fruitvale Station” lies precisely here, in its refusal to turn a man into a symbol. Nearly every black man... tends to be flattened out by popular culture and the psychopathology of everyday American life, rendered as an innocent victim, a noble warrior or a menace to society. There is a dehumanizing violence in this habit, a willed, toxic blindness that “Fruitvale Station” at once exposes and resist.

 A mother’s prayer and the silent scene of Oscar playing with his young daughter as he teeters on the brink of death emphatically underscore the contingency of black American life and uncertain futures. 

This film is well worth watching, more today than ever. It is currently screening in cinemas in the UK and available for sale online.

Some good reviews:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/fruitvale-station-unlawful-killing-oscar-grant-reel-history

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/movies/fruitvale-station-is-based-on-the-story-of-oscar-grant-iii.html?_r=0

Cited:

David Kyuman Kim. "Democracy, the Catastrophic, and Courage: A Conversation with Cornel West and David Kyuman Kim." Theory & Event 12.4 (2009). Project MUSE. Web. 18 Aug. 2014. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.]

A very brief contextual intro to recent frictions in Ferguson, Missouri: 

'Cleaning the Streets Saved My Life': Christabella George's Story

'Christabella George, [aged] 47, [mother of] 5 Children, had to fend for herselt at the tiny age of 13. Life for her then turned extremely sour, sleeping in garbage, eating garbage, serving time in prison and a long stint of drug addiction. She says her job rewarded her with a cleaned up lifestyle. Her best rehabilitation yet. This is her Story' 

This short documentary tells Christebella's fascinating story of overcoming addiction, abuse and years on the road as we follow her through her narrated life journey, redemption and morning's work cleaning the streets of Portsmouth, Dominica's northern town. This is not a story about a father or a man but it is very interesting all the same.  

A well made and subtly ethnographic documentary courtesy of InsidePossi.com. 

We need more documentaries like this that bring to light the lesser recognized everyday realities of regular Dominican people. 
I have pasted the YouTube comments below

A Father's Day radio show

I recently received an email from Dr Peter Weller of CariMAN informing of a radio show he and journalist/activist Owen Blakka Ellis  will be presenting on an internet radio program discussing masculinity and fatherhood for Father's Day 2014 - please tune in :

Sunday, Fathers Day at 12:30 EDT/Trini time.

The link:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/yardieskeptics/2014/06/15/yardie-skeptics-s2ep12-fatherhood-masculinity-and-religion

It promises to be stimulating and provocative! 

Family and Colour in Jamaica - an ethnographic re-reading

In recent months I have returned to some of the classical early kinship studies in Caribbean anthropology with the goal of mining for interesting themes and patterns that might spark dialogue with the ethnographic info I have collected during fieldwork in Dominica. 

This morning Jamaican anthropologist Fernando Henriques' Family and Colour in Jamaica (1953) fell through my door (a heavy eyed late night Amazon purchase I'd forgotten making some weeks ago). 

I read somewhere that a good ethnography is one that contains sufficient sociological richness and detail to be read as the author directs you, and then re-read, revealing its potential for alternative reinterpretation and reanalysis. This is one such ethnography. 

Here's a brief meditation on and rereading of the place of the father in Henriques' account with reference to a short autobiographical portrait of a 'lower class' schoolgirl that Henriques has annexed in his appendix.

For the most part the book is the kind of empirical overview of 'social organization' that was typical of the day - attempting to offer a cogent and comprehensive ordering of kinship across the class-colour strata of Jamaican society. 

Yet it  also seems the author felt a commitment to the first person narratives of two female interlocutors collected during his fieldwork (the diary of a Jamaican schoolgirl constitutes the similarly rich appendix II) and as such wanted them to go into print, despite convention forcing him to append them at the back of the book. His choice is a wise one though, it leaves them analytically open since appendixed items didn't demand authorial elucidation and as such they are allowed to speak for themselves. 

In the main body of the text in a chapter on 'lower class families' Henriques outlines the role of father in relation to his procreative kin (children, child-mother) and household:

[see red lined section in scan below (as you'll  observe I enjoy owning books as you can write in them with pen!)]

However, despite the 'minor' role of the 'absent' or unconcerned father and the occasional proud father when viewed structurally, 'Appendix III: Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography' reveals a subject-oriented account that positions father/step father at the centre of a young girl's kinship world. Here we glimpse the kind of richness, depth of field and audibility of voice that would only become visible decades later in anthropology.

Approaching Caribbean family life from this angle urges us to interrogate the matrifocal thesis which would be later later introduced by RT Smith, and to which Henriques  formal observations above fore-run . In this account the father-daughter is the most centrally 'focal' relation through the optics of the narrator/protagonist, rather than the objectifying position of observer who might label the arrangement as matrifocal if they were simply observing from without. I offer this interpretation as a complementary counterpoint to matrifocal interpretations, suggesting the simultaneity of multiple perspectives on kinship from each subject-position in  ego-centered radial networks of kin - with dyadic bonds of varying intensity - could yield new conclusions about who's symbolically, practically, emotionally 'focal' in kin relations at a given moment. 

This sketch (below) could represent the girl's kin network in the autobiographical account below. It might be methodologically productive to call this a polyfocal reading of kinship arrangements if we were able to gather the subject centered accounts of each kin member mentioned and bring them at in analytic level into conversation.

[the size of dot connotes intensity/significance of relationship]

In the account that follows, a 34 year old woman recalls moments in her childhood through her own words. Interesting to reflect on is the significance of her father in structuring her kinship world:his protective  patriarchal (almost Oedipal) 'ownership' of her chastity, body and sexuality; his encouraging her to be hardy and learn to fight; hers and his tears upon her discovering he was her 'step father' not biological father; and the everyday taken-for-granted intimacies of his routinized food-sharing with her, her sleeping patterns with him and the mother, their playful observation of his provisioning banana trees through the window, and the episode of being separated during a hurricane as he walked her to school. 

These richly evidenced forms of everyday paternal practice seem far from anomalous to the narrator, yet the book up to that point conceals such realities behind concerns with familial form. 

It might be fascinating to see the complexity that such a close re: reading of other canonic Caribbean kinship studies might excavate. 

Below is a scanned copy of the appendix (I hope this is legal)

'Fragment of A Lower Class Autobiography'

For readers whom this book is of interest, a book about the Henriques family and their experience of pioneering prewar migration to the UK may be of interest too. It is titled The Jippa Jappa Hat Merchant and His Family