Yesterday I marked 25 years as a mother by transplanting seedlings, cutting grass and weeding and by visiting the friend of a friend in hospital - the same hospital where I gave birth, once in June, once in September - months of summer and autumn raspberries.
Mrisi, my first, born on a blazing hot June 13 in 1992, was off to Leeds to celebrate, do some recording and release a video for Mamela, his new EP. This Is Jazz Standard magazine calls it a work of "resilience and conscience" describing Mrisi as Brighton's truthsayer.
When he was interviewed by the Huff Post at a Grime4Corbyn event pre-election, he said, "A man they want to vilify that much has to be dangerous - but dangerous in this sense is a good thing, he’s dangerous to the establishment.”
Giya, born in 1994, is in London putting up her degree show, They Came from the Water While the World Watched, a sequence based on religion and colonialism, at Seen Fifteen gallery in Peckham with fellow documentary photography students. It opens on Friday 16 June, Soweto day. She was interviewed about her work recently by the website Nataal.
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| Picture by Giya Makondo-Wills from the series They Came from the Water While the World Watched |
She says about photography, "I hope to continue to make work that has something to say and encourages young people from black, mixed, minority and underprivileged backgrounds to tell their own stories through the arts."
Which leads me to the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks and the launch of an anthology celebrating her, later this month on 29 June in London. Before The Golden Shovel anthology, you could have asked quite a few poets in the UK to name a favourite poems by Brooks and they'd have probably looked blank. She's far better known in the US, where her politics, her advocacy for poetry, her exploration of Black lives, ensured she won a Pulitzer prize.
I have known her poem The Bean Eaters for a very long time and it often comes back to me because it's so sparse yet vivid. It has a haunting quality of light, too and a timbre.
It is entirely possible that Brooks' old woman in "The Bean Eaters" may have influenced this poem too, making an appearance as Risenga's grandmother selling corn. That place where she sold corn was established as a landmark in the city in 1994 when we first went....not quite the start, but close to the start of my 25 years as a mother.
And in the same random vein... - on Friday 16 June at Waterstones in London, the Seren anthology, Writing Motherhood is launched. I'll be at Giya's opening. But the poem I have in that anthology is about her....