I had a Brillo pad in my hand and I started to scrub my face. My forehead reddened. The wire fibres of the pad tugged at my skin. It stung terribly but I continued. The skin began to tear and little beads of blood prickled their way to the surface. I went at it harder, until my forehead was grazed and red and raw to the touch. It was soon too painful to continue. But I also knew there was no point in carrying on. I wanted to scrub the blackness off my face.
I often felt unbearably visible. That sensation became all the more acute as I grew older and saw my body become an object of apprehension and hostility.
I remember sitting beside my dad in the front seats of our car when I was We had parked outside the Express Dairy in Edgware while we waited to pick up my sister, who had been visiting a friend, from the bus stop.
The engine was off. There was a rap on the side window. My dad, seeing a policeman, rolled it down and the officer leaned into the car. What were we doing in the car? Someone from inside the dairy had called the station to say there were two suspicious men outside. Who were we? Why were we waiting outside the dairy? He was formal but polite and as we drove off my dad chuckled to himself at the idea that anyone could think of us, a middle-aged man and his son in a Volvo estate, as a possible threat.
I laughed too. It only occurred to me much later that, for the person who had telephoned the police, the presence of two black men nearby was no joke.
I was a teenager but I was still used to thinking of myself as a kid, not a grownup. After that I noticed how women held their handbags closer when I sat beside them on the tube.
I got used to security guards trailing me around a store; to the scrutiny of shopkeepers as I wandered the narrow aisles of a corner shop. My presence signalled threat. When I was 18 I left home for university. I was studying politics at the LSE. They relocated to Northampton, where they could get a bigger house with a smaller mortgage.
After their departure there was no reason for me to go back to Queensbury. My aim was a larger, more final one of eradicating the memory of those years of shame. Photos, records, old exercise books, any memento of my childhood had to go.
I gathered everything I could find, dumped it into a black bin bag and left it out with the rubbish. I would refuse to look back. And I think at the time I really believed it. Much of what I was drawn to in adulthood came from the style magazine the Face. The magazine treated the apparently throwaway stuff of pop culture — fashion, music, film and clubbing — with a compelling gravity.
Poring over each issue as a teenager in Queensbury, I had discovered Jim Jarmusch movies and Def Jam records, Detroit techno and new wave Antwerp fashion. The magazine held out the promise that you could be who you wanted to be on your own terms, instead of being defined by the expectations or prejudices of others.
I longed to be part of its world. After I graduated from university in , I managed to get a couple of stories published there, and over time I became a regular contributor. Like me, they seemed to be outsiders, a bit too cerebral or self-conscious to ever throw themselves wholeheartedly into a situation; more likely instead to look on from the sidelines.
I felt at home among them. This was where I belonged, I told myself. Most nights I was out at gigs or clubs or film previews. When I was home there was always another deadline to meet. I remember the moment when I began to see the consequences of my actions.
It came at the end of a short, failed romance. I met Mia in the summer of She was Spanish, a jewellery designer, short-haired and gamine and given to wearing a Breton shirt in homage to Jean Seberg in Breathless. None of those relationships had been a success because although I could put on a show of affection, I felt repelled by the notion of intimacy. Mia and I were both She was more stylish, and more confident in her opinions and feelings, than anyone else I knew at our age.
I was besotted with her and I could see that I needed to be more open and less guarded if I expected to hold her attention.
After that, we met up once or twice a month, spending long weekends in London or Madrid. Together for a whole week after months of shorter meetings, it was as though we were seeing each other properly for the first time. Mia was exactingly curious. I watched her wandering through the market, and admired how she lingered at a stall to examine the intricate pattern-work on a handmade lampshade, while ignoring the loud invitations of neighbouring traders to look at their wares.
She brought the same acuteness to her own feelings, poring over her anxieties and desires and past love affairs with daunting honesty and directness. Threading through the market after her, I wanted to be just as bold, just as open. I was stuck in the shallows of my emotions, with nothing meaningful to offer back. The trip became a torture.
Each day I felt her draw further away from me. I was frozen by shame. On our last morning together Mia woke early to catch a flight back to Madrid. I heard her moving round the hotel room, packing in the dark while I was still half asleep.
When she was done, she leaned over the bed, kissed me faintly on the lips and left the room. I travelled back to London that afternoon, feeling empty and miserable. We spoke by phone the next day. We agreed to stay friends. But there were no more weekends in Madrid. And when we spoke I could never bear to mention that trip again. I was ashamed to admit how hurt and lonely I felt after Mia finished with me.
I see that move now as an act of deliberate self-isolation. The new flat was squeezed between two office blocks on the edge of the City of London. It was in a commercial area so I had no neighbours other than the men and women bustling in and out of those office blocks. It was in the solitude of the flat that I first began to suffer from nightmares.
On one occasion, I discovered myself in the back garden of my family home. The lawn was overgrown and unkempt, littered with rusting tools, an old rotary mower, a pair of sheers and coils of dried-out dog faeces. I glimpsed movement in the grass; a snake sliding quickly out of sight, green and, I guessed, venomous. I saw now that the lawn was infested with them. I tiptoed forward, trying to cross the grass without stepping on them, knowing already it was an impossible task.
I felt jaws clamp on my leg, fangs pierce the skin on my ankle, a jangle of pain as poison spread through my body. As the dreams became more numerous, I noticed the same figure at their centre. I came to know him as the Stranger. He appeared for the first time when I was scaling a cliff face. It was dark. The rocks were sharp and sheer.
I inched my way up, feeling for handholds with the tips of my fingers; hour after hour of effort while the ground below vanished into a black void. Near the top, I reached a wide ledge where I could rest.
But access was blocked by a figure on the ledge. I was exhausted. I reached up for help. Then, very deliberately, he began to kick my fingers away from the ledge. Each time I scrambled to catch hold again he pushed me away.
He showed no emotion and made no sound. With a final swipe of his foot, he shoved me free. I tipped backwards into nothingness, falling for forever. From then on the Stranger became a regular presence lurking at the edge of a crowd or driving beside me on the motorway.
His appearance coincided with the point when a dream lurched into horror. To try to make sense of the dreams I kept a notebook beside my bed, forcing myself to scribble down what I remembered before I was fully awake. Writing brought no consolation. I filled up half the book with notes but the sight of the accumulating pages depressed me: proof of my own powerlessness against the force of those visions.
In the autumn, I received a call from a friend, Heather. She was in a hospital in Tottenham after having herself sectioned. Would I come to visit? Heather was a year-old documentary radio producer originally from Glasgow. She was acutely perceptive and well practised as a documentary-maker at spying out the conceits and vulnerabilities of strangers. This ability, coupled with her large brown eyes, pointed nose and small frame, always reminded me of a sparrow, quick, jerky but innately fragile.
And now a psychotic episode. Yet when I met Heather on the ward she was cheerful. We sat in a corner of the day room. A pale light percolated through the windows. Heather tucked her knees up under her chin. She wore grey jogging bottoms and a blue hoodie. A large woman with thinning hair moaned softly to herself in an easy chair. The breakdown was a setback, Heather conceded, but at least therapy had given her enough perspective to see that she needed help. She rested her chin on her knees and looked up at me.
The idea excited me. Heather said that, if I was interested, she could help me find a therapist. Across the room a man with gaunt cheeks dressed in pyjamas began to swear loudly and angrily. Outside the windows traffic rumbled by, faintly audible, as if from a great distance. Heather said she was going to take a nap. Christina received patients in the front room of her terraced house in Highgate.
She was Greek, late 50s, silver-haired, elegantly dressed, and she listened attentively as I talked, perched opposite on the edge of a daybed. Sometimes her cat, Zoe, a beautiful blue-grey Persian, insinuated herself into the room. Her presence was quite the compliment, insisted Christina. Apparently Zoe was very particular about which patients she took an interest in. I felt awkward and exposed talking to Christina.
How could I articulate the swirl of anxious thoughts in my head? I squirmed to hear myself. Christina sat quietly, prompting me occasionally for clarity. I ached with embarrassment at how little she must think of me as I sat there wallowing in blandness. Even the journey to her house in Highgate was hard to bear.
Ominous signs lined the way. To get there I caught a tube to Archway, the carriage almost empty except for a few scattered passengers like me riding north against the flow of central London-bound morning travellers. Outside the underground, Archway Tower, an enormous obsidian office block with blank windows, loomed over the station like a sentinel to the afterlife. I never saw anyone enter or leave the building and it was impossible to look up at it without a shudder of foreboding.
Sometimes I arrived at her house late. Despite my apologies, Christina would be annoyed. Secretly I was glad to have her angry. It was a small rebellion against the stiltedness of our meetings. In addition, the minor guilt of being late was a welcome distraction from the larger sense of shame and sadness that came over me with each session. I became more and more frustrated and worn out.
It was a clear morning in June I wanted to be outside in the cool air not shut in a stuffy room with her. Hours seemed to pass without a word between us. Eventually Christina broke the silence. She wanted to drill into my head and I was helpless to get away. I was repulsed by her ugliness, and scared by the drill which also had a probing, phallic quality. I sat back on the daybed, flushing at the memory of the scene. To my embarrassment, Christina broke into laughter.
I got it. Christina brushed my apologies away. She leaned forward. I told her how insistent and forceful my dreams had been over the past few years. I gave her a recent example in which I was riding alone in an empty tube carriage. As if compelled I stuck out my left middle finger and plucked the top third of the digit free, exposing the empty socket, white with bone and wet with some clear viscous fluid.
I woke up feeling queasy at the image of the digit slipping free so easily and the residue of sticky liquid left in the stump. Before I could continue, she interrupted me.
Our time was up, yet for the first time I wanted to continue talking. I was more at ease talking about dreams than abstract emotions and as we explored the nightmares in more depth I began to look forward to our sessions together. I had hoped that talking about them might make the nightmares let up, yet the opposite was true: they became more violent and unsettling. I was pitched back into the Ruritanian town. I was still running from a mob. And, increasingly, I felt the presence of the Stranger.
He hunted me assiduously. On one occasion, I found myself running across a deserted town square. He peered through the telescopic lens. The perspective of the dream shifted. I saw myself running through the crosshairs of the rifle.
He pulled the trigger. I woke with a start. EE: Photography is a particularly significant medium in this context. It is the art form that, more than any other, has framed how Africa is represented in the modern era. TV news reports have similarly reinforced an impression of the continent as defined by war and famine.
But photography has also enabled the dissemination of contrasting, more affirmative views of Africa. Not least, for example, through the exuberant imagery of master portraitists such as Malick Sidibe and Seydou Keita.
LB: That idea of reclaiming photography as a medium from colonialism is very powerful. Have you encountered any interesting examples of African photographers working even more directly with colonial era photographs in an attempt to reclaim or alter their meaning? An important point to consider is that African photographers are perfectly aware of how the continent and its people have been misrepresented in the West historically.
You see less of a dealing with the specifics of an archive than interrogating the history of Western representation. I remember hearing James Barnor speak about going to the United Kingdom to practice photography shortly after Ghana became independent, and in his words to learn and bring that up to date knowledge back to Ghana. There was something very exciting about the way he talked about photographic knowledge as something that could be as valuable to the forging of a new independent country as the expertise to build infrastructure or run a government.
Do you have any thoughts on this? And that ideas of documenting a nation and its people also informed the practice of an earlier generation of studio photographers, people like SO Alonge who was taking photos of the middle classes in Benin City, Nigeria from the s onwards.
Just as important to highlight though, is the work of photographers whose images create a kind of counter-narrative that runs contrary to what could be described as an officially-sanctioned narrative of nation building. More recently, you can look at the very flamboyant imagery of someone like Athi-Patra Ruga in South Africa, and also see a critique of the failure of the post-apartheid state to live up to the dreams of liberation that inspired people during the decades of white minority rule.
This which interests me both because of the photographic emphasis of that organisation, but also because it seems that eastern Europe has also been subjected to a set of western European fantasies about it, particular in the post-Cold war era.
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