(Launch Speech, June 2000)

Face-to-Face: Different Visions, Common Voices. Welcome, everyone. It's good to be face-to-face with so many people! Writers, friends and families of writers, people interested in the processes of writing and reading and of art, generally and those who work in the arts and/or with local communities… welcome, all.

We share three things: Anger, love and fear. Anger at life, fear of death and love of… what? God, maybe, or the Goddess, or the Wheel, or nature, or physics, the unsacred geometries of the vacuum… or simply, of one another.

All three - anger, love and fear - are pre-requisites for the physical, creative act that is writing. At some level, it can be therapeutic but in my experience, writing must burst, broken and bleeding, from the cold bedrock of our collective imperfection. Even communal, stylised forms possess an inherent pain as well as an aesthetic beauty; the rigour of the stylisation acts as a kind of pressurised kiln. Amnesia creates false histories; we need to reconnect with the work of the ancient African writers like Apuleius (author of Metamorphoses) and with texts such as the Aithiopika by the Syrian writer, Heliodorus in which the central character is an Ethiopian woman called Charikleia who is a kind of 'everywoman' who asserts the power to resist and the power to create change and with the Persians who inverted the western novel, three thousand years ago, and with the Druidic and Celtic poets who were distinct from the tribal Celtic bards. Cultures have never been impermeable and historically, the most inventive, successful and vibrant cultures have been those which have had the most holes. Someone should tell that to those politicians of little vision who even today, deign to 'play the race card' in search of bottom-of-the-barrel votes and also to those tabloid newspapers which act as de facto censors and which are hegemonic, anti-democratic, regressive organs which are antithetical to the heterogeneous Britain which has always existed and which will outlive and transcend them all.

I grew up in the bad old Seventies, when racism in Scotland was deemed by many to be acceptable and in some way, funny and was rampant and overt through all social classes. This was a very alienating, fragmenting experience and a wholly negative one. When I started writing, about ten years ago, there seemed to be no Black writers in Glasgow. Actually, I know now that there were few, but I had no way of knowing that then, nor any way of meeting them. Things did change in that respect - thanks to some of the people I'll mention later on - but I felt that other writers in similar situations today should be able to leap this hurdle more adroitly than I. Partly for this reason and partly to enable a network to develop, I decided to set up a Writers' Group based around, but not exclusive to, writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds. I chose Pollokshields because it seemed to me to be an area ripe for such a project and also because it seemed to be an ideal place from which to enter the 'Unthank', the Graysian subconscious of Glasgow. And - more practically - because Pollokshields Library had a room with a door. Writers need space as well as time. CSV via GNOMA via the MC via the Lottery provided the means to enable me to set up and run the project from October to March. I'm really gratified that the Cultural and Leisure Services of Glasgow City Council have agreed to fund the project for the next six months.

[top]

The response has been phenomenal. Over 30 people wanted to come to the group. There's a pool of around 17 - and about twelve are at every meeting. Most of the writers are women. I did some didactic work and some free writing at the start. And now the writers are bringing in so much material, there's hardly enough time to go over even that! The work ranges from hard or tender social realism to comedy sketches and material of a more spiritual nature. Issues relating to the joys, the difficulties and the humour of living within and between several cultures at once are evinced in the writing. The realities of racism and sexism are approached in varying ways, while I detect also a celebration of a new kind of Britishness and of Scottishness, a broad concept of identity which is robust and inclusive and self-defined and which looks forwards as well as back. We are Scottish because we say we are - and that's enough. All of human life is inherent in the work produced by the PWG. Some of the writers have drawn on their facilities with other languages - Punjabi, Urdu and Scots Gaelic - either wholly in a work or else juxtaposed, consciously or otherwise, with English. It is through slippages, linkages, juxtapositions such as these that major art can emerge.

I invited the experienced community visual artist, Jane Thakoordin to become involved with the group for part of the time, because I felt that all arts have a common nexus and that art-forms influence one another. Words arose originally from pictures and those pictures remain embedded within the text, even as the writing evinces other, distinct images through its communicative mode. In this exhibition, the art forms a synthesis, a common voice. Face-to-face. Yes. With ourselves, with our myths, and with others. With Art and also with Racism and Sexism, both institutional and personal. And with Death. Everything is struggle. This group isn't my group - it belongs to the writers, and I am one of the writers. We create and sustain the zeitgeist which is a mixture of the three factors which define our humanity. I feel I have learned much from the other writers in the group, both as individuals and also collectively. It continues to be an enjoyable privilege to work with them.

For the future, I want to help the group 'plug into' the mainstream, via joint readings and maybe also through a publication. More guest writers are coming along, including Elizabeth Reeder, Jackie Kay, Sanjeev Kohli and Gerry Loose. The launch of Nomad magazine is next week and a substantial chunk of this issue of the magazine consists of material from the PWG.

My thanks to everyone who contributed to the process - materially, mentally or spiritually. They are too numerous to mention individually; some names are in the exhibition behind me. If, inadvertently, I've missed anyone out, please accept my apologies - the error is mine, and mine alone. First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife, Alina Mirza, whose initial impetus and continued advice and support have been central to my part in this project. Catherine McInerney has done wonderful things in and around Glasgow since her inception as LDO only 18 months ago. Her support as mentor, organiser and 'sounding-board' has been absolutely indispensable and is much appreciated.

[top]

Patricia Grant, Ethnic Services Librarian, as Referee for the project, has been hugely-supportive and has brought a vast well of experience to bear on the various ideas and ventures with which the group have become involved. The various projects set up by both Catherine and Patricia prior to and during this group's existence, have acted (for me, at any rate) as triggers and testing-grounds as well as being consciousness-elevators generally. Thanks also to Lindsay Pratt at CSV, who okay'd the initial project. She can't be with us tonight because she's on Maternity Leave. We wish her all the very best. Joan Stewart, Senior Librarian at Pollokshields Library, I wish to thank for her flexibility and generosity. I'm pleased the exhibition will live at Pollokshields Library for six weeks, from 1/8/00 to 15/9/00, so that the local community can immerse themselves in it. I want to thank the guest writers Chris Dolan and Val Thornton, who came and shared with the group their profound knowledge of drama and poetry, respectively. Writers need time, space and tea and thanks to the generous support given by Mr and Mrs Poddar of Lambhill Court Nursing Home, we shall shortly be able to partake of a buffet. They have been energetic and generous in their wholehearted support of various arts projects throughout the city. I would like to thank Jane Thakoordin for her time, talent and energy of which she gave unstintingly. Without Jane, this exhibition simply would not have been.

And last, but most importantly, I would like to thank the artists, the writers, themselves. They make the PWG what it is and this exhibition is largely a product of their collaboration with Jane. So, thanks to Safia Ali, Shameem Akhtar, Naveed Ashraf, Pauline Brown, Churnjit Kaur, Janet Coom, Helen Dunbar, Sameena Jamil, Karen Law, Martin MacIntyre, Lesley McHugh, Stewart Mercer, Sarmed Mirza, Paul Nandy, Shahana Noor, Josephine Parker, Sheila Puri, Saeeda Sultana, Ranjana Thapalyal and Rukhsana Yasin.

Returning to the beginning - as always we must - and to the forces which create, frame and drive us, namely, love, fear and anger - I find that during the time over which this project has been running, I personally have experienced all three. Perhaps, from this morass of existence we might derive a fourth stream, which might be music - the music of the word-picture, perhaps - or else, of something indefinable. In a moment, we're going to hear some of the writers read from their own work and while you're listening to them and then later, when you 'go down' to view the Marble Hall, to be 'face-to-face', perhaps you might allow yourself to sink into the different visions. You might emerge with your own words, spoken in your own, individual voices, waves in the stream of music which issues, crying and laughing, from the rock which is its source. Enjoy!

[top]