Between meetings the other day, Susie, our Artistic Director and CEO, and Siobhán, our Head of Programmes and Partnerships, were talking about how the weather has stopped being small talk. No longer dry, polite conversation. No longer the trusty, easy going opener. We’re interested in exploring this idea further, through our programme and in collaboration with local people, artists and creatives.
Extreme heatwaves, water shortages, seeing places that have always been green turn brown, and more are far from light-hearted chit-chat. Climate change is scary, and the weather lately has been too. Though it was nice to have some warmer days, but we can’t help but think about what’s left behind and what’s still to come.
Susie and Siobhán shared this thought with Simone, our Marketing and Communications Manager, who remembered a poem she’d written for our In Other Words 2 publication back in 2021 titled, How can I write about the weather?
The prompt for publication was: “Emerging from a global pandemic into a world on fire, what’s on your mind?”
Simone wrote about how the world around her was quite literally on fire, climatologically, politically, economically and in so many other ways. She wasn’t sure how to write about the weather anymore. It wasn’t the safe space that it had once been, either as a creative muse or as a conversation starter.
Simone’s piece is below.
How can I write about the weather?
I can’t write about the weather. At first there was a stubbornness, but now it’s not even on my small talk agenda.
How can I write about the weather when entire nations are burning around me? Flames are scorching the shaking voices of the innocent before they’ve even dared to dream that thought their grandparents were too scared to ever think. How can I fathom thoughts of nature when the very nature of beings seems to be to clamber our way up glass ladders to ceilings, only seen by the few, whilst the backs of the marginalised buckle and break to support us? How can I have hope for the future when fears of the past are firmly rooted in my present? And how can I even pretend to be present once I know all of this?
Can you ‘compare thee to a summer’s day’?*
I could. But I chose not to.
I always wrote about the heavy stuff and oh, was it cathartic! See, when you’re carrying the weight of the world in the suitcases on your shoulders and bags under your eyes, you can’t live without trying to find a way make sense of it all. The weather was always boring. I wanted to write about the things that made you FEEL. Like really FEEL. The things that get your palms all sweaty and form knots which wrap around themselves, gasping for air in your stomach.
So, I did.
I wrote about how when I was a child, a kid at school told me I couldn’t sit at a table with my friends because I was Black. I wrote about how I was forced to show kids at school photos of both my parents to prove my race to them. I wrote about how unwelcome fingers would always force and interlock with the locks on my head. I wrote about how unwelcome people too forced themselves into spaces that were never for them. I wrote about how I was attractive and acceptable till I wasn’t. I wrote about how society made me loathe my Black body. I wrote about how despite being BritISH, Britain never felt like home to me. I wrote about how I had expected to find home, back home in the Caribbean, but didn’t. I wrote about shrinking myself to fit into spaces I had outgrown. I wrote about how watching Black bodies murdered on screens became the norm. I wrote about how never searching for missing Black bodies also became the norm. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.
About everything but the weather. Now it’s 2021 and …
‘Mother Earth has been crying.
Heavy grey raindrops,
trying to tell us,
her children,
that she’s dying.’
Have you heard this? I mean, me? Writing about the weather?
‘She has been dying for years,
and begging for us,
her children,
to listen.’
I did it because I had to. All the stubbornness fell away. The world is f*cked and there’s nowhere left to hide. Nowhere left for solace. Mother Earth is dying. It was happening slowly but now it seems to be all at once. We shout ‘ACT NOW’ but wait until our hands are forced. Mother Earth will repair herself. Nature always does. Whether or not we’re here to experience that with her? That’s something else altogether.
And although I’m speaking about the weather now, because climate change (like a lot of things we’re yet to figure out in this world) is a mess, recognise that the weather has always been a metaphor for something bigger. A vision of something greater. The one place untouched. It didn’t need a poem or a call to action because it was beautiful. It didn’t need trending hashtags or social media blackouts because it just was. All by itself.
Until it wasn’t.
So now, I guess I’ll write about the weather. Add it to the list of other tragic things I must somehow turn to art to make somewhat bearable. The other list of norms I accept, justifying because of ‘society’, forgetting that I am society.
And then what?
What will be left to write?
Simone Yasmin
We love this piece. For its honesty, rawness and for the conversation it opened in our team when small talk was not enough. One of our key research themes is Climate and Nature and we’ve been focusing on that this month. At an all-staff away day a couple of weeks ago, we all shared our dreams for Metal and many of them centred around doing something to tackle an element of the climate crisis in a creative way. We don’t want to say too much about them, but there’s some really exciting ideas that we’re looking forward to getting started on.
A few months ago, we asked for any artists/creatives with an interest in environmental practices to respond to a post we shared, to get involved in some work we’re doing creating a New Arts Green Book with the Design Museum and UP Projects and to just connect with us for future work. The response was massive! You can check it out here and add yourself to the comments too.
If you want to check out In Other Words, you can buy a copy of In Other Words 2 from our website here, as well as a copy of the first In Other Words book here.
Oh and how was that for a taster of some of our team’s creative talents! Look out for our new Art Workers & Artists series coming very soon.
