Over the summer, there was a public outcry against the Museum of the Home that I need to address (given our planned collaboration). I say this because I believe in a politics of accountability to my wider community; this is the connection that fuels my Black feminist praxis. This grounds my hope in the possibilities of Black women’s home-making in our current political climate.”
How we build home
Contents of page:
(click to jump to each section)
Home includes so much. So much joy, tenderness, heartbreak and sorrow. So many moments where we feel lost in ourselves, overwhelmed by the waves of grief and trauma that move beyond the specific places that we’re in. So many knots formed and tended to, with loved ones that are both near and far. Our focus is on these intertwined moments of finding ourselves: we’re building space to insist on home, in this world that prefers to devalue our existence. We have all of these different spaces where we make home with each other, even when we’re not physically in the same space – through Skype calls, the various social media apps, and work projects that we’re still talking/thinking through.
So really, this project is first and foremost to and for us: Wasi Daniju and Azeezat Johnson. It’s about us choosing ourselves and each other, trusting that choice as the grounds for a completely different reality. And that’s been heavy work: we’re having to imagine hope and ease while still facing the brutalisation and inequities that inform our realities.
Undoubtedly, we make mistakes, and feel our different lived experiences rub up against one another. Yet it’s such a gift to be sure in the knowledge that both of us are committed to tending our interconnected sores/bruises as gently as possible, to know we can grow together, that we can learn how to tend to ourselves by honouring the connections beyond ourselves (also see Starry Nights). This is such an integral part of the power of the homes we’re building.
Our home-making practice is about being loved for who we are, who we’ve been, and the endless possibilities of who we might be. It is us sitting in the knottedness of our embodied geographies with the care and love that we deserve.
Throughout this project, both of us speak to how this process of home-making has included searching and stretching ourselves, to see the most gentle versions of ourselves and reach for the same in someone you love.
As we build, we welcome ourselves home.
Below are the readings from the launch of How We Build Home, a hybrid event which happened in July 2022 at Museum of the Home and online – you can watch the whole video here 🎥.
“Gems that crystallize underground are formed under intense heat and pressure.
This is our commitment to one another: we refuse to stay underground anymore.
We arrive here tired of being sacrificed for dominant imaginations of law, order or liberation. Colonisation created conditions that make lives unlivable: our bodies have been rendered disposable in worlds centred around profit. This brutalises and erases us from the bodies that we live in; while enabling others to brutalise and erase us via the policies, policing and imperialism that it justifies.
When we spoke about our pains, we were asked to straitjacket our experiences into consumable, publishable ‘proof’. We were told our realities were divisive; our knowledges irrational; our worldviews incomplete. And slowly, it became easier to be dishonest about the bodies we write from. Even when we worked within community spaces that claimed to fight for a collective liberation, we were compelled to wait for justice and erase our bodies – ourselves.
No.
We’re building a different reality.”
Read the full statement at Introducing GEM.
“Working with the Museum of the Home: Geffrye Must Fall
On 23rd November, I sent this letter to the Museum of Home’s Board of Trustees. I am currently awaiting their response.
Read in full Azeezat’s letter to the Museum of the Home.
Poem for Azeezat by Oluwatosin Daniju.
How We Build Home (for Azeezat)
We started by finding each other,
Not by chance so much as present day
written in past stars
that shine on into unfathomable futures.
And the finding would have been as nothing
without the recognition of its worth,
Fate did its part, and then kept it moving,
Testament to good taste and keen sight
that it trusted our sense
that we trusted our senses.
Made the leap, in faith, that we would fall with grace
That any falling out would only lead to a deeper falling in
That falling was all we ever had to do
To land at new depths
together.
And each leap, each landing
Every deep dive and delve
Created a trail that led us homeward;
Building by traversing,
Creating a constellation
that lit every possible path onward.
And so we evolve, over and over,
Our revolutions imperfect, never-ending
Our revelations ecstatic, open endings
Love an action, as done, doing and still to do.
So much still to do
In this spill from our bottle of time
a whole universe and more pouring forth
and still
the home we build reaches beyond it
cannot be limited to length or latitude,
exists past horizons
Approaches infinity and extends
Still
We didn’t build new worlds, we grew into new selves
Didn’t discard past hurts but trusted our tending
Nurtured new strengths from old foundations
Existed as enough, engaged ease as end point.
Created holding, held out content as tethering
Saw each other back from the brink of disappearing.
All we had to do to build home
was be
All we’ve always been and ever will be.
Together
we are home.
Oluwatosin Daniju; 07/03/22; 9.30am
“We were tired of waiting for justice or care, tired of having to face interconnected brutalities alone. For me – and I think for all of us – GEM was about creating a home where we could speak from our bodies, and tend to the wounds that we are told to forget/minimise.
We started by trying to pitch our own tent, build our own home thatwe could take comfort in and be protected within (at least a little).“
Read Azeezat’s full post, Starry Nights: the evolution of our tent.
A large-scale patchwork quilt by the South London Refugee Association’s Women Group is on display at Museum of the Home as part of GEM’s How We Build Home project. The quilt is accompanied by a zine featuring interviews, photographs and poetry. Between April 2020 and July 2021, the group met weekly online to support and care for each other, be creative and organise for change within the UK’s hostile immigration system.
SLRA Women Group Manifesto:
We are a group of excellent women and we want change!
We want to live functional, active, and productive lives.
We want our independence, freedom, and justice.
We will continue to draw attention to these!
Fighting against injustice, racism, inhumanity, gender and sexual discrimination,
and to end hate crime!
We fight for what we stand for. We fight for our cause, and we fight against waiting
in insecurity and endless uncertainty.
And we will reach this in togetherness.
We want to feel uncompromised and protected, to help each other, to be creative
and to have space for self-development.
We deserve to be able to care for our families and offer the best for our children.
We deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.
We as a women group hear our voices, see our needs to access our basic rights to housing,food and safety.
And finally, we all deserve a good vacation.
Read more about the Women’s Group and SLRA here: “We are a group of excellent women and we want change!”
Click the image or the following link to watch the full film: All The Women In Me Are Tired
All The Women In Me Are Tired*
Oluwatosin Daniju – 2020/2021
Forever, or so it seems, Black women have faced exclusion, assault and multiple griefs. We are obliged to be of service to others while bearing the burden of many, often intersecting points of oppression. Throughout it, we are expected to struggle on, hence the oft-imposed stereotype of the ‘strong Black woman’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s declaration of Black women as the “mule uh de world”.
In such a world, actively choosing to care for oneself as a Black woman, to acknowledge the heaviness of these various burdens as being too much to constantly bear, can become a radical act.
In her essay, A Burst Of Light, Audre Lorde stated “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
With this piece, I have chosen rest as my own act of political warfare, a different defiance in the varied arsenal of resistance.
[CN: contains audio of various incidents of anti-Black violence that viewers may find distressing]
*Title comes from a Nayyirah Waheed poem.
A note for playing the video: the volume increases over the first 2 minutes of the video, so don’t turn up the volume too much at the start – it’s meant to be quiet.
Constellations of gratitude
The walls of our home have not been built alone – there are so many who have come before us or continue alongside us who offer inspiration and a foundation to what we have built here. The list is long and impossible to encompass here, so these are just a few of those who have lit the way for us and to whom we are deeply grateful.