Home Is Not A Place- The Journey of Seeking Out Our People in Spaces We Never Belonged

On October 17, I had the pleasure of attending a poetry event hosted by writer, poet and artist Malika Booker at the Manchester Poetry Library. The event was in admiration of Home Is Not A Place, a photography and poetry book curated by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson.

Johny Pitts is an accomplished writer, photographer and musician. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention his award winning book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) which is an exploration of the past and present residence of Black people throughout Europe and the challenges they face as Afro-Europeans.

Co-curator of Home Is Not A Place, Roger Robinson, is also an award winning writer, receiving the T.S Eliot Prize in 2019 for his book A Portable Paradise (2019), making him the second writer of Caribbean descent to win this prize. Alongside this,Roger is also a musician and performer.

Johny and Roger came together to make a beacon of Black-British artistry with Home Is Not A Place. The pair travelled the UK in a Mini Cooper, which throughout they listened to the Soulquarians and ate fish and chips, capturing people of the African diaspora in places where we don’t hold a great population such as in; Glasgow, Bristol and Blackpool. Johny describes: “I’d always head to the outskirts of town, it’s that kind of that Toni Morrison (Afro-American novelist) idea of standing on the border and claiming it centre. That’s where I find the truth of the place.” And this was how he was capturing these moments that feature within the book. While Roger explained that he would walk around and observe the city. Roger goes on and states: “At the end we had all these poems and all these photographs. We kind of threw them up in the air and we wanted to see how they’d land”, explaining that the book was a collision of two different perspectives into one.

From this we get to see how our culture thrives outside of big cities, and larger populations, where oftentimes it goes unnoticed. Roger describes: “The sense of… we would ask people questions about their lives they have never been asked about before”. The book shows our culture’s beauty along with our hardships, Johny’s photos along with Roger’s words illustrate a story on each and every page. Johny describes wanting to capture an everyday realness and to “Work with the notion of a photograph as a window”, and that’s what makes Home Is Not A Place masterful and thought provoking.

The book is definitely a love letter to Black, working class Britain. Everyday, normal, Black people were the subject of this project– the photos capturing them, while the words tell their story.

“This book was powered by the generosity of the Black community” – Johny Pitts.

Roger also points out: “The way we saw the coast wasn’t just true Blackness, we saw Britain through a prism of Black eyes”. In this we get to see an everyday version of British living; a group of schoolboys exiting a boat at a dock, people commuting on the London tube, and Roger eating fish and chips, all inherently British things carried out by Black people.

With these as positives, we also read the negatives of Black British living. “As good as things get some things remain… sometimes Black people do this thing called ‘code-switching’ to try to fit in with the dominant lingo to try and make them seem less dangerous”. A specific excerpt within the book, The Interview, is a soul-touching piece of writing that exhibits the in’s and out’s of a Black man code-switching to try get a job within a white dominated space. With the way Roger writes, you feel like you’re inside the man’s brain, seeing him in a frantic state trying to distort himself to seem suitable enough in the eyes of the white man.

“The Black man had an interview. He grabbed a pair of glasses to look less threatening. He felt silly (there was nothing wrong with his eyes). He thought perhaps a tweed jacket, something more traditional. No, no jewellery. He wouldn’t have bothered, but he needed this job”

“A short afro was the best he could do. He was trying to present himself in a way that was unthreatening (though he knew that there was no threat there).”

The Interview goes on to paint the picture of the man’s struggle for fair treatment, one equal to his white counterparts. He shows up on time and is told his name isn’t on the list. The man is so eager to be on time as he knows as a Black man, tardiness is a stereotype he doesn’t want to be associated with. He knows for a fact he is on the list, so he asks them to check again.

When the man’s tone slightly changes out of sheer anxiety, the security tackle and restrain the man trying to throw him out on the assumption he doesn’t belong. Then, at that moment, the man’s name is called to be interviewed. At this point the man’s jacket is ripped, his glasses cracked, his dignity stripped and yet, he still has to go in for his interview.

This is representative of the sad reality many Black people across the world face– trying to assimilate as much as they can just for equal opportunity and more often than not it is not paying off. I feel this excerpt specifically would be beneficial for White people to read, as it gives them an idea of what some Black people go through on a daily basis and then would make them question their preconceptions of Black people.

Home Is Not A Place is so well rounded as it envisions Black life from every angle with both the struggle as well as the joy and love. We see Black love in the photos of couples, friends, and family. We see all of this throughout the book.

Not only do we witness this Black joy from the people in the book, but we also feel the joy of the creators who made it. From going to this poetry event I felt a strong friendship between the two. I felt as if us as the audience had also been going round the whole of the UK with Johny and Roger in their comically small choice of transportation, listening to the Soulquarians, and eating fish and chips at every destination. The two talked us through the creative process of the book and the fun and joy behind doing it, while also explaining some of the excerpts in such detail that I could envision each story perfectly. The photos and poems take you to each city, each coast of the UK, without you even being there physically.

The book is a journey that is beautifully and purely portrayed through poetry and photography. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone, it is everything.