YLA in Black History Month with the George Padmore Institute and 198 Gallery
Upon Westminster Bridge
Thursday 5 October 2023 at 198 Gallery, Herne Hill, London
In the early 1980s, Michael Smith was seen as a rising star of Jamaican poetry, taking the UK by storm. Then he was suddenly killed in a political confrontation in his homeland. Forty years after his untimely death, London remembers this stellar wordsmith through a screening of the BBC Arena film Upon Westminster Bridge, which documents his visit to the capital. We see Michael Smith in his full poetic glory, equally at home reciting his Jamaican dub poetry or the English Romantic poets.
After the screening, the accompanying panel discussion features Arena editor Anthony Wall, who made the film, as well as two poets of Caribbean heritage, Linton Kwesi Johnson (who also appears in the film), Hannah Lowe and Your Local Arena poet-in-residence Helen Thomas. The evening will be completed with a reading of a newly-commissioned poem inspired by the film, written and read by Helen Thomas.
Co-hosted by 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning and the George Padmore Institute
‘Sometimes’
Ode to Michael Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Louise Bennett and CLR James
Your Local Arena Roving Poet in Residence for our Black History Month community events, Helen Thomas, wrote this new poem responding to the film. She performed ‘Sometimes’, an ode to Michael Smith, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Louise Bennett and CLR James, at the screening at the 198 Gallery, and you can watch her read it here, and read it yourself by clicking below.
Mi seh mi cyaan believe it…
Once seen or heard, never to be forgotten.
Anthony Wall reflects on Upon Westminster Bridge
Anthony Wall spent his early years in the east end of London. He studied at King’s College Cambridge. In 1974 he joined BBC radio as a studio manager. The same year he became the rock critic of the Morning Star and was the first journalist to interview Bob Marley for a national newspaper. Wall moved into television in 1978 and soon joined Arena, becoming one of the core directors/producers (1978-85) and then Series Editor from 1985 to 2018. He has won three BAFTAs, with numerous nominations and other awards from all over the world. His project Night and Day – The Arena Time Machine, a 24-hour evocation of a single day in the life of the planet, made entirely from the Arena archive, screened at the 2019 San Francisco Film Festival, where Wall and Arena received the Mel Novikoff Award, one of the festival’s highest honours, for their ‘contribution to cinema’.
Mi seh mi cyaan believe it… the first words and repeated refrain of Michael (Mikey) Smith’s most famous poem. Once seen or heard, never to be forgotten. The poem is an invective against injustice, full of power and anger. Despite his young age, Mikey had a clearly defined persona, a fierce defender of “the oppressed and dispossessed” and a coruscating critic of those who keep them so.
In 1982, Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) and Creation For Liberation brought Mikey to the UK. At the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books he walked on stage singing Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ and then proceeded to bring the house down. He agreed to make a film with the support of LKJ, Darcus Howe and The Race Today Collective. He was staying in the Race Today building on Railton Road, the epicentre of the insurrection in Brixton the year before.
The original idea was to shoot the film in Brixton to highlight its parallels with the Caribbean, but the idea was taken a step further by the great Marxist philosopher and historian C.L.R. James (CLR). CLR, who was living in the Race Today building, was a great champion of the poetry and activism of LKJ and Mikey. He made no bones about his passionate love of the great poetic works of the English literary canon, especially the radical Romantics Keats and Shelley. None of that was to Mikey’s taste, it was all part and parcel of British colonial domination. CLR persuaded him that Keats and Shelley were also revolutionary poets and that there was a correspondence, not in literary style, but in political and moral attitude between what he and LKJ were doing and the work of the revolutionary poets of the Romantic age. This was the essence of the film.
The discussion sequences with CLR, Mikey and LKJ are the core of Upon Westminster Bridge, with ideas flying across the generations. Together they’re a meditation on Empire, liberation, history and the present, and the very building block of poetry, language itself. Most of the film is set in Brixton; the place becomes a character in its own right. Mikey’s performances in the streets and finally in Lambeth Town Hall are electrifying.
A year later Michael Smith was dead. He was killed in Jamaica after heckling at a Jamaican Labour Party meeting, becoming a victim of the very partisan politics he so despised. He was twenty-eight. I hope this film stands as a record of his brilliance and his legacy.
Anthony Wall
Director Arena: Upon Westminster Bridge
Biographies
Responding to the film
Award-winning reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica and came to London in 1963. His first poetry collection, Voices of the Living and the Dead, came out in 1974. In 2002 he became only the second living poet and the first black poet to have his work included in Penguin’s Modern Classics (reissued in 2022 as Selected Poems). Johnson’s first album, Dread Beat An Blood, was released in 1978; fourteen more have followed. In 2023 Time Come, his first book of selected prose, came out. LKJ is a Trustee of the George Padmore Institute and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist and academic. Her latest book, The Kids, won the Costa Poetry Award and the Costa Book of the Year, 2021. Her first poetry collection, Chick, (Bloodaxe, 2013), won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. Her family memoir, Long Time, No See (Periscope, 2015) featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University.
Helen Thomas is a writer of Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage who was born in London. She moved to Cornwall over twenty years ago after receiving her DPhil in English Literature. In 2020, she distributed Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and Law, 1770-2020 as a free, 500-page e-book to celebrate Black History Month, and in 2022 she published 1562, a volume of poetry voicing the fictional lives of six black women from six ports in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Britain. Since then Helen has been experimenting with poetry and poetic plays, writing work that fuses literary genres and highlights the experience of black migrants in Britain as well as their contributions to British culture. In 2023, she was commissioned to co-create a play with young people in Plymouth as part of the With Flying Colours and Beyond Face Theatre Company partnership. She is currently working on two poetic plays and a new collection of poems.
See biography of Anthony Wall above.
