Black History Month: Dreams and Legacies

Jennifer Wong

“I don’t think I’ve ever had to really articulate what racism feels like until coming here. So when I am here I get excluded from things, you get spoken over, you get checked for your ID several times by security; it’s frustrating. You’re the last table anybody ever wants to sit on when you’re the black girls. People look everywhere everywhere for a space and then eventually they’ll come and sit near you, and it’s like: OK, I see you there. You’re in a lecture and you’re like excited because you’ve spent six grand, you’ve given up your job to come and be here, you’ve worked hard to get your Masters, and then the whole curriculum is telling you about people who have enslaved your people and you’re asked to applaud their work.”

An interview with a Brookes student

There have been ups and downs, good and bad.

A photogram has the complex beauty of capturing 3D objects on a 2D surface. For me, photography has the technical skill to capture depths and intricacies on all levels. I hope this image displays a balance of playfulness but also the serious message behind it also. When approached to participate in this project it was a privilege to use the medium of photography to assist in this visual translation of communication, or in some instances, lack of communication. In the interview I heard, the member of staff says: “I’ve sat with members of staff who don’t even give you eye contact at all”.

Family life is clearly at the core of 'success' (however we define it) and ultimately self-employment would be the ideal. Controlling and elevating the time under your own mind and intentions; in this instance: with his wife and child.

Amongst the shadows captured here are items from a Chairs and Ladders Game. Ladders represent the opportunities: “I’ve had opportunities to go from point A to point B” and the chairs, for me, represent the interviewee's experience of unsuccessful applications for other roles. A chair can be symbolic of various roles, opportunities and interviews, and for me, certainly correspond with the interviewee's negative experience with his application to the Board of Governors: “So where does this stem from? That just stems from the top, and if the top doesn’t believe in it, then the other people down the structures will do the same and then they’re not going to be interested. So, it has to come from the top."

Additionally, there are multiple references to struggles in the interview, which for me reside as a sensation of being caught up in a net: “For me personally..I believe it has been a struggle getting to where I have got to...Underneath all that is a genuine struggle”.

I have chosen the positive print over the initial negative; to encourage the growth and changes that will, hopefully, be made in the future.

“There have been ups and downs, good and bad. The people do make a difference, but you can always tell. I’ve come across scenarios whereby you believe you have the potential to carry on something; everyone else seems to demean that potential in you, and even if you wanted to go ahead and still prove beyond that point, you’d still find some difficulties in doing so. I think I should be somewhere above where I am today and I don’t think I’ve got the opportunity within this organization to get there. [...] For me, it’s the understanding that one day one time I’ll be out of here, and the patience for me comes from my wife really, because I think overall she is the only reason why I’m still here.”

An interview with a Brookes member of staff

Dreams call a body home.
Doubt is only a next door neighbour–
the kind that visits once to change the locks
and claim everything as its own.

Eyes that once were telescopes,
mapping constellations between cloudbursts and rays of sun,
are tricked into believing the room for possibility shrinks
once strife makes terrifying all that’s not yet clear.  

The body stands still, afraid
to fall on either side of the standstill
between whispers parading as symphonies of others’ ideals,
and the dream crying out that it will never have another life to live in.

But will is lightning,
striking as many times as fits its need,
to set the mind afire with the tinder of what it means to achieve.
Prayers interlace with fingers,
embolden knuckles, re-teaches how to stretch and reach.
The call rings out, fanfares the future
with a song that cartwheels in the ear,
tumbling every cog in the body into one determined motion– Onward.

True success is a skeleton key.
Doubt can only be evicted
by the desire of conviction of a dream calling a body home,
To summon the strength of stance to stand the ground of destiny.

Christina Raisea Murphy

“I think faith is a large barrier to success. It’s a barrier but it’s also a door. The door’s always going to be a closed door and you’re not going to be able to envision what’s on the other side of it if you have no faith. If you do, and if you have strong faith in yourself and what you’re capable of, then really you have the key.”

An interview with a Brookes student