#davidoluwale

[trespassingassemblies]

love and rage for David Oluwale - murdered by police, Leeds, 1969 It’s 50 years since David, a Nigerian British man, was chased to his death by drowning in the River Aire in central Leeds. I learnt about David from Stuart Hodkinson when I first moved to Leeds and his story has shaped my understanding of this place I’ve called home for seven-and-a-half years.

The piece below was published in ‘Remembering Oluwale’ (Valley Press, 2016). It wasn’t written directly about David but he is part of it, part of the people seen as, and made into, rubbish and surplus in this city - in the present as well as the past. In a way it was the end of the beginning of my attempts to write about these things, and much more. 

Promises (for David Oluwale) 

 Security

I watch myself feeling my way around the city wall. I finger the cracks in the stone until my fingers are the cracks, and I walk, as I walk, two fingers, two thumbs, a mouth, a head, a back, two feet, this mouth that we must take bread through, this same mouth. A mouth, a head, a back, two feet, as the sun comes round. The cracks change with light, water expands as it becomes ice.

 The place is incidental, then. I am alone, ice pools spread, I am thought in pool, I am still outside the city, I am asleep, and so I surround and am surrounded. Facing the terror, the throat attack which is only a moment, not a policy, not a good deal of time. A motorway or a wall is worse than a bomb. I am pitiful. Exposure to difficulty has made my hands a little rough. There is snow in the cracks in the wall. How far? For a garden, there has to be an idea, a thought of blooming, power, labour. If paradise is a garden, who waters it? That same mouth. My tread rakes earth. I journey.

 Social Justice

In the court waiting area, where there are no windows, a woman shows another a black and white photo. And there’s the leg... just there – at once I am floating, the gabbling becomes water, and I am unfixed in my own ocean, with my child, and a terrible refusal for it to be subjected to this, this being forced to pay rent, money extorted from the threat of eviction. I was in the room with another woman, older, and her friend, a younger woman, and the duty solicitor. He went out and she began to cry, again, weary and familiar, grinning into tears. He came back in, springy, efficient. Don’t cry, he said, don’t cry, it’s good news. The council solicitor has agreed to a suspension and for you to pay £3.60 a week. And you might be eligible for a temporary payment to cover your rent. It’s good news, the best possible outcome really! Mind those tears now. As if she had not been crying for ten months. My child can be a person from whom money is extorted – this is my fury beginning - but in no country that I can imagine my child living in (my child now) will anyone be prosecuted for letting themselves go hungry. Pay the rent. My child, who is a woman, eats so little that her periods stop. Pay up. And the judge delivers the best possible outcome of an extorted £3.60 a week, that’s sensible, you can pay that can’t you. Can’t you, says the solicitor and there’s a small nod, Yes your honour, the tenant is agreeable to that. The judge knows his children will never have their rent extorted and a mind that lives on its nerves and severings like that, a womb on ice; he knows the law inside out, as well as they know grief and perhaps a little better, and he knows that he and his dear ones are always inside and that local government is to tough choices as he is to the safety of his ocean, his lake, his home. But how can they demand that the child never be left, she can’t even leave the house, not even to pop out to get bread... she can’t be a mum like that.

Work  

In the photographs of the Workhouse, which is also additionally named the Infirmary, perhaps because the two buildings sit side by side, sharing an internal wall, there are a group of men who are known as inmates, or so it’s written here, or patients, as it’s written elsewhere. They work to make the crops grow, or to make themselves better, or a more complete man, or in order that they may eat, or in order that the workhouse can grow and take in more people to be cured, restored to work again, that the city stays in order, that the city can be cured. I sit with them, I am the man with the city’s disorder, I am the woman in the crumpled skirt. People are awful surplus, old men with not even a belt to hold up their trousers, so they must use stolen rope, with not a voice to speak of them, not even to record the crime, not two pieces of paper that agree on what to call them. They are the shape the state needs. Almost. For belonging.  Either they aren’t sure what to call you or, waste matter, they think that you must have several names. Certain sicknesses for certain times. Are you still sick, they ask each month, and then every six months, tell us how. Can you wash yourself, what work are you able to do then? You’re not prone, but we don’t know what to do with you, because, you see, you won’t tell us what to do with yourself. We haven’t invented the workhouse yet. Here we are in our past unpoliced, unpolicied state. Apply a sticking plaster to the surplus until something more robust can be constructed. Something with an inside, an outside, and a shared wall.

 Progress

 Often there are so many fences, it’s surprising not to see one. Out of the gate I go, space winds me. Security fences anticipate attack, rebellion, preformed riots, training exercises. I’ve trodden fields claggy with the knowledge that the fence could not be climbed and I was on the side where I could be caught. Your whole street does not work in the factory. This street was built for the works. That space at the top of the hill where nothing has been built and something has been demolished. Housing infrastructure is no longer dictated by industrial infrastructure; development is about ‘regional growth’ and we’re segmented, market delineated, an A2 or a C3 shopper. Everything about us is known even though there is so much to know, a city for people so various would either be a single palace or a various mess.  Everything about us is used to plan the shops we frequent to buoy The Economy up, the shops that sometimes close without warning so when you go to buy cheap stationery, you trip instead over a grey chasm lying like a joke among the moving shoppers. 



An Important Man says he is mystified by that fact that the expansion of jobs in the US and Europe has not resulted in higher wages. Capital is a great mystery, and that mystery of these cities of the North, their fragmentation, their porous suffering. The failure, the inability, the impossibility of planning. The collapse of local government, and the decline of civic architecture; ‘good works’ have gone the way of ‘the works’ at the top of the street, where the space is. I have stood at the top of a gasometer and looked out onto the huge plain, of factories, canals, of woods and houses, half in smog and half in green. I have wondered what was this all made for? And why is it still here? Down by the empty mills, it mostly feels like a mistake, a chewed field, a nightmare of someone who woke up in the morning, in any year you’d care to name, who woke and cried and asked God for another dream.

[origamidotme]

Tiger by Kaede Nakamura by alex.mironenko https://flic.kr/p/287SDjV

[interwovenhistories]

Remember Oluwale

- Max Farrar in: Caryl Philips, Foreigners: Three English Stories, Northern Lights, Vintage 2007

Chapeltown’s history is written into its architecture. Its huge semi-detached and terraced houses, built for the prosperous, Christian new middle classes in the early 1900s, its two parks and its wide, tree-lined streets are now interspersed with buildings, which were once synagogues, and Asian-owned mini-markets selling the produce of the world. Halfway up Chapeltown Road there’s a wall which, throughout the seventies, bore the inscription REMEMBER OLUWALE in huge white letters. Near that wall there’s an ugly vacant lot, which, until recently, was the site of the elegant country club built in the twenties for those prosperous Christians. The club became Chapeltown’s most notorious pub. White Leeds imagined that inside the Hayfield every type of black sinner was making mischief. A curious corollary of this fantasy was that the Hayfield became a kind of ‘black space’, where whites only entered if they accepted the rules laid down by the black men who played dominoes, drank, sold a little weed and checked the ladies. Since these rules were easy to accept - mutual respect and tolerance, whatever status the outside world conferred upon you - lots of adventurous whites found themselves at home there. It’s said that David Oluwale frequented a similar place in Chapeltown, a nightclub called, in this day, the Glass Bucket, but I’m pretty certain the early evening would have found him in the Hayfield. The Hayfield was erased from the map around 2004 - yet another sign of the city’s inability to deal properly with its black citizens.

[interwovenhistories]

'The City of Dreadful Something'

- Ian Duhig in: The Hounding of David Oluwale, London : Vintage

      When I moved to Leeds in 1974, the city's reputation for coldness and brutality was of mythic dimensions even among poets. Martin Bell, who came and stayed until his death execrated the place in a sequence he called 'The City of Dreadful Something', which included the line parodying Marlowe, 'Why, Leeds is Hell, nor am I out of it!' Never in it, even on a visit, Patrick Kavanagh could nevertheless define despair as 'like winter alone in Leeds'.

       My first job locally was as a casual labourer in Hepworth's cloth warehouse in Claypit Lane, just up from the Merrion Centre ('with its special subways for mugging' — Bell). In fact, my workmates were very friendly to me, only setting off the more their coldness to a security guard who worked there called Kitching, which I didn't understand. Then they told me his story. Apart from his crimes, which they felt shamed their city, they resented this soft job he'd walked straight into after a soft and short time in open prison. I looked at him more closely in the light of this. He was a shadow of the bully his ruined physique still suggested he was once good at, and his eyes were beginning to hollow out because of the drink. But we were all haunted by Oluwale, whose name would be hissed after him in much the same way that it was chanted at police by the Elland Road Kop, as abuse of abusive authority.

       I worked a lot with homelessness agencies in Leeds after this time and the example of what happened to Oluwale lay before them all as demonstrating the depths to which the city's inhospitability could sink if it wasn’t challenged. Kitching remained a different kind of example for me, an example demonstrating the truism that we become like what we hate: he treated Oluwale hatefully like a pariah, then Kitching was a hated pariah. And that is how he will be remembered in this city.

[interwovenhistories]

Black Population in Leeds

- Kester Aspden, 2008, The Hounding of David Oluwale, London : Vintage

[…] it was rare to see a black face in Leeds. Only five Africans were recorded in the 1921 census. Sikh peddlers and hawkers were familiar sights on the streets in the late 1920s, and there were a few dozen Chinese in the city; Indian and Egyptian students added colour to Leeds's workaday red-brick university from the 1920s — but Leeds's public face was barely changed. A black person walking on the streets of the city was an object of crude fascination. Ces Thompson, who came to Leeds from the West Indies just before the outbreak of the Second World War (and became, in the early 1950s, the first black person to represent Great Britain in rugby league), walked curtain-twitching streets with some trepidation. Somebody once shouted after him, 'Hi, nigger boy, did you come out of your mother's arse?'

       Leeds citizens might have read about the arrival of the Windrush at Tilbury and the British Nationality Act — those foundational moments in the making of modern multiracial Britain — but a decade after Ces first walked the streets of Hunslet a black face in the city was still rare enough to excite comment. In Leeds the first settlers from the Caribbean were ex-servicemen, mainly from the RAF, who'd been demobilised in 1947 and 1948 and staved to find work. Young single males, they lodged together in those few houses which would have them. In Woodhouse, 20 Clarendon Road was the house where the locals said the darkies lived. This is how it stayed until the early 1950s when an increasing number of West Indians began to find a ready supply of rented accommodation in the Chapeltown area as the last remnants of the Jewish community withdrew from their 'Little Israel' for leafier suburbs further up the Harrogate Road. A 1953 government working party on 'Coloured People seeking Employment' reported that Leeds had a black population of recent growth numbering between five and six hundred. Even then the black newcomers were well outnumbered by displaced Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, whose presence in the city aroused far less comment and animosity. […] 

     The usual response to black people seeking rented accommodation in Leeds was the slammed door. Sensing an opportunity, a canny Irishwoman who had worked as a cleaner at the university, Helen McCrum, began to buy up houses and let rooms to the small number of blacks in the city. She grandly advertised her properties as 'Private Hotels', charging around £2 a week for bed and board, which took care of a good chunk of a foundry labourer's wages. One of Mrs McCrum's properties was 12 Grove Terrace, a three-storey red-brick terrace in the Little London area of the city, at the bottom end of Camp Road. Most of the Leeds Africans passed through this house at some point. Camp Road was a part of the city with a notorious reputation. In 1949 a special report in the Yorkshire Evening Post attributed the area's decline to the 'foreign element, a floating population inhabiting single carpetless rooms in the once handsome houses of Victorian gentry'; these new arrivals were responsible for nightly brawls, prostitution, assaults on women and `un-British attacks with knives, pepper and ginger'. Scattered among Camp Road's indigenous population and the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigration were a few Sikh hawkers and peddlers; a few Pakistanis; poor Jews who'd never made it to Chapeltown, never mind the suburbs; 'displaced persons' from Central and Eastern Europe; small numbers of Jamaicans and Africans. It was an unlovely setting of clothing factories, printing works, stone and timber yards, rough pubs, army barracks; the only greenery the residents of 12 Grove Terrace could see was the North Street recreation ground, known locally as the 'Jews' Park' (or, more derogatorily, as 'Sheeny Park').