[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

HUNGRY WORK  
[[link removed]]


 

Lola Olufemi
October 7, 2024
Vittles
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ It was women who ran the hostel services and food kitchens in the
League of Coloured Peoples in the 1930–50s; and women who made sure
that the minutes of meetings and conferences were kept. They are why
we have this important history. _

Women in food kitchens have been the backbone of black radical social
movements. , Hannah Buckman

 

‘This “history of the greats” will by necessity ignore the
masses of women who have been the backbone of the black struggle,
those women who ran the hostel services and food kitchens in the
League of Coloured Peoples in the 1930–50s; women who made sure that
the minutes of meetings and conferences were kept, which have made an
analysis of the Pan-African and Home Rule movements in British history
possible.’

—Julia Chinyere Oparah,‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s
Organisations and the Politics of Transformation

I imagine a modest-sized kitchen at the first meeting of the League of
Coloured Peoples in 1931. The meeting – held at the YMCA on
Tottenham Court Road – ends at around 2pm, and is followed by
refreshments. When the men snake their heads around the corner to
check on the kitchen’s progress, they see a group of women huddled
around a centre table. The cotton tablecloth is adorned with an
intricate red and green pattern. The women are counting dinner plates
and glasses, making sure they have enough portions of rice for every
person in attendance. These are women with political agendas that go
beyond the removal of the Colour Bar. They do not agree that the
League should focus all its energy on appeals for representation from
the colonial British government, or that the League should seek to
simply correct ‘racial misunderstanding’ – they find Harold
Moody’s agenda far too conservative. They believe that the negro
worker must determine their own fate. This is part of the task the
women undertake when they cook. They reveal how the engine of struggle
is located in the kitchen, where they reproduce one another hourly,
daily, weekly. This is not a gendered act of service: it is the
maintenance of life.

History is littered with many such kitchens. Domestic work, and
cooking in particular, has always been a sustaining force for radical
social movements: the transformation of any social and political
landscape is hungry work. Food is a focal point around which
communities under threat solidify their interdependence, not only
bringing people together but also structuring how they relate to each
other, providing parameters for frequent meeting and exchange. A meal
cooked in a community kitchen once a week can be enough to sow the
seeds for critical analysis – beginning perhaps with joint
observations about the local area, and expanding when people and their
neighbours start to ask why things are the way they are. When we sit
and eat with others, with people who believe in the real possibility
of freedom, we rescue the act of tasting and digestion from a world
where food is reduced to fuel for labour. The questions we ask
ourselves when planning a meal, much like the ones prepared by the
unnamed women of the League of Coloured Peoples, are the same
questions political organisers ask themselves: What do we want? With
whom? How long will it take us to prepare? How will we feel when we
are finished?

In efforts to recover histories lost to the masculinist character of
certain political organisations, such as the British Black Panthers
and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, there is a tendency to conceive
of the kitchen and the process of food preparation as gendered
ancillaries to the ‘real’ work of politics that occurred inside
the meeting room, to imagine the woman performing this labour as
perpetually silenced and hushed. In their 1982 Editorial, first
published in community newsletter SPEAK OUT!, the Brixton Black
Women’s Group noted that it was their designation as cooks and
notetakers in the movement that reproduced the gendered subordination
they sought to escape:

‘So black women[1] were left in a kind of limbo – damned if we did
and damned if we didn’t. Our roles for the revolution were to be as
coffee-makers, cooks, fundraisers, and, of course, willing sexual
partners, while the men conducted the important business of the
struggle.’

In refusing such a limiting designation of women’s roles in the
revolution, they began to understand that work undertaken inside the
kitchen was not an act of love but of labour, and that this labour was
intrinsically linked to the political strategies being devised outside
of it. By reclaiming autonomy, every space where women gathered could
be made political.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Marxist and socialist critiques of the
operation of capitalism, gender, and race that were developed and
practised by Black and racialised women’s organisations in the UK
were couched in the formation of communities in which the work of
social reproduction (caring labour such as cooking, cleaning, and
emotional support, which produce the worker over and over again) was
central. Groups like the Brixton Black Women’s Group, the
Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, the Black
Women’s Action Group (which started in a council flat on the
Aylesbury Estate in Walworth and later became the Southwark Black
Women’s Centre), Awaz, the Abasindi Co-operative, and the Walsall
Black Women’s Centre were founded on principles of communalism,
which extended to the preparation and consumption of food in homes, at
conferences and community events. Records of shared meals litter oral
histories, interviews, and editorials.

A flyer detailing the Railton 4 campaign. Credit: Black Cultural
Archives.

Often, the joint preparation of meals was a way to offset dire
material conditions experienced by the racialised poor: joint meals
meant lower costs, shared labour, and free childcare. At crucial
junctures, cooking food became a means of expression, a way for
members to signal that they cared for one another. This caring labour
was crucial to the community support, defence committees, and forms of
organisation that preceded and followed the 1981 uprisings in Brixton,
Toxteth, Handsworth, and Moss Side. Would campaigns related to the Sus
Laws, the Railton 4, the Bradford 12, state sexual violence (through
so-called ‘virginity testing’ at Heathrow Airport), the infamous
Grunwick Strike, or local demands for better housing and schooling for
young children have been possible on empty stomachs?

In an interview about her book Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain
(1978), a ground-breaking analysis of South Asian women’s
subjectivity and political organising, feminist and anti-racist
activist and scholar Amrit Wilson recalls an interaction with one of
her research participants:

I told her that I was writing a book and she said she wanted to tell
me about her life. I can never forget the way she told her story and
the need she felt to do so. I remember she offered me some food and
there was a very hot chutney – it was so nice but so hot. And then
suddenly we were both crying, I don’t know if it was the chillies
… She told me so much.

Here, a shared meal became the grounds upon which the relationship
between interviewer and interviewee was built. Food strengthened the
capacity to share, for the woman in question to divulge the story of
her migration to the UK and the racism she experienced at the hands of
the state. In this anecdote, we might understand chutney as a serious
component of political thinking, as a gustatory experience which
brought forth the opportunity to expand political consciousness! This
instance teaches that bodily experience, the satisfaction that occurs
after a shared meal, cannot be neatly separated from the historical
narratives and political subjectivities that produce us in time and
space. Suddenly they were crying, and they did not know whether it was
because of the chillies themselves or whether the act of sharing a
meal had enabled them to open up to one another, as Asian women
exiting Britain’s post-war consensus and emerging into a political
landscape brimming with possibility.

From the beginning of Black and racialised feminist political
formations in Britain, food was a means of recruitment, an invitation
to step away from the state and towards one another, a balm for the
soul while the world outside the estate walls continued to crumble.
The work of social reproduction not only makes and remakes the worker
(and therefore life), but itself manufactures all manner of affects
and emotional states of reliance – love, comradeship, solidarity –
which lessen the perceived gap between what political subjects desire
and what they are capable of building for themselves and others.

In 1967, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black radical leader born to
sharecroppers in Mississippi, established the Freedom Farm
Cooperative. Hamer purchased forty acres of Delta land for community
use, where Black farmers planted soybeans, cotton, cucumbers, peas,
beans and squash with membership dues of a dollar or less. Hamer
sought to undo the effects of the ‘Great Land Dispossession’,
state-sponsored land grabs that saw the early descendants of freed
slaves lose land due to improper paperwork, land seizures, and debt
bondage, all of which were bolstered via dispossession through federal
regulations, lynchings, intimidation, and the Jim Crow laws. Many
labelled Hamer’s endeavour utopian; a 1969 speech, though,
demonstrates that Hamer’s motivation was more pragmatic: ‘We are
sick and tired of seeing people lynched, and raped, and shot down all
across the country in the name of law and order and not even feeding
the hungry across the country.’ The land was bought with a key
question in mind, one that Ashanté M Reese elucidates beautifully:
‘Who is going to feed our communities?’

Food is also a weapon. As the Sudanese Revolution began to spread in
2018, it was the vital work of the grassroots resistance committees
(whom Lina Dohia has described as ‘carriers … of … imaginative
practice … that subsequently became the centre of revolutionary and
collective struggle’) that kept it alive. Groups began cooking
inside their homes, in local mosques, and in community kitchens,
feeding their neighbours and those who refused to move from the
streets, as they gathered to enact the death of Omar al-Bashir’s
regime. When the state collapsed, the resistance committees focused on
the provision of sustenance. Revolution requires this kind of
reproductive labour, the capacity to affirm life by meeting basic
needs.

Years later, in the midst of a counterrevolutionary war, the work of
the resistance committees continues, showing that it is possible, even
in a time of violent dispossession, to buoy one another. In March, the
paramilitary Rapid Support Forces arrested activists in Khartoum, as
they were supervising soup kitchens feeding thousands of hungry
people. Both the Rapid Support Forces and the rival Sudanese Armed
Forces were intent on, and have succeeded in, driving the population
into famine, an attempt to break the liberatory echoes of the
revolution and curtail resistance from the working class. Yet another
example of how (manufactured) hunger can change the course of history.

The effects of fifteen years of austerity have shaped the UK’s
cultural and political imaginary such that scarcity and lack are now
the virtues upon which state allocation of resources depends. But when
half a million children in England face the prospect of going hungry
this month and more people rely on food banks in Britain than ever
before, the question of nourishment remains urgent. Rather than
addressing the growing hunger crisis by recognising human dependency
and need, approaches to food systems and social welfare have
prioritised food production, privatisation, and consumer choice. Such
decisions are made possible by the violent underbelly of exploitative
labour that powers food supply chains. There is no ‘consumer
choice’ absent the migrant workers from Bolivia, South Africa,
Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, who pick fruit and farm in
‘slave-like’ conditions, with little to no recourse to fight back
against sexual and racial harassment, in order to sustain the rising
demands of the British agricultural sector. For those with attachments
to freedom, the question is always the same: how can we break such
vast and extensive systems of violence?

Looking across borders and temporal lines provides evidence of how
historical and contemporary radical social movements have transformed
material conditions without aid from the state. In learning from the
radicalism of the 1970s and 1980s, we needn’t despair at the
frustrating particularity of the present. We might instead look to the
growing popularity of food cooperatives enacting principles of mutual
aid – political engagement, solidarity, and non-hierarchical
organisation. These cooperatives stand in stark opposition to the
benevolence of food banks as evidence of the ability to immediately
resist the political condition imposed upon us by neoliberal state
policies.

Groups like Cooperation Town, a network of thirty self-organising
neighbourhood co-ops from Gospel Oak to Kentish Town, encourage
members to organise against food poverty in ways that work against the
charity and food bank model and give them back dignity and autonomy.
Cooperation Town provides resources, infrastructure, and advice for
community members wishing to start their own cooperatives. They
encourage members to analyse the political roots of food poverty,
building links with their neighbours to organise the purchase,
storage, and distribution of food or to access surplus produce from
supermarkets, because, as one Cooperation Town organiser explains,
‘there is no real shortage of food, there is just an unequal
distribution of resources’. We hear the echoes of radical practice
in this analysis, which refuses to capitulate to the logic of
scarcity, and instead seeks to close the gap between those who are
able to access nutritionally rich foods and those for whom hunger and
rationing are a daily occurrence.

Elsewhere, grassroots collectives like Land in Our Names draw their
political practices – of food sovereignty, justice, and the
continued development of holistic relationships with the land for
Black and racialised communities in the UK – from the vibrant
history of land struggles in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, as well as
from agrarian farm workers in Palestine. Their call for reparations is
a call to disrupt the structural forces of racism, capitalism, and
colonialism, and to understand how all three have shaped present-day
systems of land ownership through plantation economies and trespass
laws. Practically, this means fighting to improve working conditions
for migrant agricultural workers, procuring land for community
growing, and addressing racist planning departments that designate the
use of land in local towns and councils. Such efforts should not be
dismissed or downplayed: they represent the possibility of seriously
fracturing the seeming impenetrability of systems of exploitation in
the present.

Radical practices of food preparation, distribution, and production by
Black and racialised women’s organisations in the UK and
internationally show that it is impossible to think about food in
isolation. A more integrated approach is needed, one that recognises
that what and how we eat is intimately tied to our social condition
and our capacity for transformative action. Food systems are knitted
across borders, and depend on violent processes of extraction that can
and should be read in tandem with an analysis of social reproduction.
These reciprocal relationships are determinative: ‘good’ food –
sensorially stimulating food that is unmoored from gendered labour –
is a fantasy while any person anywhere remains unfree. The kitchen
will remain a site of domination as long as ingredients are sourced
using methods of acute violation. Food production is a political
arena: what we eat contributes to the construction of a social body
which, if we are to adequately confront a myriad of ongoing threats
– rising fascism, climate catastrophe, our government’s active
participation in genocidal warfare in Palestine – must be driven by
a communal approach to life. Hollow mantras of consumer choice and
charities plugging the deliberately constructed holes in the state’s
social provision will never remedy the types of social, political, and
bodily hunger we experience. Only remaking the world can do that.

[1] In the 1970s and 1980s, the use of the term ‘Black’ signalled
a theoretical and activist tradition that identified political
subjects with a shared history of British colonialism into a coherent
group for the purposes of political demand-making and working across
difference. This term was a geographically contingent marker of common
experience, used in grassroots organising as a means of self-titling
racialised subjects from African, Caribbean, Asian, and Latin American
backgrounds whose material conditions were determined by histories of
imperial violence and the racist legislation that defined the post-war
era of the British Commonwealth.

Credits

Dr Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall Foundation
researcher from London, based in the Centre for Research and Education
in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on
the uses of the political imagination and its relationship to cultural
production, political demands, and futurity. She is the author of
Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020) and
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021) and a member of
bare minimum, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

Hannah Buckman is an illustrator and artist based in London. They can
be found at hannahbuckman.com or at @hannahbuckmanillustration on
Instagram.

The full VITTLES masthead can be found here
[[link removed]].

* Black History
[[link removed]]
* radical history
[[link removed]]
* food workers
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]