What I am Reading Now…
layla-roxanne hill
May 2023

Creating time + spaciousness to read, is an important caring strategy. Where you (can) read + how you (can) read, can be as transformational as what you read. When I don’t make time for reading, I deny nourishment, stillness, being held + moving in wor(l)ds beyond my own.

As a library user from a young age, I recognise the relationship between book ownership + socio-economic status + I’m grateful to those who make work freely + widely available, + for my own access to borrowed + bought readings.

Questioning who + what gets published, has led to the love I have for self-published works, as well as those produced by smaller publishing houses.

To support independent writing + keep my reading varied, during the pandemic, I signed up to Good Press Subscription Service.

Through this, I received Architectures of Healing: Cure through Sleep, Touch, and Travel and MsHeresies 3 — Amniotechnics.

 When I had experienced loss through death, thoughts about touch came to me + have since stayed. When was the last time a person experienced touch? Gentle caresses, tracing of curves + bumps touch. Not touch without feeling. We live in worlds of insomnia, restrictions on movement + where being untouchable is aspirational. Architectures of Healing: Cure through Sleep, Touch, and Travel show us forms of care + healing which have existed across time.

Msheresies 3 – Amniotechnics republishes the essay ‘Amniotechnics’ by feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, alongside material from Triple Jeopardy, by the Third World Women’s Alliance. Through graphic design, the MsHeresies series by Rietlanden Women’s Office explores the topic of work, + demonstrates beautifully how archives can be accessed care-fully + creatively to (re)create collective works.

Francesca Sobande + I are working on a graphic novel, Black Oot Here: Dreaming O’ Us, which is loosely based on our book Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland. We have been working with Chris Manson, Naomi Gessesse + Lesley Benzie to create a dreamspace, in the hope it lets Black Scottish (hi)stories thrive in less institutional + limiting ways.

Chris Manson is illustrating Black Oot Here: Dreaming O’ Us + his work has always brought me a lot of joy + hope, especially in challenging the norms we have come to accept within capitalism. His story, F! Providence has recently been published in the anthology, Tilt: Six Tales by Quindrie Press.

Naomi Gessesse has undertaken the Scots Gaelic translation of Black Oot Here: Dreaming O’ Us, doing so with care + nuance. In their book, Dreaming a Black Scottish Archive, Naomi offers a reading of Maureen Blackwood’s A Family Called Abrew. Naomi’s dreaming + writing has become a vital resource for Black Scottish history.

Quindrie Press + Transit Arts publish passion projects + it can be felt in the reading!

Blackgirl on Mars by Lesley-Ann Brown, is a book I read this year which spoke to my being. I cried, laughed, shared sections via voice notes to friends. I wrote + wrote, feeling released + healed. Lesley-Ann Brown writes with love, honesty + a connectedness, reminding us to live + feel with wholeness.

Returning to books, is as significant as starting new ones.

In 2016 I visited Nigeria, the country of my mother’s birth + mine, for the first time since I had left as an infant. Walking around Lagos, guided by what I knew without knowing – ancestral knowledge – I felt at home.

Thinking about what I knew about Nigeria + Africa, shaped by imperialism, coloniality + antiblackness, didn’t instil feelings of home. Re-reading African Myths and Legends of Gender by Sophie Bosede Oluwole + J.O. Akin Sofoluwe, bought in Nigeria, I think about decolonisation + how it is understood/practiced in Scotland. When we include knowledge in our lives, how do we do this without replicating the same extractive + fetishizing structures we seek to destroy?

Current discussions around (the working) class render people white, sexless + genderless, assuming desirability to conform + belong to the dominant white heteropatriarchal society. Reductive arguments centred around culture wars + identity politics, avoid us struggling for all + further deny the existence of ‘Other’ selves we all have.

Reading a proof copy of Yvette Taylor’s Working Class Queers, is a reminder we can create collective ecologies of care + belonging, where people’s whole selves are recognised + held.

Some organising groups I’m involved with have come into contact with the Kurdish Women’s Movement + Jineology. Built on the principle that without freedom of women within society + without a real consciousness surrounding women, Jineology believes no society can be free of patriarchy, capitalism + the state.

At a recent trade union conference, the movement congratulated itself on its continued international solidarity, whilst debates were had (+ won) to support weapon + nuclear energy job creation in Scotland. It was there, I was given Collusion, Conspiracy & Corruption: An “On the Ground” Report into Turkish War Crimes and Use of Chemical Weapons.

When Scotland makes + sells weapons, it hurts women across the world. It is the responsibility of feminist movements to resist this + Jineology – like Black feminism – critiques them for failing to do so.

(Re)remembering + (re)learning how to be in community with women + the earth  in respectful, nourishing + accountable ways, is to create conditions of compassion, belonging, hope + joy, we all need to be healed + liberated from the ravages of capitalism.