Edson Burton’s cultural highlights

Dr Edson Burton is a prolific writer of audio, live drama and poetry. Edson won the 2025 Tinniswood Prize for Man Friday, an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Edson’s previous audio dramas include the acclaimed Radio 4 series Deacon, starring Don Warrington. Recent live work includes the listening journey Duppy Hunter, produced by Tamasha Theatre, and the theatrical promenade Destination Old Market. Edson is the author of the poetry collections Seasoned (2009) and Witness (2025). Edson is a contributor to WritersMosaic, a member of the film collective Come the Revolution, and a board member of Lyra poetry festival and Afrika Eye film festival.

Art: Barbara Walker at Arnolfini, Bristol 

Barbara Walker’s retrospective Being Here is a breathtaking combination of superlative illustrations, thematic breadth and depth. Spanning time and space, Walker imprints the Black presence on the European story where it has been erased, neglected or under-documented. Each portrait in her Turner Prize-nominated series Burden of Proof revives the human story behind the Kafkaesque cruelty of our immigration system. In conversation with Burden of Proof, the series Shock and Awe is an enthralling portrait of Black service personnel. Perhaps it is due to my obsession with Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) that I found her depiction of Black Christians in prayer, with a soft-faced youth in the foreground, the most haunting of all the portraits in the collection.

https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/barbarawalker/

Film: Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler

From absent fathers to African betrayal, I have long been impressed by Ryan Coogler’s ability to combine diasporic concerns with box office appeal. I was intrigued to see if he would repeat his winning formula. Set in 1920s Mississippi, Sinners imagines a cosmological multiverse where Indigenous, American, African, and Irish folklore meet in the buildup to the opening of a juke joint by twin brothers, played handsomely by Michael B. Jordan. The brothers recruit a cast of musicians to entertain the revellers including Old Sammie (Buddy Guy), ‘the preacher boy’, whom we discover has the power to bridge the ‘crossroads’. Unwittingly, his music also attracts vampires that are loose in the county. The story is rich and compelling, but it is the central Sankofa scene, in which Sammie conjures past and future spirits in a seamless dissolution of time and space, that is truly extraordinary. In five minutes, Coogler has given us a lesson in ethnomusicology, Afrofuturism, and Black spirituality in a blockbuster, Tarantinoesque genre mash-up. Yep, the brother did it again.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31193180/?ref_=mv_close

Live Music: Rotary Connection 222 at We Out Here

This homage to producer and arranger Charles Stepney was, for me, the musical highlight of a packed festival season. Stepney is widely credited for the group’s uniqueness. Together with Rotary’s founder Leonard Chess, he created a sound that combined psychedelic, rock, funk and classical elements. This show, featuring original and new band members, recreated the classic hits ‘Les Fleur’, ‘Love has fallen on me’, and the eternal anthem ‘Black Gold of the Sun’. Wrapped up in the evening’s warmth, I watched, swayed and bathed in the orchestral sonics. Minus the unnecessary intrusion of video interviews, it was a flawless show. My two companions, both some twenty years younger than I, were moved to tears. Whatever we carried into the festival, we left knowing we were indeed the black gold of the sun.

https://weoutherefestival.com/2025/02/spotlight-rotary-connection-222/

Festival: St Pauls Carnival, Bristol, July 2025 

There was a heady freedom in these streets, sharper than I had ever experienced before in my 31 years of St Pauls Carnival. Perhaps it was the freedom of transgression, for this year’s Carnival was not meant to happen: the official body responsible for Carnival was forced, by a financial shortfall, to offer a slimline series of ‘back-a-yard’ events. Frustrated, the sound systems, vendors and local influencers staged an on-street takeover that culminated in an epic block party. I hit the streets with my posse in the late afternoon. St Paul’s was a fiercely sensual bath of sound, sight and smell. Thousands, in their finest, filled the streets, and whined, skanked, twerked, and two-stepped to the cacophony of sound systems. The absence of curated journeys and crowd management meant we were free to explore and discover. Awareness that this was a DIY event – an experiment – ironically ensured a self-policing bonhomie. Bad min’ was not welcome. We flowed through the streets, meeting old and new friends, ending the night in a junglist haze at the superclub Lakota. Brrrp. Brrrp. Brrrp.

https://visitbristol.co.uk/event/st-pauls-carnival/239842301/

Poetry: The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha 

How can we write the meaning behind historical events? How do we write the self without half-truths and alibis? The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha rises to the challenge gorgeously. His poetry is a cavern of meaning. I am led further into possibilities beyond the surface on each rereading. Yet, as with all the best work, it also speaks through music and imagery. Joyous musings spring to mind: ‘Imagine a kiss that binds one animal to another. Delicious because it was hers’ – while his reflections, passing from the surface to the interior, articulate the complex battle to live and express the multiple selves: ‘She has me speaking in my fourth language but my thoughts have us undressed in my first.’ The New Carthaginians is food for the mind and the heart, but I am particularly drawn to the tragic outsider soul that haunts the collection.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/463875/the-new-carthaginians-by-makoha-nick/9781802067071

Favourite WritersMosaic artist: John Akomfrah

Racism, and our resistance to it, risks imprisoning us in a conversation that is blind to vast past and present realities outside our experience. John Akomfrah’s work captures, and then transcends, the particularities of our story. In his work, I see the universal and, in particular, the temporal and the eternal.

Edson Burton

Edson Burton is a poet, drama writer, curator and historian.