John Siddique’s cultural highlights
Sacred teacher and writer John Siddique has dedicated his life to honouring the authentic in our human experience. He is the author of nine books ranging through poetry, memoir and non-fiction. The Times of India calls him ‘Rebellious by nature, pure at heart.’ His work has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, Poetry Review and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. The New York Times correspondent Bina Shah says, he is ‘One of the best poets of our generation.’ Siddique is the former British Council Writer-in-Residence at California State University, and he is an Honorary Fellow at Leicester University.
Books: James Baldwin – Complete in 3 Volumes (Library of America)
In this year of unbelievable horror in the ‘ourstory’ of the human species, one of the few bright points for this author has been the celebration of James Baldwin’s birth centenary. My own remembrance and commemoration of this beautiful man resolved in the buying of his complete works, in a gorgeous three-volume set that somewhat appropriately feels like a set of Bibles. My cultural life, like my life, has been a long slow process of reclamation from colonisation. The ‘new’ to me might be old to someone else, but I’m never chasing the new; instead, uncovering and taking ownership of oneself from the structures of misrepresentation we’ve been handed can be supported by an engendering of curiosity to move for ourselves more freely through existing cultural landscapes. For me, brother James, like brother Malcolm, sets a highly authentic standard of reclaimed selfhood through his writing which helps light our way – reminding us that we should always be prepared to complicate things to return us to our humanity.
https://www.loa.org/books/505-complete-fiction-amp-collected-essays-three-volumes
Painting: Massacre In Korea, 1951 – Pablo Picasso
Picasso painted three war paintings during his life – most everyone has heard of his Guernica (1937) – but one day earlier this year I was somehow, I guess, looking for art to give my feelings a place to go with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and came across Massacre in Korea (Massacre en Corée) from 1951, depicting the moment before a group of machine-like soldiers slaughter naked women and children. It is thought that Picasso painted this work as a commentary on North American atrocities in the Korean War (1950-53), though he never said anything publicly. Strangely, a few weeks after finding images of this painting online, I was in the Picasso Museum in Spain and on turning a corner there it was in the flesh (paint). When we have no words of our own, we need art, poetry and music as vessels for our humanity.
Film: Shurayuki-hime (Lady Snowblood), 1973
I love old martial arts and samurai movies; they were such a mainstay of my youth when I would get them on VHS from our local video shop, just across the road, run by Mr Ahmed. Lady Snowblood is the tale of Yuki (played by Meiko Kaji) whose mother, Sayo, dies in prison while giving birth to her. Sayo had been brutally raped by four men who also murdered her husband and son. Later, in prison, she deliberately conceives her child to seek vengeance on those who took all from her. Yuki undergoes fighting and sword training with the brutal tutelage of her master, Dokai, and in a hero’s journey which defies any linear narrative arc Yuki delivers wrath to those who deserve it. My inner teenager loved this film; I think it might be his favourite film now – it’s definitely up there with Akira (1988) and Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986). Lady Snowblood was (ahem) ‘heavily borrowed from’ by Quentin Tarantino for his Kill Bill (2003-4) movies and Meiko Kaji, who is a well-known singer in Japan as well as an actor, sang the song at the end of Kill Bill: Volume 1.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158714
Artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat
Speaking of reclamation, somehow until this year I’d never really looked at the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Now I find myself plunged head and heart-long into a complete love affair with his work, which I came to after a deep dive into his friend Andy Warhol. Basquiat’s work makes the point, I feel, that reclamation does not need to be undertaken in an academic or prescribed way, but that your very soul with some help from your genes will recognise and express itself in resonance and necessity with a deep knowing of your cultural and inherited, physical memory in your art, without having to belong to tribe or group or other identity. The paintings he co-created with Warhol are astounding, as are the quite literal breaking through of texts and poetic lines into his visionary, unstructured renderings of people and scenes. Living in the north of England there’s little chance of seeing any of his work in the flesh – the arts are greatly reduced in their scope and support and too often bound into some of the dysfunctional binaries of our times up here as they are elsewhere too. So, if anyone wants to fund this writer to go on a curatorial mission to see Basquiat’s work, I’m right here. This is top of my arts list for the next while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat
Music: Green – Hiroshi Yoshimura
Having had a deep meditation practice for 46 years, and teaching it as part of my practice for almost 40, I’ve come to a working conclusion that we too often mistake the way forward as belonging to the realm of intelligence and one thing winning against another, whereas the true transformer of our lives and the world is consciousness, and our state of being. When consciousness and intelligence are combined with love then what looks like miracles can occur, and that’s what this album is. To describe it as ‘intelligent ambient’ is to do Hiroshi Yoshimura the greatest disservice; it is a music that, though sounding 1980s because of its instrumentation, plugs right into the heart and the mind in a way that shows such understanding of our construction and spirit that you can’t help but flourish and return to the heart of yourself under its patterns and waves. Quite honestly, it is one of the most important albums I’ve come across – completely up there with everything that is great in music. And if one person turns on to it because of reading this, that’s a thing indeed.
