Michael McMillan’s cultural highlights
Michael McMillan is a writer, playwright, artistic curator and academic – best known for his internationally recreated installation-based exhibition, The West Indian Front Room (2005-6). The exhibition is on permanent display as The Front Room at the Museum of the Home in London and published in book form as The Front Room: Diaspora migrant aesthetics in the Home (2009, revised in 2023). His plays include On Duty (1984) and Blood for Britain (2001) on BBC Radio 4. He lectures in Cultural & Historical Studies at London College of Fashion (UAL) and is a research associate with Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg.
Book: Burma Boy by Biyi Bandele
It wasn’t until after attending a memorial for the Nigerian writer, Biyi Bandele, who died in 2022, that I read his 2008 novel, Burma Boy. Homage to his father’s experience as a young West African soldier in Britain’s Burma campaign against the Japanese during the Second World War, its authentic narrative is created through extensive research including at London’s Imperial War Museum. Teenager, Ali Banana (an imaginary rendering of Biyi Bandele’s own name) fights alongside the Chindits, Allied special forces that include Burmese, Nepalese, Chinese, West African and British soldiers using guerilla tactics against the Japanese in the unforgiving Burmese jungle. With Bandele’s hilarious storytelling, ‘a story started, as stories often were, while men were squatted side by side answering nature’ – we see comradeship between Nigerian compatriots – Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Edo. As they fall, one by one, Banana is so traumatised that he leaves the jungle naked, covered in leeches. It was the day after completing his last novel Yorùbá Boy Running (2024), about the man who first wrote down Yoruba in order to translate the Bible, that Bandele took his own life. As a playwright, screenwriter, essayist, filmmaker and novelist, Bandele has left a prodigious body of work to live on.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/358935/burma-boy-by-bandele-biyi/9780099488989
Exhibition: There Is Light Somewhere (The Hayward Gallery, 2024)
My dad told me that Queen Elizabeth II bowed when she met the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. This historic encounter is referenced in Tavares Strachan’s collage painting Every Knee Shall Bow (2020) in his solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. Coming from small island Bahamas, Strachan uses sculpture, photography, mixed media and painting to tell monumental stories through monumental works. His 14-metre-long recreation of the SS Yarmouth, flagship of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line shipping company, floats in a flooded terrace on a upper level of the gallery; 2500 pages of entries not found in the Encyclopedia Britannica form an installation for The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018); and large bronze heads of Jamaican sound artist King Tubby, Marcus Garvey and others stand as Ruins of a Giant (2024).
Exhibition: The 80s: Photographing Britain (Tate Britain, 5 May 2025)
Selected by a group of young practitioners, The 80s: Photographing Britain is a large-scale survey of the work of photographers active during the 1980s, including Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Maud Sulter, Joy Gregory and Jo Spence. Captured through mostly black and white documentary imagery are the gritty social, cultural and political realities resulting from Thatcherism’s neo-liberal project. These include protest around the miners’ strike, the cultural renaissance of Black and Asian resistance, feminist and Black feminist expresson, and a sense that Britain is already a multicultural society. Some might see nostalgia through this gaze, but the past is always in the present, and The 80s: Photographing Britain portrays an alternative way of being when social inequality has become normalised.
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/the-80s-photographing-britain
Theatre: Lucky Money by and starring Oliver Samuels (2024)
In Oliver Samuels’ Lucky Money he plays himself as Anton DeSouza, a dark-skinned, street-wise poor man who wins $400 million (Jamaican dollars) on the lottery. He gives the winning ticket to Walter Nelson (Pablo Hoilett), a light-skinned, self-righteous radio talk show host who, with his wife Alzira (Karen Harriot), conspires to double-cross Anton to keep hold of the winnnings. In this slapstick comedy, Samuels uses self-mockery, masterful comic timing and belly laugh wit to expose Walter’s class-affected colourism and put it to a moral beating, like in a good Anancy folktale. With Anton’s weekly wage only £77, and the winnings just short £2 million sterling, Lucky Money is also a social commentary on the dream of escaping poverty within Jamaican society. Of, about and with the people, Samuels continues the oral tradition of comedic satire in Jamaican patois (nation language) that we hear in the poetry and folktales of Miss Lou (Louise Bennett-Coverley) and in reggae dancehall.
https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/listings/4783
Film: Ludi by Edson Jean
In Ludi (2021) by the Haitian filmmaker, Edson Jean, the eponymous protagonist of the film is a Haitian migrant nurse doing carework in Miami’s Little Haiti. Her American dream becomes a nightmare. After promising to pay for her niece’s graduation gown, via tape cassette recorded messages she sends back home to her sister, she battles with co-workers for more overtime. Desparate, she takes on a night shift through an illegal private agency, looking after an obnoxious elderly Jewish man who refuses her help. In a climatic moment, as Ludi struggles to wipe his bottom, shit spills on her face. Morning comes and she discovers that she mistakenly took down the wrong address, and looked after the wrong person. Ludi resonates with so much of migrant experience, not simply in the United States, but across the global migrant diaspora.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12275196/
A favourite WritersMosaic writer: Margaret Busby
Writer, editor, and Britain’s first black female publisher, Margaret Busby, editor of the anthology, Daughters of Africa (1992) and New Daughters of Africa (2019).