Zena Edwards’s cultural highlights

After graduating from Middlesex University with a BA Hons in Drama, Media and Communication Studies, Zena Edwards went on to study Storytelling in Performance at The International School of Performing Arts. Her featured work with the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and The Gaia Foundation has won her acclaim and respect in the environmental and regenerative agricultural world and her writing is internationally merited by her contribution to anthologies such as Daughters Of Africa Volumes 2 and 3 and Part Of The Story That Began Before Me, both published by Penguin. 

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Performed Poem and the winner of the Hidden Creatives Award for Creative Mentoring, Zena is a renowned artist celebrated for her contributions to poetry in performance and giving back to community.

 

Art: Black Collage

Three elements drew me to collage art by black artists. Its particular, historical, storytelling abilities introduced me to the intellectually intricate and sensitively-laid conceptualization of its form and content. I was initially introduced to it by the Thoth-inspired Tarot of Black Futurist Manzel B. I was struck by the powerful colouration, the image-fragment placement and the framing of this artist’s eye and by their interpretation of one of Carl Jung’s favourite crafts.

Inspired by a plethora of collage Tarot decks, I introduced digital collage and found poetry to my own creative practice. Research brought me to Black Collagists: The  Book, compiled by Teri Henderson, which platforms work by black collage artists from the 1930s to 2020. Its many artists’ essays are affirmations about the wonder that is the black experience and the imagination to express it. Rhythm framing, the art of flow, and its democracy as an art form is woven through it, namely, you don’t have to be painterly to create and tell your story.

 

https://www.blackcollagists.com/black-collagists-1

 

Film: Locke (2013), directed by Steven Knight 

As a poet with a theatre background and a love for film, I found the 2013 film Locke, starring Tom Hardy, to be a brilliant series of events, in terms of acting, storytelling and poetic justice, that raises questions around integrity, responsibility and honesty. Directed by Steven Knight, this film is set entirely in the claustrophobic space of a car being driven at speed along a motorway. Ivan Locke is a well-respected construction site manager whose life begins to unravel during a 1am,  two-hour drive from Birmingham to London for the birth of his child, conceived as a result of a one-night stand. He has also, however, promised to be at home for a critical family time of watching football with his sons and wife. Along with this, he has only a few hours to prepare to supervise a trainee for the largest pour of concrete for a building foundation that Europe has ever seen, which is scheduled to occur later that morning. The bind is that the job is massive, his marriage is shaky and his 10 and 11 year old children think they still love their dad, but he is determined not to be a replica of his absent father and so has chosen to make this journey to London for the birth of his child.

It sounds like the worst day (or the worst movie), however, if you want to see how the best acting takes shape, watch and enjoy. It is so relatably tense with its densely-layered text and the subtext of promises broken while new beginnings arise. The writing lends itself to the evolution of a person who is your everyday white guy who wants to succeed in life.

I highly recommend Locke and would very much like to see a stage production at a small theatre like the Park Theatre, in North London’s Finsbury Park area.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2692904/ 

 

Poem: ‘Ruellia Noctiflora’ by Marilyn Nelson 

I looked into the gentle eyes of an image of George Washington Carver when I was researching his life for a masterclass entitled Nature Persists for  the Deptford Literature Festival in 2025. As an example of BiPOC EcoPoetry, Marilyn Nelson’s poem ‘Ruellia Noctiflora’, spotlights Carver’s genius when, in the poem, he makes the discovery of a tiny white flower from the Petunia family, deep in a forest in the Antebellum American South.

Carver was an educator, botanist, scientist and inventor; a deeply spiritual man who believed that nature and God were synonymous and Mary Nelson captures the awe coursing through his being when he makes the discovery of this flower in the depths of the woods. Nelson reveals the wonderful in the seeming banality of a woodland glade within earshot of the Baptist church:

And suddenly this tall, rawbone wild man 

come puffing out of the woods, shouting 

Come see! Come see! 

The natural world explodes onto the page as a surreal, palpable, cloaking, invisible mist – the closeness of the trees, the vibrancy of the moss and vines and the wonder of the moment. She celebrates how, like it or not, nature claims you.

https://marilynnelson-poetry.com/index.php/about/

 

Documentary Film: Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023) & Poetry Book: Poems: 1968 – 2020 by Nikki Giovanni

Black Soil Film Festival, Amsterdam is a great, end-of-year, movie buff event if you want to travel and catch up on some of the obscure international movies that the film world has to offer. I was invited to read poems as a precursor to the screening of the biographical documentary Going To Mars on the life of the poet, writer, mother and activist Nikki Giovanni. Serendipitously, the event was one day after the passing of Nikki Giovanni on December 9, 2024. And the one year anniversary of the passing of my father to the ancestral realm was on December 10. It was an emotional moment.

I researched Giovanni’s  writing and bought Poems: 1968 – 2020. I could not put it down, except to ponder on what I had just read. The poem I wrote and read on the evening of the screening was an echo of Giovanni’s candid approach to the delivery of life’s complexity – Giovanni is brutally honest and able to mother any wound inflicted, with Kintsugi healing in the same conversation.

The poetry collection and film take you on a journey through various stages of Giovanni’s growth: from self love to her evolution through her activism to her poetic conversations exploring human kind’s humanity to human kind. Giovanni’s life captures a measure of her formidable voice (as a person and as a poet) as undaunted by the violence of patriarchy, her advocacy for women’s rights and for racial equality. It is a captivating collage with a surprising soundtrack that will get you smiling at the memory, saying ‘Ah, yes. I remember this one.’

https://writersmosaic.org.uk/spotlight/nikki-giovanni-is-ready-for-mars/

 

Food: The culture of foraging for food

This year I made blackberry jam and blanched red plums picked from the by-ways of London and from my back garden for delicious desserts and breakfasts. Elderberry serums from my local park and red plum skin health cordial sit in carafes in my fridge. Pears from my neighbour’s tree that is burdened with so much yield. It’s cool, they said, if any fruit falls on my side of the fence. Pear and blackberry crumble!

A cultural hit in a time of food insecurity would be that of the Gatherer. I would like to elevate the skill of foraging. It feels inconsistent to speak of ancestral knowledge and connection to the Earth if we are not looking, listening and witnessing the most profound reconnection to Earth through the primal act of searching for food as our Ancestors would have done.

There are many classes, courses and family outings facilitated by professional foragers and natural food conservationists. They can keep you safe. At present my two main rules as I learn are: do not eat anything from the floor and do not eat anything you haven’t put in your shopping basket before from a supermarket chain!

Wikicommons. Photo: DM Thompson1313

Theatre: Miss Myrtle’s Garden

A play about grief and a longing to reunite with an achingly-loved deceased partner, Miss Myrtle’s Garden is a moving, funny, heart-wrenching and edgy play that transports you from the Bush Theatre to the supernatural. The play is advertised as a story about dementia, which is its silver thread however, from my point of view, every character is grieving what they can’t have.

Danny James is able to write relatable emotional journeys while keeping the audience grounded and this kind of writing is important in a time in which culture should be a vehicle for emotional maturation into an intelligence that enables us to look at themes of dementia with fervent curiosity and actionable compassion.

A brilliant commitment to character by all of the actors made it easy to relax into the text, in which the Caribbean meets London’s complex queer society. Surprisingly, there is no clash except with the nervous and extremely kind-hearted grandson of Miss Myrtle. This is not a tear jerker per se, but a tear did fall and it was unexpected.

The writer’s grandmother, by whom the central character is inspired, is the voice of the garden. As an eco-focused poet, I found the interaction with the Gardens symbolic of the nurturements with which we quietly but potentially invest in our relationships and watch the seasons turn our hard work into beautiful blossoms that give back. I would love to see this show turned into a radio play.

https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/past-event/miss-myrtles-garden/